Family and Individuality Theme Analysis

Much of Circe’s story involves her trying to distance herself from her family, the cruel immortals of ancient Greek mythology. She is not alone in these endeavors; characters from Pasiphaë to Medea to Telemachus also seek to escape the violence in their families. In fact, all the families in Circe have significant faults, with Circe’s family being perhaps the most ruthless. Circe grows up in her father, Helios’s, halls, where she witnesses and experiences his callous brutality and narcissism. This environment leaves a lasting effect on Circe and her siblings, with many of them becoming just as cruel as the family they grew up in. As Circe becomes more involved in the goings on of the world, she learns of her siblings’ gruesome acts, from her sister Pasiphaë’s spite-fueled killing of serving girls to her brother Aeëtes’s grotesque torturing of sailors. She even faces the chilling fact that she, too, contains her family’s wickedness. After all, Circe does user her powers as a nymph to create Scylla, one of her world’s most infamous monsters. But, unlike her siblings, Circe finally refuses to perpetuate her family’s cycle of cruelty. By confronting her flaws and working to undo them, she becomes a deeply empathetic character. By depicting families and the few outliers who defy them, the novel illustrates how, although family is a formative influence on a person, it is possible to free oneself of one’s family and their faults.

Through depicting the family of the gods’ generational vices, the book illustrates how families shape a person. The gods are characterized by their egotism and cruelty. Except for Prometheus, all the gods that Circe meets in Helios’s halls act in the same petty and selfish way, often from birth. Circe sees this happen with her siblings, Pasiphaë and Perses, who immediately mirror their mother, Perse’s, malice. As she puts it, “The two of them were clever and quickly saw how things stood.” They assimilate to the family that they are in by emulating their parents’ cruelty, mocking and ostracizing Circe. Even when removed from their families, the gods are still marked by the wickedness that they grow up with. Aeëtes especially exemplifies this: when he leaves the halls of the gods, he becomes a sorcerer who tortures men for pleasure and display of power. This reflects Helios’s amusement when speaking of the mortal astronomers who are killed whenever he, appearing to mortals as the sun, does not follow their predictions. Aeëtes even seeks to murder his disobedient daughter, Medea, an act reminiscent of Helios’s melting the defiant Circe in a fit of rage.

Even those who hate their families nevertheless adopt their faults, as the vices that they have learned from their families are the same tools they know to use in order to survive. When Pasiphaë tells Circe that she loathes their brutal family and their obsession with power, Circe is shocked, as Pasiphaë “ha[s] always seemed […] their distillation, a glittering monument to [their] blood’s vain cruelty.” Despite her hatred for them, Pasiphaë believes that the only way to survive in their family is to play their games of power. As she tells Circe, “The only thing that makes them listen is power,” so in order to be heeded, she is as cruel as the rest of them. Circe’s niece Medea undergoes a similar development: when Circe first meets her, Medea does not hesitate to condemn her father, Aeëtes, as evil. Yet Medea eventually follows her father’s footsteps, showing the same readiness to spill blood for pride and vengeance. After her husband Jason leaves her, Medea burns his new wife alive before killing her and Jason’s own children. As Circe notes, Medea “had grown up trained around [Aeëtes’s] cruelty, and in the end it seem[s] she ha[s] not learned how to hold another shape.” In other words, although Medea recognizes and disapproves of her family’s cruelty, she easily falls into their same patterns of behavior.

But a few characters are able to break their families’ vicious cycles of cruelty by confronting their own flaws and ending their complicity in their families’ wickedness. Circe hates her family but nevertheless finds herself mirroring her father’s cruelty and vanity, which is especially apparent by her transformation of the nymph Scylla into a monster. Upon learning that Scylla eats humans, Circe knows that she is responsible for the deaths of countless mortals. Instead of dismissing her crimes (as Pasiphaë does) as simply her way of surviving in the world created by her parents, she nurtures her guilt and empathy—feelings that are foreign to her family members—for others’ pain and loss. These feelings are what motivate her to kill Scylla—a violent act in itself, but one that puts an end to Circe’s participation in her family’s cycle of violence. Symbolically, she then gives up her immortality, leaving her family for good. Telemachus similarly resents his family, namely his father, Odysseus. Telemachus is consumed with guilt over his complicity in Odysseus’s brutal schemes—especially when, at Odysseus’s orders, he murders the serving girls who were raped by Telemachus’s mother, Penelope’s, suitors. Like Circe, Telemachus keeps his guilt close. His regret and empathy for others are what set him apart from Odysseus, who is thoughtless in his grabs for power and fame. Telemachus refuses to be like his father, a decision epitomized in his refusing Athena, Odysseus’s patron, when she orders him to make an empire in the west. Unlike proud Odysseus, Telemachus chooses a quiet, nonviolent life.

The first character in the novel to defy their family is Prometheus, who sacrifices himself to eternal torture so that mortals can benefit from “all the arts and profits of civilization.” Prometheus defies Zeus, whom his Titan relatives defer to, by giving humans fire—something that Zeus kept from them to prevent them from forming civilizations, knowing that living difficult, uncomfortable lives would make humans give more homage to the gods. It is Prometheus’s defiance of Zeus that shows Circe that “Not every god need be the same” and inspires her to be different as well. But beyond the impact that Prometheus’s rebellion has on Circe, his action suggests that sacrifice is necessary to truly separate oneself from one’s family. Just as Prometheus sacrifices himself to unending pain, Circe relinquishes her immortality, and Telemachus gives up glory. They must sacrifice the advantages that they inherit from their family (divine power and fame) to break away from their families and their families’ faults.