The Perimenopausal Rage of Circe in The Odessey

I am not one to revel in my GenX-ness. I mean, I do. I love the movies and the music and bootstrapping nature of my generational cohort, but I’m not one to get clique-y with it.

However. We are the first collective to go through peri- and menopause armed with science and more than just science, with medication. Say what you will about older generations, they went through hot flashes and joint pain and sleeplessness and Osteoporosis with nuthin’. You’ll pry my Estradiol from my cold, dead etc.

My generation as a whole was also the first to have working mothers for the entirety of our childhood (“Do not call me unless there is a cop outside the house or a bone showing.”), women had ready access to education without it being extremely odd or being ostracized for seeking it, more opportunities of employment than our mothers, and The Pill. We gals could have it All*!

There was fine print on that “all” that most of us didn’t realize. Sure, all of the opportunities available at the time, and all of the challenges, all of the housework, all of the childrearing, all of the emotional labor, all of the family and house management, all of the meal prep and social glueing and all the civic responsibilities and all all all. All of it fell on our shoulders. If we’re lucky, we might have a partner that kicks in on any of this, and if you have sisters or a mother or aunts, they also understand All* and maybe help, too. (And you’re helping them.)

This is the easy path to success, what I’ve just described. The simple, straightforward path to “achieving your dreams.” I didn’t include those of us born with disabilities or poor or in communities behind a Red Line or outside of a First-world Nation. I didn’t include those of us who dealt with sexual assault in the home or the workplace or who experienced domestic violence. That All* is even longer fine print, if so. My All* has some extra fine print beyond the standard issue, so I’m speaking from experience.

I’m about to turn 54. I presently live like Circe on her hidden island, Aeaea, children raised and now alone, surrounded by my things, living as I wish for the most part, entertaining my guests like every visit is worthy of a banquet, and just trying to stay out of the radar of those who would do me harm.

Spoiler for one of the most influential stories in all of Western Civilization? Circe has Had It™️ with poorly behaved men. If you are not clear on Zeus’s Law, aka xenia, it’s a moral obligation of a host to their guests to provide, to meet their needs. The understanding is that in return, the guest will then behave themselves. No overstaying your welcome, helping yourself to things not offered, normal stuff like that.

Circe, who did not ask for Odysseus nor his men to show up en masse at her door uninvited, offers them food and shelter. In the story, something missing in the new movie, the men… want more. A lot more. They don’t ask. They help themselves. Law broken, but what is a law centered in morality to those who have no morals? Circe’s face is one of grim understanding. This isn’t her first rodeo.

In the source material (naturally the Emily Wilson translation) and Madeline Miller’s perfect side-quest novel, Circe, we get more of the events that transpired in Circe’s witchy hut before the main event occurs. If you grew up as a woman on this earth, you already know what happened to inspire her rage. You know in your bones the alertness required when in the presence of a man, let alone an entire ship-full of desperate sailors. (Can you begin to imagine!?)

Even Penelope, behind her thin screen in her open-concept castle, had me on high alert as a cavalcade of drunken, clutching men kicked her husband’s dog and emptied her kitchens night after night, opportunistic and impatient to claim her body, her name, her home. (When you realize that they were tracking her moon cycles all those years… Horrific.)

The beautiful Calypso (Charlize Theron), who is trying to have a midlife rebrand with a Nice Guy on a deserted beach, who is a goddess herself with a Very Important Father (Atlas), is stripped of all personality to become a free therapist and nursemaid to a man who realizes he wants his first wife, after all. When not even Theron and a lack of responsibilities isn’t enough for a guy…

And so we come to Circe, who is most of us women of middle age, transitioning from maiden to crone with aches and pains and hair that used to shine and a sagging cheek. She has been in the courts of the Gods, she has entertained lovers and partners, sought a higher station, and look. Listen. Sure the rumor was she killed her husband and was thus exiled to this hidden-on-the-map island, and yeah, okay, other people say she flew into a rage of jealousy after her lover became enamored with young and beautiful Scylla and so she poisoned a sea to turn Scylla into a monster and was banished, but whomst among us, right?! How about a little respect for the years Circe put into those relationships? The guy cheats and she’s exiled? (Loses her house, her standing, her community…) Now she’s left alone to age, to find cures for her own ailments? To find her own comfort and peace? Unwanted and the butt of jokes?

We each have our battle scars, our triumphs and shames, and wherever life finds us, we have a little patch of “mine” we feel fiercely protective over. We’re not stingy; we are more judicious with whom we share. We’ve learned that lesson, at least. But unlike us, Circe is physically bound by the laws of the day: When one has a guest, you must be a gracious host.

And when the guest oversteps (I would say sexual assault and theft are oversteps, although not shown on screen), we may nod and murmur to ourselves in grim understanding when Circe grabs one man and molds him like wet clay to physically appear as piggish, as animalistic as his behavior. Her soft, maternal voice shushing him as thin, greying hair slips from her braid, explaining with seemingly endless patience why this is happening to him. The look in her eye as she spots the next man who must learn his lesson, a look that could mean, “All you had to do was behave.”

Nolan’s Odyssey is full of men who cannot behave. Men who must have more. Men who are never satisfied. Not even Odysseus, while played sympathetically by EveryMan Matt Damon, escapes the need for more. More glory, more wins, more spoils and rewards. It seems as if its never enough, and they’re all so quick to anger, so quick to strike, so quick to battle. That’s the underlying truth of the oldest, most important story in Western Civilization and one that keeps being missed.

In the original text, Circe is who tells Odysseus how difficult the trip home will be, about the Sirens, about the choice between a rock and a hard place, aka Scylla and Charybdis, about Helius’ sheep and cattle that could not be touched or the men would die. The movie took that wisdom from her and gave it to a man to tell. She advised Odysseus and filled his sails with wind and sent them on their way (they visited her twice, and the second time is what we see in the movie). Can you see why she would be so enraged?

“I told you exactly how to get home, what to avoid to stay safe, and not only couldn’t you do that, but then you come back here and eat me out of house and home, take liberties that were not yours and insult me in my own little patch of mine? And not one of you offered to do a chore in return.”

They got off easy.

Odd that the public takes away from this story the fear of lost time, lost opportunity, of career setbacks and hardship of war, when the very wise (and not at the time perimenopausal Penelope) initially tells her husband, “We should just sail West and leave all of this.” Guess what they do after twenty years of hardship!? Should have listened to her in the beginning!

Zendaya’s maiden goddess Athena looks on the men with tears in her eyes – all of this war and bloodshed in her name, and she is lost for words for most of the movie. I take away the lesson of the burgeoning crone, of Circe, of the cast-aside woman who is losing her youth but gaining wisdom by the hour. Circe, whose son left her for decades in search of a capricious father who didn’t want the job. Circe, who the Fates toyed with and yet she persevered. Who knew the end of her story, of all the stories to come, and still managed to go about her day, finding the little joys where she could and believing that could be enough to make a sort of happy life.

And… when it wasn’t, well. Those men were pigs. Metaphorically speaking. Why not make it literal?

SHE UNDID IT, sheesh. …eventually.

My final takeaway is that with each new iteration of this oldest, central story, from Emily Wilson’s brilliant, studied and feminist-liberation translation on, we grow a little more sympathetic to the women of the Odyssey, not just the young, vibrant nymphs and maidens and goddesses, but the women who were hardened by hardship, by enduring the evil brought about by male rulers, by the crones finally free of Man’s desire to claim them as property yet still seeking to share their wisdom for those open to listening and learning. Willing to play host for the price of courtesy.

As I enter my crone years, my eyes are wide open, and so is my table. As long as you behave.

(And if you haven’t read Madeline Miller’s Circe, run, don’t walk to your local library!)

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