“For a hundred generations, I walked to work drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease,” wrote Madeline Miller as her protagonist, the hawk-eyed Circe. “Then I learned I can bend the world, as a bow is bent for an arrow.”
Miller’s sophomore novel “Circe” depicts the world of gods and goddesses, mortals and witches, and she is bringing that world to Midtown Scholar Bookstore on Wednesday.
“We’re delighted to welcome Madeline Miller to Harrisburg, especially with all the buzz surrounding her new novel,” said Alex Brubaker, Midtown Scholar’s manager. “To come in at No. 1 on the New York Times bestsellers list proves she’s one of the finest storytellers working today.”
“Circe” is a feminist retelling of the classic mythological character seen in Homer’s “The Odyssey.” The novel is told through the perspective of Circe, the daughter of the Titan sun god Helios and the alluring nymph Perse. Circe cannot start fire with her eyes or bleed gold like her father, nor does she have the fatal beauty of her mother. Feeling like a black sheep, she turns to the mortal world. There, she learns she does possess a power–the power of witchcraft. She harnesses this power by turning her enemies into monsters (and opposing men into pigs).
“With Circe, people have been really moved by her story just as a women,” Miller said. “I think a lot of those features of women’s lives don’t get treated in an epic fashion. Women have not been the center of an epic, so I wanted to make a women’s life epic and give her the complexity that the male characters have.”
It seems as if the Boston native was born to retail the stories of gods and goddesses. As a young girl, her mother read her passages from Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” as bedtime stories. Immediately, she was gripped by the raw emotions of the characters.
“Here are all these characters that are angry and grieving, and learning, and it was just so monumental and passionate that I was totally hypnotized,” Miller said.
From then on, she dove into as many mythological texts as she could get her hands on. In high school, Miller learned ancient Greek and Latin from her teacher. A year after her first lesson, she was able to read and comprehend “The Iliad” in its original language.
“[It] was just mind blowing,” she said. “It wasn’t just about the story. It was also the beauty of the languages. Latin and Greek literature are just some of the most beautiful poetry you can imagine.”
She then went on to receive her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classics at Brown University. There, she learned more on how to uncover hidden meanings and themes within the text, such as homoeroticism, which is seen in her first novel “The Songs of Achilles.” Literature and philosophy icons such as Plato and even Shakespeare wrote about the love between Achilles and Patroclus, yet, according to Miller, that interpretation has dissolved through the decades.
“Part of what I really wanted to do was honor the relationship in ‘The Songs of Achilles’ and bring that interpretation back out of the closet space,” she said.
Miller then took to her own classroom, where she taught and tutored high school students in Latin, Greek and Shakespeare for 15 years. Miller said it was exciting to see her students come to the material for the first time and she wanted to bring that feeling to more people, thus came her first novel.
“The Songs of Achilles” was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, became a New York Times bestseller and was translated into over 25 languages. “Circe” was noted as becoming an instant No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
“I never in my wildest dreams imagined No. 1,” Miller said. “At most, I hoped I would make the top 10 and that already felt like I was living in la la land.”
Currently, Miller says she is in the “thinking phase” of her third novel. While there may be some ideas swimming around in her head, she is not ready to get behind the computer just yet.
“After such an intensive time with ‘Circe,’ I just want to sit for a little while and read other people’s books,” she said with a laugh.
Miller said her presentation at Midtown Scholar will focus on “Circe” and the complexities of the characters, underlying themes and what it was like relating back to Homer and other classics.
“One thing I have found, which is one of the nicest, nicest things during these events is that people come with a ton of questions,” she said. “Not just about my work but about mythology and literary adaptations. They’ll either come knowing a lot about mythology or nothing about mythology and wanting to know more. As a teacher, seeing so many people who are interested and engaging about this topic is really exciting.”
Madeline Miller will be at Midtown Scholar Bookstore, 1302 N. 3rd St., Harrisburg, on May 23, 7 to 9 p.m. For more information, visit www.midtownscholar.com. To learn more about Miller and her novels visit Madelinemiller.com.
