What Circe Taught Me — The Blatant Distortion of Female Rage

How myth and magic as a means against the terror of uncontrolled nature, and therefore, the urge to deny female rage, made Circe into a devilish femme fatale.

With regard to the diachronic change of meaning from antiquity to the present day and the synchronous variety of word uses, it is not easy to define the term myth conceptually. According to Merriam-Webster, a myth is “usually a traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon.”

In the 18th century, Giambattista Vico assumed that the myth’s origin is a chaotic primal fear. Thus he is considered the first philosopher in modern times to interpret mythology as a “reaction in the form of fear in the face of the overpowering forces of nature.” In the 19th and 20th centuries, Freud, Horkheimer, and Adorno, in particular, represented the “explanatory model of fear” by using magic and myth as a means against the terror of uncontrolled nature.

The Mythization of the Woman and the Fear of Men

Virginia Woolf, one of the feminist pioneers of the 20th century, and her successors, whose gender theories have made significant contributions to women’s movements, assume a mythical image of women in literary history as the opposite depiction of the…