Circe’s Garden: Rewriting Epic and Revolutionary Time

Abstract

This article focuses on two retellings of the story of Circe, the witch from Homer's Odyssey, exploring Augusta Webster's 1870 dramatic monologue ‘Circe’ and Madeline Miller's 2018 novel of the same name. In both texts Circe's main motivation is to escape from the island, depicted as an idyllic garden, where she has been exiled by the gods. This escape comes to symbolize movement towards revolutionary feminist change; however, there is no possibility of describing what form the escape will take according to existing discourses, suggesting paradoxically that change can only be represented through a failure of all forms of representation. This poses a difficulty in terms of conceptualizing practical social transformation. Michel Foucault's power-knowledge dialectic and Gilles Deleuze's work on virtuality are deployed here to illustrate how ideas of change and newness can be conceptualized from within the system purporting to be changed. Revolution etymologically suggests a recurring back to an idealized state of nature while simultaneously functioning as an invocation of utopian change and the progressively new. Circe's immortality functions as a symbol for this cultural paralysis but the garden represents a way of thinking beyond it. The garden is a space which purports to control or contain temporal and aesthetic movement. However, in fact this space encourages the risk of change in ways which threaten this control, or at least model how containment could be destabilized. For Circe, the garden is thus a platform from which subjective revolutionary possibilities can be modelled in preparation for application to the material world.