Ecolinguistic Analyses of Circe by Madeline Miller: Reconstructing the Relations among Different Forms of Beings through Figurative Reconceptualizations

Abstract

Madeline Miller is one of the most renowned "revisionist mythmakers" in the 21st century. Miller`s prize-winning novel Circe (2019) is an attempt to recreate the histories of the mythological past in the revised versions of herstories. Like Angela Carter, and Margaret Atwood; Madeline Miller intends to deconstruct the phallogocentric narrations which have established the literary canon by recreating the same stories from a feminist perspective. To do so, she rewrites the myth of Circe, a formidable sorceress, who is treated as a minor character in the male-authored The Odyssey from Circe`s point of view. Miller explains what she aims to do as follows: "I wanted her to be the center of the story. I wanted it to be an epic story about a woman's life. And for her to have all the attention and all the adventures and the growth, the errors, the virtues, that heroes like Achilles and Odysseus have in their stories" (Nicolau, 2018, p. 7). In this sense Circe can be described as a "female epic" or a "mythographic metafiction" (Nunes, 2014, pp. 231–232). This article intends to examine Miller`s stylistic choices with an ecolinguistic approach by focusing specifically on her use of similes to find out why she employs this figure of speech with high frequency and what discursive effects she has created and what ideological implications her use of similes offer. The ecolinguistic examination of how she employs the similes in Circe reveals that Miller skillfully brings together an ecologically conscious language and thought to reflect her vision which can be characterized as ecosophic wisdom.