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Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Snakes:
Snakes, both real and metaphorical, are a motif in the novel. Miller uses them to comment on power and monstrosity. In Chapter 1, Circe compares her siblings to snakes when they tease her about her father's cows:
I must have had an odd look on my face, for Perses and Pasiphaë began to snicker from their couch. “Did you swallow a frog?”
“No,” I said.
This only made them laugh harder, rubbing their draped limbs on each other like snakes polishing their scales. My sister said, “And how were our father’s golden heifers?”
“Beautiful.”
Perses laughed. “She doesn’t know! Have you ever heard of anyone so stupid?”
“Never,” my sister said.
Perses and Pasiphaë delight in Circe's discomfort as they reveal to her that Helios's cows are so beautiful because he breeds with them himself. They are literally divine cows. Circe is disgusted both by this revelation and by her siblings' behavior, which borders on incest to match Helios's bestiality. She compares them to snakes to emphasize the way they both frighten and unsettle her. They always seem to be wrapped around each other, a two-headed monster waiting to strike.
When Prometheus is brought to Helios's palace for his punishment, he is accompanied by a Fury with snakes for hair. The snakes are part of the Fury's monstrous presentation, which everyone including Circe finds intimidating. However, importantly, this is one of Circe's first encounters with a woman powerful enough to imprison a man and command the attention of a full court. Unlike Pasiphaë, whose snakelike nature is intertwined with Perses's, the Fury shows Circe an example of a woman who can be snakelike all on her own.
By the time Circe meets Hermes in Chapter 8 and begins an affair with him, she has begun to see metaphorical snakes everywhere. She describes her relationship with Hermes as one between two snakes:
He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.
By this point, Circe is no longer disgusted by "poisonous," snake-like behavior—or at least, she does not reject it like she once did. Instead, she seems to take for granted that everyone slithers through the world with a low profile until the time comes to strike at others. She even thinks of herself in these terms, as an opportunistic creature who will readily lash out even at those closest to her if they hurt her. Becoming a snake is how she survives. She even begins to forgive her siblings for doing the same.
Thinking of herself as a snake eventually helps Circe justify her practice of turning sexually violent men into pigs and killing them. In Chapter 15 she writes:
There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.
Circe hates herself for killing the men, but she tells herself that at least her violence is "honest." She strikes only when provoked. The men, on the other hand, perform sexual violence for fun. They are the true monsters.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Snakes:
Covered in "Chapter 1 Explanation and Analysis—Snakes"
Snakes, both real and metaphorical, are a motif in the novel. Miller uses them to comment on power and monstrosity. In Chapter 1, Circe compares her siblings to snakes when they tease her about her father's cows:
I must have had an odd look on my face, for Perses and Pasiphaë began to snicker from their couch. “Did you swallow a frog?”
“No,” I said.
This only made them laugh harder, rubbing their draped limbs on each other like snakes polishing their scales. My sister said, “And how were our father’s golden heifers?”
“Beautiful.”
Perses laughed. “She doesn’t know! Have you ever heard of anyone so stupid?”
“Never,” my sister said.
Perses and Pasiphaë delight in Circe's discomfort as they reveal to her that Helios's cows are so beautiful because he breeds with them himself. They are literally divine cows. Circe is disgusted both by this revelation and by her siblings' behavior, which borders on incest to match Helios's bestiality. She compares them to snakes to emphasize the way they both frighten and unsettle her. They always seem to be wrapped around each other, a two-headed monster waiting to strike.
When Prometheus is brought to Helios's palace for his punishment, he is accompanied by a Fury with snakes for hair. The snakes are part of the Fury's monstrous presentation, which everyone including Circe finds intimidating. However, importantly, this is one of Circe's first encounters with a woman powerful enough to imprison a man and command the attention of a full court. Unlike Pasiphaë, whose snakelike nature is intertwined with Perses's, the Fury shows Circe an example of a woman who can be snakelike all on her own.
By the time Circe meets Hermes in Chapter 8 and begins an affair with him, she has begun to see metaphorical snakes everywhere. She describes her relationship with Hermes as one between two snakes:
He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.
By this point, Circe is no longer disgusted by "poisonous," snake-like behavior—or at least, she does not reject it like she once did. Instead, she seems to take for granted that everyone slithers through the world with a low profile until the time comes to strike at others. She even thinks of herself in these terms, as an opportunistic creature who will readily lash out even at those closest to her if they hurt her. Becoming a snake is how she survives. She even begins to forgive her siblings for doing the same.
Thinking of herself as a snake eventually helps Circe justify her practice of turning sexually violent men into pigs and killing them. In Chapter 15 she writes:
There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.
Circe hates herself for killing the men, but she tells herself that at least her violence is "honest." She strikes only when provoked. The men, on the other hand, perform sexual violence for fun. They are the true monsters.
Related Themes:
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Meteors and Dust:
In Chapter 9, when she introduces Daedalus for the first time, Circe uses a metaphor to describe the kind of mortals who capture the gods' attention. The metaphor foreshadows the death of Daedalus's son, and it also gestures toward Circe's choice to become mortal:
Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.
Circe does not use Daedalus's name until a few lines later. The metaphor helps to build suspense and excitement as the reader waits to find out who Circe's visitor is. It implies that while mortal, he is a rare and impressive "meteor" in Greek mythology. There are multiple important stories about Daedalus and his incredible craftsmanship, which even the gods find impressive. However, the meteor metaphor foreshadows the specific story for which Daedalus will become most famous once it comes to pass: the story of his and his son's attempted escape from Crete on wings made of wax and feathers. There is a way to read Icarus's death during this escape attempt as divine punishment for Daedalus's inventiveness: no mortal should be so bold as to attempt flying. And yet, flying turns Daedalus into a "meteor" streaking across the sky. For better or worse, the gods cannot ignore him.
Circe notes that "merely good" mortals are "dust to us." In contrast with a flying meteor that enraptures all who look up at it, dust lives mainly beneath people's feet. When it rises up to rest visibly on tables and other surfaces, it is treated as a nuisance to be wiped away. This is how the gods think of most mortals: not at all, or possibly as a minor inconvenience. Mortals should not take it personally, Circe suggests. Their bodies die and disintegrate too fast for most of them to distinguish themselves.
However, while most gods spend their lives looking up to the sky at Zeus, Helios, and the occasional remarkable mortal, Circe spends an inordinate amount of her time paying attention to the earth beneath her feet. She cultivates plants and pays close attention to the way her island changes shape through centuries of erosion. Likewise, she quickly becomes interested in Daedalus not for the things that make him famous, but rather for the things that make him human. Icarus's "meteoric" death happens off the page. Circe describes Daedalus's grief in the aftermath, emphasizing the ordinary human element of the story above all. Mortals may be "dust to [gods]," but dust is far more important to Circe than it is to most gods. It is so alluring, in fact, that she chooses to become mortal "dust" herself.
Related Themes:
Chapter 14
Explanation and Analysis—Mending:
Mending recurs throughout the novel as a metaphor for the interpersonal connection Circe craves. One example of this motif appears in Chapter 14, when a ship full of mortal men lands on the shore of Aiaia:
These were not heroes, or the crew of a king. They must scrabble for their livelihoods as Glaucos once did: hauling nets, carrying odd cargo, hunting down whatever dinner they could find. I felt a warmth run through me. My fingers itched as if for needle and thread. Here was something torn that I could mend.
Everything is hard work for these mortal sailors, and they are barely surviving. Metaphorically, they are "torn" cloth (possibly even torn sails) in need of a needle and thread to make them whole again. Circe is glad to see them because she imagines that she can use her power to sew them up and send them on their way. By contrast, the gods and nymphs who have previously passed through Aiaia during her exile have not needed much from Circe at all. The line "here was something torn that I could mend" suggests that she has been looking for a chance to feel capable and useful. She has been unable to reverse her spell on Scylla, and her father views her as such a liability that he has condemned her to exile. When she sees the sailors, she hopes that at last she will be able to fix something instead of breaking it.
As the novel goes on, it becomes apparent that Circe's urge to "mend" others and their problems is really a desire to repair her relationships with the people around her. In Chapter 24, she bitterly avoids Penelope and Telemachus while they "mend" their relationship:
The two of them were often together now, mending what had been broken. I did not care to see it.
Circe seems to envy the ability of the mother and son to come back from the brink of betrayal. Circe has never quite been able to repair things like this with anyone. Her relationships with Glaucos, Aeëtes, and nearly everyone else have all ended in abandonment. Even her years of love, care, and protection have not been enough to keep Telegonus from leaving her. The mortal men who once showed up on her shore and sought her aid ended up betraying her terribly. She responded to their sexual assault by killing them all. She carries deep shame about this incident, which she takes as confirmation that she is a harmful person fated to loneliness. She wants nothing more than to "mend" a relationship of her own, but it takes the entire novel for her to prove to herself that she can.
Related Themes:
Chapter 15
Explanation and Analysis—Snakes:
Covered in "Chapter 1 Explanation and Analysis—Snakes"
Snakes, both real and metaphorical, are a motif in the novel. Miller uses them to comment on power and monstrosity. In Chapter 1, Circe compares her siblings to snakes when they tease her about her father's cows:
I must have had an odd look on my face, for Perses and Pasiphaë began to snicker from their couch. “Did you swallow a frog?”
“No,” I said.
This only made them laugh harder, rubbing their draped limbs on each other like snakes polishing their scales. My sister said, “And how were our father’s golden heifers?”
“Beautiful.”
Perses laughed. “She doesn’t know! Have you ever heard of anyone so stupid?”
“Never,” my sister said.
Perses and Pasiphaë delight in Circe's discomfort as they reveal to her that Helios's cows are so beautiful because he breeds with them himself. They are literally divine cows. Circe is disgusted both by this revelation and by her siblings' behavior, which borders on incest to match Helios's bestiality. She compares them to snakes to emphasize the way they both frighten and unsettle her. They always seem to be wrapped around each other, a two-headed monster waiting to strike.
When Prometheus is brought to Helios's palace for his punishment, he is accompanied by a Fury with snakes for hair. The snakes are part of the Fury's monstrous presentation, which everyone including Circe finds intimidating. However, importantly, this is one of Circe's first encounters with a woman powerful enough to imprison a man and command the attention of a full court. Unlike Pasiphaë, whose snakelike nature is intertwined with Perses's, the Fury shows Circe an example of a woman who can be snakelike all on her own.
By the time Circe meets Hermes in Chapter 8 and begins an affair with him, she has begun to see metaphorical snakes everywhere. She describes her relationship with Hermes as one between two snakes:
He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.
By this point, Circe is no longer disgusted by "poisonous," snake-like behavior—or at least, she does not reject it like she once did. Instead, she seems to take for granted that everyone slithers through the world with a low profile until the time comes to strike at others. She even thinks of herself in these terms, as an opportunistic creature who will readily lash out even at those closest to her if they hurt her. Becoming a snake is how she survives. She even begins to forgive her siblings for doing the same.
Thinking of herself as a snake eventually helps Circe justify her practice of turning sexually violent men into pigs and killing them. In Chapter 15 she writes:
There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.
Circe hates herself for killing the men, but she tells herself that at least her violence is "honest." She strikes only when provoked. The men, on the other hand, perform sexual violence for fun. They are the true monsters.
Related Themes:
Chapter 23
Explanation and Analysis—Innocent Telemachus:
In Chapter 23, Circe comments on Telemachus's innocence. She uses two metaphors to explain what she means:
[H]e was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.
Circe's first metaphor compares people to drainage systems or filters. Telemachus's thoughts and feelings are like a liquid that flows straight through him until it comes out of him as decisive action. In other words, Circe sees him as someone who always knows what he believes and how to enact those beliefs. His simple integrity is a kind of innocence because it demonstrates that he is either unaware or unaffected by the external beliefs and hangups, or "dregs," that contaminate the thoughts and feelings of "the rest of us." These dregs build up into clogs in the system: not only do they make it difficult for people to act according to their own beliefs, but they can even make it difficult to act at all. Circe, for instance, spends centuries on Aiaia seething in bitterness and embroiled in self-doubt instead of taking her life into her own hands. Telemachus is "made only of himself" and none of the dregs that Circe still feels inside herself.
Telemachus's innocence, however, does not come from a lack of exposure to pain, abuse, and challenging external beliefs. Circe makes as much clear with another metaphor about the "blade" Telemachus carries. A sheltered man would have no need to carry a blade. Telemachus has endured enough betrayal and violence in his life (including when his father forced him to kill and torture innocent people) to understand that he must protect his own integrity from contamination by "dregs." His "open blade" is not necessarily a physical weapon, but rather an attitude: he has learned his boundaries, and he lets everyone know that he is willing to defend them. Circe marvels at how different this openness is from Odysseus's suspicious approach to life, as though everyone is sharpening their knives in secret while lulling others into a false sense of security. Telemachus is innocent in that he is committed to authenticity in a way that neither Odysseus nor Circe ever realized was possible.
Related Themes:
Chapter 24
Explanation and Analysis—Mending:
Covered in "Chapter 14 Explanation and Analysis—Mending"
Mending recurs throughout the novel as a metaphor for the interpersonal connection Circe craves. One example of this motif appears in Chapter 14, when a ship full of mortal men lands on the shore of Aiaia:
These were not heroes, or the crew of a king. They must scrabble for their livelihoods as Glaucos once did: hauling nets, carrying odd cargo, hunting down whatever dinner they could find. I felt a warmth run through me. My fingers itched as if for needle and thread. Here was something torn that I could mend.
Everything is hard work for these mortal sailors, and they are barely surviving. Metaphorically, they are "torn" cloth (possibly even torn sails) in need of a needle and thread to make them whole again. Circe is glad to see them because she imagines that she can use her power to sew them up and send them on their way. By contrast, the gods and nymphs who have previously passed through Aiaia during her exile have not needed much from Circe at all. The line "here was something torn that I could mend" suggests that she has been looking for a chance to feel capable and useful. She has been unable to reverse her spell on Scylla, and her father views her as such a liability that he has condemned her to exile. When she sees the sailors, she hopes that at last she will be able to fix something instead of breaking it.
As the novel goes on, it becomes apparent that Circe's urge to "mend" others and their problems is really a desire to repair her relationships with the people around her. In Chapter 24, she bitterly avoids Penelope and Telemachus while they "mend" their relationship:
The two of them were often together now, mending what had been broken. I did not care to see it.
Circe seems to envy the ability of the mother and son to come back from the brink of betrayal. Circe has never quite been able to repair things like this with anyone. Her relationships with Glaucos, Aeëtes, and nearly everyone else have all ended in abandonment. Even her years of love, care, and protection have not been enough to keep Telegonus from leaving her. The mortal men who once showed up on her shore and sought her aid ended up betraying her terribly. She responded to their sexual assault by killing them all. She carries deep shame about this incident, which she takes as confirmation that she is a harmful person fated to loneliness. She wants nothing more than to "mend" a relationship of her own, but it takes the entire novel for her to prove to herself that she can.
Related Themes:
Chapter 26
Explanation and Analysis—Singing Yellow Flowers:
In Chapter 26, after gathering flowers from her old home, Circe finally tells Telemachus about her sexual assault and the revenge she took on her attackers. She personifies the flowers in this passage, turning them into a metaphor for her own voice:
The stars were very bright, and Vesper shone like a flame overhead. “I did not tell you before because I did not want it to lie between us.”
“And now you do not mind if it does?”
From the darkness of my bag, the flowers sang their yellow note. “Now I want you to have the truth, whatever comes.”
Circe claims that the flowers "sang" from inside her bag. The flowers may be magic, but they cannot actually sing. Circe gives them figurative voices that emphasize the importance of this moment in transforming her life. The flowers' voices are imbued with color that lights up the dark bag. Similarly, by confessing her deepest secret to Telemachus, Circe uses her voice to light up the darkest part of herself.
Crucially, the flowers pierce the darkness with a "yellow note." The light of Helios is gold, as are Circe's eyes and the blood of Prometheus and Trygon. Gold is a color of the gods. By contrast, the yellow of the flowers' "note" is gold without its luster. This flat color, which nonetheless has the power to cut through the darkness of the bag, is a metaphor for Circe's mortal voice. She has always been told that it makes her a lesser, flawed being. In this scene, though, it is by using her flawed mortal voice that she heals herself. No other magic has ever been able to heal the shame that set in the night of her assault.
These are the same flowers Circe once used to transform Glaucos into a god and Scylla into a monster. Circe has always believed that the flowers turn people into the truest versions of themselves. Aeëtes, meanwhile, has suggested that they are a tool to help Circe get what she wants. She wanted Glaucos to be a god, and so he became one; she wanted Scylla to be a monster, and so she became one. The novel never clarifies exactly what the flowers do. This scene suggests that both Circe and Aeëtes are correct. Retrieving the flowers finally enables Circe to be honest with Telemachus, even about her deepest shame: in this way, they help her both to reveal her truest self and also to satisfy her lifelong desire for authentic connection.
Related Themes:
