Circe Background

Fantasy

Circe is a fantasy novel set in the ancient Greece of Homer’s The Odyssey. Magic and monsters, witchcraft and gods: these are all elements of Circe’s world. As a retelling of one of the most well-known myths in history, the novel takes existing myths and mythic characters and refashions them from Circe’s perspective. Thus, the birth of the Minotaur on Crete is a way for Circe to see that she is not like her sister Pasiphaë. Circe’s transforming of the sailors is a defense mechanism to keep them from raping her. An encounter with Athena, goddess of war, shows the ruthlessness of the gods toward anyone who defies their will.

As a new perspective on a classic tale, Circe also joins a literary tradition of revisionism. Famous revisionist novels include Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (a retelling of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha Mason), Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (a retelling of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Wicked Witch of the West), and Geraldine Brooks’ March (a retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women from the perspective of Mr. March). It is important to note that Greek myths themselves are retellings of stories from generations of oral tradition. What distinguishes revisionist novels is the way they tell an existing story from a completely different point of view: usually that of a minor or side character, and often a villain.

Context

Homer was a Greek poet who lived between the 12th and 8th centuries BC. He is credited as the author of two narrative poems: The Iliad and The Odyssey. The Iliad is the tale of the Trojan War between city-states of Greece and Troy. The Odyssey is the tale of one of the heroes of the Trojan war, Odysseus, and his 10-year journey home after the war. Homer did not invent the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey; he collected myths and stories of the times and spun them into epic poems. Some of the events in the poems may have been related to real-world events, but for modern readers, they paint a picture of ancient beliefs about the monsters and intruding gods who made mortal life dangerous and uncertain.