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Chapter 15
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Circe, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Fear, and Self-Preservation
Women, Power, and Misogyny
Change, Initiative, and the Self
Mortality, Fragility, and Fulfillment
Family and Individuality
Summary
Analysis
Looking back from the future, Circe thinks of how the famous song describing her meeting with Odysseus portrays her as weak and bested by Odysseus’s guile. She isn’t surprised; poets often reduce women’s power in their stories.
Circe criticizes how history and literature often portray women as weak and easily outsmarted by men. In a society that chooses to believe that women are inferior to men, people falsely document events to reduce women’s importance.
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After Circe and Odysseus have sex, Odysseus describes how grueling his trip from Troy has been—they have encountered cannibals, storms, and a cyclops, and endured the fury of various gods. He adds that Athena, who was his supporter throughout the war, has now abandoned him because he didn’t prayed to her before sailing away from Troy, since he was anxious to get home.
The gods treat humans as tools for their own personal gain or amusement. Multiple gods have used and mistreated Odysseus for their own purposes, not caring that their actions make his life miserable. Even Athena, who is supposed to be Odysseus’s patron, mistreats him, probably so that he will be all the more grateful for her (and therefore give her more attention and offerings) when she decides to help him again. It is as Hermes described previously: gods prefer that humans are miserable, so that humans feel the gods’ power more acutely.
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Circe can see Odysseus’s exhaustion plain on his face. Feeling her old desire to help those who are broken, Circe tells Odysseus that he can rest on her island for the evening. He is visibly relieved, but when she brings him to the feasting hall, he refuses to eat until his men are transformed back to their old selves. She leads him to the pig pen, where she turns the animals back into his crewmen.
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Now joined by his men, Odysseus feasts joyfully. After the dinner, the men troop off to sleep, but Odysseus joins Circe at her fire for conversation. She impresses him by informing him that her loom had been made by Daedalus, whom Odysseus always admired as a child. After a few tales of the war, including Achilles and his downfall after the death of his lover, Odysseus begs Circe for more help: he and his fatigued men need more rest on her island. Inwardly rejoicing at more time with Odysseus, she grants them the month he requests.
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For the next several weeks, Circe relishes Odysseus’s company. They dine together and, later, have sex, during which she loves running her hands over his battle scars. When they lie together afterward, Odysseus spins tales of the war.
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One night, Odysseus tells Circe that the people who really win wars aren’t the heroes or the generals. The winners are the men who can unite the men to work together, even if that means committing brutalities, from beating mutineers to abandoning ailing men whose wounds destroy other soldiers’ morale. One should be practical, Odysseus explains, before one is honorable. Circe thinks of how some men might have balked at Odysseus’s ruthlessness, but she knows that all heroes, such as Jason, commit horrible deeds.
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Literary Devices
The days pass, and Circe marvels at mortals’ persistence and resilience. Odysseus often complains of various pains, and she does her best to soothe them, once even offering to use her magic to remove his scars. But he declines, asking her “how would [he] know [him]self” if his scars were gone. Circe is inwardly pleased at this decision; Odysseus’s scars indicate that he is a man of many stories.
Circe considers telling Odysseus a bit about her own past, but she worries that doing so would expose her weaknesses. Sometimes, she wonders what her body would look like if it scarred like a mortal’s: missing fingers, charred skin, countless knife cuts from harvesting herbs. Circe remembers Aeëtes’s words regarding Scylla from long ago, that ugly nymphs are “a stain upon the face of the world.” Brushing aside her thoughts of scars, she embraces her identity as a witch without a past.
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Over the weeks, Circe learns that Odysseus is short-tempered and occasionally strikes out at his men. Circe is calm with him, drawing out his stories, which always end with him telling her of Ithaca, his home. When the month is nearing its end, Odysseus asks for an extension of time so that the men can stay the winter and leave in the spring. Circe is again secretly overjoyed, but she does her best to hide it, and she agrees to their continued stay.
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Circe and Odysseus continue to grow closer, with Odysseus telling her of his past and complaining about his unruly men, and Circe asking him to do chores around the house. She knows that he will leave for home and that such an adventurous and cunning man—particularly a mortal—will never be content with an isolated and domestic life. But still, she weaves herself closer to him, preparing his favorite meals and asking his advice.
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Although Circe tries to ignore the fact that Odysseus is married, she at last asks about his wife. He launches into an adoration of his wife, Penelope, whom he calls faithful and clever. Circe is stung to still hear so much love in his voice and realizes that all their time together has not changed his feelings for his wife. Thinking over their time together, Circe also notes that it is likely that Odysseus, so accustomed to war and its challenges, is using his stay with Circe as a kind of practice for domestic life.
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When winter comes, the men stay in the hall, where Odysseus tells them glorious tales of the war with Troy. They glow at these stories, whispering among themselves about how they once fought beside and against the great heroes of the war. Afterward, Odysseus laughs at them, mocking how they delude themselves into thinking that they had personally stood against warriors such as Hector, the greatest of the Trojans; even Odysseus himself wouldn’t have dared.
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Circe asks Odysseus for more of Hector’s story, so he tells her of how, after the Greeks won the war and killed Hector, one of the Greeks soldiers brutally murdered Hector’s young son. Odysseus goes on to say that the murder was unavoidable, for sons must avenge their fathers’ deaths. He even says that the thought comforts him that if he died, his son Telemachus would hunt down the murderers.
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When Circe asks Odysseus to describe Telemachus, he lingers on the boy’s sweetness, telling her of all the characteristics that he can remember. Circe is surprised at all his memories of Telemachus, thinking how Odysseus knows more about his son from one year than Helios does of Circe for all eternity. He pauses, then tells Circe of how he still hopes to “leave some mark” on his son, who is now already a teenager. Ruminating on how fast mortals’ lives pass them by, Circe imagines the young Telemachus grieving daily for his father, hoping that he may return. Lying in the dark with Odysseus, Circe suddenly wonders whether there might be “a living breath” still within her.
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