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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis:
Miller's writing style is characterized by vivid detail and description that makes the world of ancient Greek mythology come alive in visceral ways. For example, in Chapter 3, Minos comes to marry Pasiphaë. Circe describes him with a pair of similes that help paint a vivid picture:
Minos, king of Crete, son of Zeus and a mortal woman. A demigod, his kind were called, mortal themselves but blessed by their divine parentage. He towered over his advisers, his hair thick as matted brush and his chest broad as the deck of a ship.
The image of hair "thick as matted brush" not only gives the reader an idea of the texture of Minos's hair. It also lends texture to Circe's world: even though she is a goddess, she spends time around matted brush. This little detail pushes back against the idea that the gods all live in an ethereal place beyond human comprehension. They, too, have bodies, senses, and environments that shape their reality. The simile humanizes Circe.
On the other hand, she compares Minos's chest to "the deck of a ship" because it is so broad. This comparison does not appear to be a hyperbole. Minos is a demigod and the son of Zeus, the most fearsome god in Circe's universe. The gods and demigods have the ability to disguise themselves as regular mortals, at least to some extent, but among the gods Minos flaunts his fantastically broad chest as a show of power. The use of simile to help convey a fantastical idea is a regular convention of epic poetry like The Odyssey, one of Miller's source texts. Sometimes, her similes draw on this convention. However, by pairing unfathomable images and similes (e.g. a man whose chest is as big as a ship deck) with humble images and similes (e.g. hair the texture of matted brush), Miller gives the reader a sense of how overwhelming Circe's world can be. The giant man is as real as the brush, meaning that Circe's senses must take in and respond to a wider array of stimuli and situations than a human could even imagine.
Over the course of the novel, it becomes clear that part of why the world is so much for Circe to process is that she pays more attention to small-scale details than most gods do. Where her family is disinterested in the affairs of most mortals, Circe is fascinated by them. While her father is trying to win a long cold war with Zeus, Circe pays attention to the tiniest flowers. It is not that she is uninterested in the large-scale, either; she considers how Kronos's blood made the flowers and how the flowers might help her free Scylla from an eternity of torture. Miller writes with rich detail about the mundane and the fantastical, the minuscule and the gargantuan, in order to give the reader a sense of just how much life, beauty, and feeling there is in Circe's world.
Related Themes:
