let the less-loving one be me

Anonymous asked, "What do you think of Homer's temptation/fantasy ladies, like Circe and Calypso?"

Faves. Unsurprising, formative faves. Less so Calypso because Calypso is less of an icon, but I’ve grown steadily more and more fascinated in her over the years. Odysseus stayed with her for seven years. Seven years! I’d love to know what that time was all about.

But Circe, Circe, oh, faves, and faves compounded, actually, by having read a bunch of Italian epics, because she literally shows up in every single one. Really: every one has a sorceress on an island who derails the hero from his quest, and her parts are always the best parts. (I mean, that’s just true of epics in general—Arthuriana’s rife with them, what’s Gawain and the Green Knight if not a sorceress derailment riff? But Italian epics play it straight and do the transfiguration stuff and the enchanted islands, the whole bit.) There’s even a weird fanficcy reclamation in Moderata Fonte’s Floridoro, where we meet Circe’s daughter, Circetta—I KNOW—and she tells the heroes that her mother was actually a really nice lady who was really in love with Odysseus and really hurt when he left!! (I KNOW. It kind of sucks. Women have a difficult time writing The Circe because The Circe as canonized represents a sexual threat that I expect a high-society Renaissance woman intent on protecting her own virtuous image would find difficult to ~identify with, since sadly none of the courtesan poets wrote chivalric epics; my point is, the epics written by women keep ~reclaiming~ that figure as a benevolent goddess/earth mother type, and it makes sense, but it also is SO MUCH LESS FUN THAN THE ORIGINAL. Which is canonized in an archaically sexist scared-of-sexy-ladies POV, but now that we are not scared of sexy ladies, it’s actually a way less oppressive gender schematic! BASICALLY WATCHING PEOPLE WRITE CIRCE THROUGH THE AGES IS A WEIRD FUN MESS. I’ve written papers about this.)

That was definitely more Renaissance than you were expecting. Occupational hazard. Whoops.

3 months ago / 14 notes
#history #mythblog #love all the circes #my favorite—well my favorite's CIRCE but my favorite non-circe-circe is armida #only good bit of gerusalemme liberata thank god she's such a rampant stanza-stealer