Circe and Language: What Welty Took from Joyce

The most obvious fact of Eudora Welty's 1955 short story "Circe" is that the author has reversed the Homeric perspective, thereby granting a voice and an inner life to the title character in contrast to an unbroken tradition of male authors ranging from Virgil to Milton to Calderon. Narrating in the first person, Welty's immortal enchantress Circe relates her intriguing but unfulfilling experience of the year-long visit of mortal Odysseus and his men to the island of Aeaea. "Welty's story is about the evolution of Circe's consciousness," writes Judith Yarnall, "not Odysseus's" (185).

To summarize, Welty's retelling of Book 10 of the Odyssey retains an outline familiar from Homer: the arrival of Odysseus upon Circe's isle; her transformation of half his crew to swine and back again; his resistance to her magic "broth" with the help of Hermes's "cautious herb"; their year-long love affair; the death of Elpenor, who falls drunkenly from a rooftop; and the hero's departure for Hades (641). Original to Welty, however, are her divine protagonist's sharp and funny personality; the pride this mistress of a household takes in her domestic skills—weaving, cleaning, cooking, baking, and turning men into pigs; the goddess's profound dissatisfaction at her inability to grasp our "mortal mystery," an undefined "secret" of human existence stemming from our "frailty"; and the fact that Circe, when Odysseus sails away, is pregnant with Telegonus, the son (according to some traditions) fated to kill him (642).

Suzanne Marrs, Welty's friend and biographer, notes that despite the switch from Odysseus's male heroic perspective, "the story's greatest emphasis [falls] not upon a female version of myth but upon the unresolv- able mystery at the heart of human identity, the mystery that distinguishes men and women from gods and goddesses, the mystery involved in the quest for independence and the battle against mortality" (146). That is, this very brief tale goes well beyond a redress of historical male imbalance to explore universal and archetypal themes. And the themes Marrs finds in "Circe"—identity, divinity, mortality, independence, mystery, creativity—seem to find their genesis in the Circe chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. Given the brevity of Welty's version (a mere six and a half pages), it shares with Joyce's chapter a striking number of related themes and verbal echoes quite apart from the mythic material the two writers derive from Homer. For example, the four terms "speech," "frailty," "epitaph," and "word" make crucial appearances in both Joyce's chapter and Welty's short story, and this is what I'd like to explore here.

1. SPEECH

In response to Bloom's pretentious euphuism—"the mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of rank weed"—Zoe Higgins, a prostitute going about her business, mocks his bloated language: "Go on. Make a stump speech out of it" (Joyce 390). In another conflict of male/female perspective, Welty's narrator is likewise put off by her lover's oddly formal farewell after a year's intimacy when Odysseus announces his departure as a fait accompli: "Thank you, Circe, for the hospitality we have enjoyed beneath your roof" (643). Like Zoe, Circe responds sarcastically to male pretensions: "What is the occasion for a speech?" (643). In both cases, a woman uses the word speech to undercut male falsity and pretension in a sexual context.

2. FRAILTY

A magazine illustration of a nymph in a grotto hangs in a frame above Bloom's bed, and as Bloom converses with her, he reflects on the vulnerability of his own sleeping (and snoring) form: "Frailty, thy name is marriage" (Joyce 445). In modifying (perhaps misremembering) Hamlet's soliloquy recalling his mother and father's relationship ("Frailty thy name is woman"), Bloom ironically turns the cliché against his own blighted love life (Shakespeare I.ii.146, 1145). In Welty's story, Circe similarly observes the sleeping form of a wandering lover and reflects (unwittingly) on the limitation of her own perspective: "Only frailty, it seems, can divine it [the "mortal mystery"]—and I was not...