Goddess, Lover, Mother, Witch : Feminist Revisionist Mythmaking and Feminine Morphology of Narrative in Madeline Miller’s Circe

Abstract: This thesis aims to position Circe by Madeline Miller as an example of feminist revisionist mythmaking and investigate some of the novel’s revisionary practices. I thus begin by introducing the project of feminist revisionism, as conceptualized by several different feminist thinkers. I then move on to describe two methods by which Circe reimagines the stories of the Epic Cycle. I argue that the first method, in the analysis of which I primarily use the work of the formalist Caroline Levine on hierarchies, is to subvert gender and immortality – two world-organizing binaries of Greek myth. I then make the argument that Circe also revises myth on the level of narrative, which I support with Teresa de Lauretis’ work on narrative morphology. The study concludes that both these methods are being employed in Circe and are successful in reimagining myth from a feminist perspective. My thesis results in a better understanding of the ways in which Greek myth is being rewritten by contemporary feminists in popular literature.