Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Fletcher, Judith.
Classical World, Volume 99, Number 4, Summer 2006, pp. 405-418 (Article)

Published by Classical Association of the Atlantic States

DOI: 10.1353/clw.2006.0065

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405

SIGNIFYING CIRCE
IN TONI MORRISONS SONG OF SOLOMON
Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon shares with Homers Odyssey a profound concern with naming. Names are obscured, replaced,
and eventually revealed in both epic poem and novel. 1 They possess a transformative power at times: Odysseus does indeed become
No Man, the name he uses to trick the Cyclops, when he arrives
home as a nameless beggar; in Morrisons novel the man whose
name is changed to Macon Dead is murdered, and his descendants
transfixed in a spiritual death. Names in Song of Solomon are deeply
implicated in issues of narrativity: this is a story about naming,
and its characters frequently bear names which denote their narrative function, for example Pilate, who acts as a guide to the protagonist
Milkman Dead, or Sweet, the woman he wins after completing his
ordeal in Shalimar. Certain names allude to other stories: Hagar,
Ruth, Rebecca, and First Corinthians have obvious biblical associations in keeping with the novels title. The midwife, Circe, a
pivotal figure in the puzzles of naming and narrative around which
the novel is structured, is the only character to bear a name from
Greek mythology. Yet while she so obviously signifies a Homeric
intertext and the patrilineal literary history that is its legacy, Circe
simultaneously subverts this tradition, sending the protagonist on
a journey that resembles the master narrative, but is destabilized
by other discourses. The integrity of the narrative is accordingly
stretched between a system of dualities: mens and womens stories compete for authority, Western mythic traditions are contested
by African folklore, and the myth of the catabasis, the descent to
the Underworld, is challenged by a fantasy of ascent manifested
in the folktale of the man who could fly.
In this essay I focus on how Morrison employs the figure of
Circe to position her novel both within and beyond the classical
tradition of the catabatic narrative. Toni Morrison graduated with
a minor in classics from Howard University in 1953, and it is obvious that her academic training informed Song of Solomon. 2 This,
her third novel, is distinguished from much of her other work, which
explores the experience of black American women, by its focus
on a central male character, Milkman Dead. Milkman, the son of
a prosperous slumlord in an unnamed Michigan city, is set on a
quest for his history and identity that leads him back to Virginia
and the Gullah traditions of his ancestors. That Song of Solomon
is structured as an archetypal heroic saga was immediately recog1
On the implications of names in the Odyssey see J. Peradotto, Man in the Middle
Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton 1990). The significance of naming
in Song of Solomon is discussed at length by M. S. Mobley, Folk Roots and Mythic
Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge 1991) 1028.
2
Morrison herself has identified the influence of Classical Greek literature on
her work. See Mobley (above, n.1) 41, n.119.

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nized when it made its debut in the late 1970s. In an early essay
on the novel, A. Leslie Harris identified a mythic structure that
conforms to the male initiatory pattern. Harris analysis was exclusively concerned with Milkmans role as an archetypal hero whose
childhood is narrated as a series of events resonating with symbolic and archetypal significance, 3 beginning with a miraculous
birth (the first black baby to be born in Mercy Hospital), proceeding to a period of alienation from his family, and culminating
in a quest ostensibly for gold, but also for his genealogy. Other
characters in the novel can be mapped onto this mythic grid. Milkmans
childhood friend and eventual antagonist, Guitar, functions as an
alter ego, while women such as Pilate and Circe correspond to
the positions of helpers and threshold guardians. 4
This early literary criticism identified Milkmans quest as an
exponent of a Rankian mythic structure, which valorizes the male
initiation pattern. This is a completely legitimate reading of the
text, but one with limitations. The resolution of the novel, which
implicates a female oral tradition and African folktale, suggests a
more subversive approach to the familiar mythic structure. Later
scholarship posits that Morrison manipulates the male initiation theme
to expose it as problematic. Gerry Brenner and Michael Awkward
recognized that Morrison employs the mythic archetype to articulate a male narrative which allows women to function only as a
supplement in the androcentric narrative of a heros quest. 5 I would
like to expand upon this reading by providing a closer inspection
of the novels classical antecedents with special emphasis on Circe.
My objective here is to facilitate a better understanding of how
Morrison manipulates and subverts the catabatic traditions connected
with coming of age or initiation narratives and how she situates
the obligatory descent to the Underworld with relation to the story
of flight.
The catabasis of Odysseus functions as a prototype for this
narrative tradition, and as a model for Morrisons novel: the hero
experiences a death of identity which is symbolized by his trip to
Hades, where he encounters the shades of figures from the heroic
past. 6 He is symbolically reborn when he is cast ashore, naked
and alone, at Scheria, and he works towards recuperating his identity
3
A. L. Harris, Myth as Structure in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, MELUS
7.3: Ethnic Women Writers 1 (1980) 70.
4
Accordingly, Milkman is like Aeneas, like Ulysses (Mobley [above, n.1] 74).
5
G. Brenner, Song of Solomon: Morrisons Rejection of Ranks Monomyth and
Feminism, The New England Quarterly 15.1 (1987) 1324; M. Awkward, Unruly
and Let Loose: Myth, Ideology and Gender in Song of Solomon, Callaloo 13 (1990)
48298.
6
Odysseus of course does not descend into Hades like Aeneas, but his trip to
the Underworld is clearly modeled on myths of the catabasis and functioned as a
model for later versions. See A. Heubeck and A. Hoekstra, A Commentary on Homers
Odyssey: V.II, Books IXXVII (Oxford 1989) 7577.

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when he finally arrives home in Ithaca. 7 Circe plays an important

role in Odysseus visit to the Underworld. After spending a year
of indolence on her island, the hero prepares to leave, only to be
told by Circe that he must make the descent. She provides information about how to accomplish the catabasis, and is an integral
part of the Nekyia. 8 Although her role in Song of Solomon is obviously modeled on this Homeric tradition, Morrison scholars have
not fully explored and accounted for her origins outside the novel. 9
Essays which recognize the novels mythical underpinnings seldom
look to the classical texts themselves, but tend to rely on popular
works by Robert Graves or Joseph Campbell, which provide generalized schemata of the monomyth.10 Although Marilyn Sanders Mobley
presents a compelling and informed analysis of how Morrison revises myth and folktale, even she designates Circe as more like a
prophetess or sibyl, 11 without considering how her role in the development not only of Milkman, but also of his father, Macon Dead,
and his aunt Pilate, resonates with her role in the Odyssey. Mobley,
however, does make an important point when she cautions:
The temptation throughout the entire novel . . . is
to make a series of one-to-one correspondences between
[Morrisons] text and classical texts. But in the irony,
complexity, and multiplicity of mythopoesis, this
temptation is thwarted and the reader must acknowledge a variety of ways to interpret the names, to
read the signs, to understand the rituals. 12
7
For a reading of the birth symbolism in Odysseus voyage from Calypsos
island to the Phaeacians see R. M. Newton, The Rebirth of Odysseus, GRBS 25
(1984) 520.
8
See D. Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Princeton 2001) 13941. Ogden
records Circe as being the first of a line of female necromancers in literature. As he
points out, her knowledge of Odysseus consultation with Teiresias in the Underworld
suggests that she accompanied him unseen. Furthermore, her association with the Underworld seems to predate the Odyssey. Siduri, a Circe-like figure in the Akkadian Gilgamesh,
directs the hero to Utnapishtim (the land of the dead) through a forest and water. N.
Marinatos (Circe and Liminality: Ritual Background and Narrative Structure, in M.
Dickie and O. Anderson, eds., Homers World: Fiction, Tradition, and Reality [Bergen
1995] 13340) draws comparisons with Babylonian Ishtar and Asherah. For further folktale
parallels, discussion, and bibliography see Heubeck and Hoekstra (above, n.6) 5052.
9
In her survey of the manifestations of Circe in literary history, Judith Yarnell
(Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress [Urbana and Chicago, 1994]
183) devotes only a paragraph to Song of Solomon which aptly identifies her as keeper
of true names and pointer of true directions. For an excellent discussion of how
Circe appears throughout classical literature including Apollonius, Vergil, Ovid, and
Petronius, and her iconographic tradition in the plastic arts see R. Brilliant, Kirkes
Men: Swine and Sweethearts, in B. Cohen, ed., The Distaff Side: Representing the
Female in Homers Odyssey (Oxford 1995) 16574.
10
P. Page (Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrisons
Novels [Jackson, Miss., 1995] 98), for instance, relies on the monomyth of the heros
quest as delineated by Joseph Campbell and Otto Rank.
11
Mobley (above, n.1) 120.
12
Mobley (above, n.1) 119.

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Morrisons Circe is by no means simply a carbon copy of Homers,

but she does invite the reader to recall the traditional heroic saga
from which she seems to be imported. It is by examining how she
both signifies that narrative tradition and operates as an agent of
its rupture that we understand the full implications of her presence
and power.
Let us turn now to the story. Like the Odyssey it features a
complex narrative structure, with numerous embedded tales which
fill in the past and which even sometimes contradict one another.
The protagonist, nicknamed Milkman, is the third in his line to
carry the name of Macon Dead, his fathers name, and his fathers
before him. Yet the first Macon Dead, an illiterate ex-slave, had
another name (Jake Solomon), lost to his progeny, and it will be
Milkmans project to recover the name and story of his forebears.
As the second Macon Dead recounts, when his father registered
with the Freedmans Bureau in Virginia, the man behind the desk
was drunk:
He asked Papa where he was born. Papa said Macon.
Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said,
Hes dead. Asked him who owned him, Papa said,
Im free. Well, the Yankee wrote it all down, but
in the wrong spaces . . . and in the space for his
name the fool wrote, Dead comma Macon. 13
(53)
It is as if death displaces and thus conceals the name of Milkmans
forefather, who kept this misnomer because his wife, Sing, Liked
the name. Said it was new and would wipe out the past (54). It
does indeed wipe out the past, but it also becomes a prediction of
the untimely demise of Macon Dead, who is murdered right in
front of his two young children by a white neighbor who covets
his farm. Macon the second and his little sister Pilate hide until
they see the smoke from a cook stovejust as the smoke from
her cottage had signified Circes presence to Odysseus and his
companions (10.196197). The children are concealed and fed by
Circe; in this version she is a black woman who works for the
wealthy white family who murdered Macon Dead. After several weeks
in seclusion, yearning for fresh air and simple food, they return
to the wild, and eventually hide in a cave where young Macon,
surprised and frightened by an old prospector, stabs him in the
back. Brother and sister part company here, permanently alienated
with their characters firmly set. Macon wants to take the old mans
gold, Pilate understands the danger and immorality of such an action.
Macon is depicted as anything but heroicthe assault of the old
man in the cave hardly seems justified, and his wrangle with his
sister sets the tone for his future relationships with women. Pilate
13

All quotes from the novel are from T. Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York

1977).

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spends the next night alone in the cave, and then sets out on her
journeys. The process has been her initiation, 14 and she will develop
into a doublet of Circe, a griot or wise woman of the African
folk tradition.
Pilate travels throughout the South collecting rocks and lovers
along the way, until she settles with her daughter Reba and granddaughter Hagar outside the Michigan town where her brother has
established himself. In contrast to his sisters life on the margins
of society, Macon becomes an entrepreneur who marries respectably and has three children: two daughters, First Corinthians and
Lena, and a son, Milkman. Spiritually annihilated by the trauma
of his fathers murder, Macon Dead the second is undone by his
compensating lust for money and property. His family life is sterile and repressive, and he continues to ignore his sister. Pilates
life is more emotionally rich, but still she experiences tragedies
and sorrows directly related to the fragmentation of family. As Philip
Page observes: Without their name (Solomon) and the wisdom it
implies, the Deads are ignorant of their ancestry, and hence of
themselves, and they are alienated from their community, each other,
and themselves. 15
Although he is the third man in his family to inherit the name
of Macon Dead, his grandfathers misnomer, Milkman acquires his
life name, which replaces his patronymic, through his protracted
connection to his mothers body. The neurotic Ruth, starved for
intimacy, breastfeeds her son long into his early boyhood, a secret which, when discovered, provides the child with his new name.
The maternal body is thus imposed on the already displaced name
of the father which is correlative with the story itself. This matronymic,
as it were, contributes to the initiatory theme by pinioning Milkman in a maternal world from which he must break free, a common
element in such narratives. 16 Ruth even tries to appropriate the naming
of her son more completely when she suggests that he become a
doctor like her father, and adopt his name, becoming Dr. Macon
Foster. But once he learns how he acquired his nickname, Milkman begins to move away from his suffocating mother, and starts
his journey of self-discovery, which is unfortunately complicated
and forestalled by Milkmans identification with his father. Milkmans
quest for his true name is his story; it becomes a process that
14
See J. S. Bakerman, Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of
Toni Morrison, American Literature 52.4 (1981) 54163. Bakerman does not discuss
female initiation as a mythic pattern in Song of Solomon, but nonetheless makes some
valuable observations about the initiatory themes in the novel. Hagar is an example
of a failed initiation, First Corinthians, Milkmans sister, individuates from her father
by seeking employment and taking a lover, but this is a delayed initiation (taking
place when she is in her forties). Only Pilate goes through an initiation when she is
an adolescent, as is traditional. (554). As Bakerman points out, the device indicates
the extreme difficulty of the black womans search for self-determination (554).
15
Page (above, n.10) 86.
16
Telemachus must leave the home of his mother, or, to give a more trenchant
example, Orestes must kill Clytemnestra.

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involves considerable stripping away of his masculine ego and social identity, and a renunciation of his fathers solipsism and
materialism.
The dead must be named in order for the story to be put to
rest. Yet the power of naming, despite the strong patrilineal surface narrative, resides to a very large extent within the bodies and
knowledge of women: Sing, wife of the first Macon Dead, determines that he will keep his name; Circe and the women of Shalimar
reveal the names of Milkmans ancestors. Responding to the ghost
of her father (Macon Dead the first), Pilate and her family unknowingly enact the name of her mother. Sing, Sing, says the
ghost, and understanding his revelation to be a command, Pilate
and her family do indeed sing. Their song about Sugarman contains the vestigial name of their forefather, Solomon or Shalimar,
who flew away from slaveryand family. It will guide Milkman
to the truth about his origins. The song, which recurs with variations throughout the narrative like a refrain, is first sung in the
opening chapter by a shabby and eccentrically dressed woman (presumably Pilate) who is part of the crowd watching the insurance
agents failed attempt to fly from the roof of Mercy Hospital:
O Sugarman done fly away
Sugarman done gone
Sugarman cut across the sky
Sugarman gone home. . . . (6)
Pilates song contextualizes an apparently foolish suicide within
a larger narrative framework, the folktale of the slave who flew
back to Africa; her voice provides meaning and continuity for a
death performed before an audience. The event corresponds with
the birth of Milkman, who will later hear the song performed by
his aunts and cousin, with Solomon replacing Sugarman, providing the key to his patrimony. Naming and narrativity are inextricably
woven together in this instance, and it is the voices of women
(and later children) who transmit this patrimony, and who contest
its significance and meaning. For Milkman the tale is self-affirming and heroic, but the wise women of Shalimar read it differently.
Susan Byrd (Milkmans great-aunt) focuses more on Ryna, Solomons
wife, and their twenty-one children, abandoned when Sugarman flew
to freedom. It would seem that the discovery of Milkmans true
name requires him to burrow through layers or distortions of names
Sugarman, Charlemagne, Solomon, Shalimarthat also signify an
absence of narrative fixity or certitude; versions of stories change
according to who tells them.
The relationship between names and narrative is established
early in the novel by the subversive processes that bring about
the designation of Not Doctor Street. The black community had
a different name for what was officially Mains Avenue. Since the
only black doctor in town, Dr. Foster, lived there, it became Doctor Street; when city officials insisted that it was not Doctor Street,

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the black population responded by calling it Not Doctor Street.

This contest of naming and renaming is symbolic of a conflict
between two kinds of narrative authority 17 which prevails throughout
the novel. There is a corresponding competition for narrative control between Milkmans mother and father. As I have noted, Ruths
inappropriate intimacy with her son challenges the patrilineal system of naming her son. Her attempt to make him adopt her fathers
name and profession is a pathetic attempt to revive her dead father. Ruths obsession becomes the subject of her husbands confidence
to Milkman, a version that she challenges. The tension between
Macon and Ruth is most forcefully realized in their competing narratives
regarding Ruths relationship with her dead father. Ruths morbid
adulation of Dr. Foster (after whom Not Doctor Street was named)
extinguishes any desire Macon ever felt for her. Explaining his
contempt for and abuse of his wife to Milkman, Macon recounts
a scene of incestuous necrophiliahis naked wife sucking the fingers of her fathers corpse. But Ruths account of the event differs
substantially; although she admits to such a longing for her dead
father that she surreptitiously visits his grave at night, she represents her yearning in more natural terms, and accuses Macon not
only of trying to poison her father, but also of trying to cause a
miscarriage of her unborn son, Milkman.
Milkman hears the contesting tales of both his parents, uncertain of the truth. Yet he chooses to privilege one particular story
of his father: that after Macon and his sister Pilate, as children,
spent the night in a cave, he left his sister with the corpse and
three bags of gold. Convinced that Pilate has the gold in a bag
tied to her ceiling, he sends Milkman and Guitar to steal it. The
counter-narrative is told by Pilate to Ruth, in a story never circulated among the men: that the sack contains rocks from different
places Pilate had visited, and, as Milkman finally discovers after
he and Guitar are picked up by the police, human bones. But whose
bones? For when the skin has melted from a body, it is impossible to tell if a man was black or white. The bones that Pilate
carries with her are not those of a lost husband, Mr. Solomon, as
she tells the police, or even those of the white prospector, as she
believes, but those of her own father, whom she unconsciously names.
The narrative without this missing name is incomplete. This search
for a name and a story becomes Milkmans quest. It is his function to fill in the spaces of the form properly, to slide the elements
of his grandfathers history into their original positions, and thus
to discover the names of his forefathers and foremothers: Jake and
Singing Bird, his grandparents, and his great-grandparents, Shalimar
and Ryna. The momentum for this quest for knowledge, however,
is his fathers greed; Macon Dead still lusts for the prospectors
17
T. O. Mason, The Novelist as Conservator: Stories and Comprehension in
Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, in H. Bloom, ed., Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon
(New York and Philadelphia, 1990) 177.

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gold, so does Guitar, Sunday hit man for the Seven Days, and so
at first does Milkman, who sees the gold as freedom from the overpowering unhappiness of his family. His quest, however, will evolve
into a search for personal and cultural identity, an identity that
individuates him from the father who bullies his wife and daughters, neglects and repudiates his only sister, and turns an old woman
and her family out of her home. Given his fathers misogyny, Milkmans
treatment of women is hardly surprising. He callously dumps his
cousin Hagar, after a long-term relationship, with a thank-you note
and a gift, he interferes in his sisters love affair, and he robs his
aunt. Milkmans quest for knowledge and identity, then, is a gradual
movement toward a more decent relationship with women, and a
value system more in line with that of Pilate rather than his father. The figure at the threshold of his development is the uncanny
Circe.
Circe is first named by Macon when he starts to recount his
history to Milkman. The narration is in response to Milkmans forbidden
visit to Macons estranged sister Pilate, and to her version of their
shared childhood experience. The name of Circe surfaces like a
specter, as Macon reminisces about life on his fathers farm. He
remembers the animals named after humans, and significantly, a
pig named General Lee, who was delicious.
Circe made up the best pot of maws she ever cooked.
Huh! Id forgotten that womans name. That was
it, Circe. Worked at a big farm some white people
owned in Danville, Pennsylvania. Funny how things
get away from you. For years you cant remember
nothing. Then just like that, it all comes back to
you.
(52)
In chapter 10 Milkman encounters Circe for himself when he visits
Danville in search of the gold that he believes is in the prospectors
cave. His investigations lead him to the Butler mansion, where Circe
concealed Macon and Pilate. Although his grandfathers old friends
have vivid memories of Circe, they assume she is dead, since she
was a hundred when I was a boy (237). The accent on her extreme
old age is suggestive of the antiquity of the tale from which Circe
is imported (book 10 of the Odyssey). And even if her Homeric
associations have not been emphasized at this point (although General
Lee the pig should give us pause), Milkmans encounter with her
will be infused with that ancient narrative. Her home, the decaying
Butler mansion, is hidden behind bushes, much like the lush greenery
of Aeaea; indeed the inaccessibility of the place makes it a veritable
island.
Circe is a strange combination of appalling decrepitude and
sexual power. Like the ancient tale she is in decline, but still possessed
of a compelling allure. As she embraces Milkman, mistaking him
for his father, the young man finds himself simultaneously aroused
and disgusted. Deathless she may be, but she is by no means age-

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less. Nonetheless Milkmans first encounter with her is sexually

charged; she is like a figure from a dream, a sexual power which
is again reminiscent of the Homeric Circe who keeps Odysseus
for a year as her lover. Like her epic predecessor, who supplicates the hero soon after meeting him (after failing to enchant
him with her potions, Od. 10.323), Circe immediately makes close
physical contact with Milkman. Their embrace is only interrupted
by her throng of dogs. Circe is also mistress of the animals; her
strange Weimaraners with human eyes recall the men turned into
wolves, who fawned on Odysseus companions like dogs fawn on
their masters (Od. 10.215216). Whether they are in fact her former
masters is never specified. Reverend Cooper had advised Milkman
that any evening up left to do, Circe took care of (233); readers are left to make their own conclusions about the full details
of her retribution.
Circes association with animals is suggestive of her origins
as a fertility goddess. 18 She is, after Odysseus has overpowered
her, benevolent and nurturing, attributes she passes down to her
twentieth-century counterpart who succors Macon and Pilate after
the murder of their father. Associated with her fecundating qualities is her role as a midwife; she delivered most of the people in
Denford, including Macon and Pilate. It is Circe to whom Odysseus
returns after his visit to the Underworld, so in a sense she too
functions as a midwife in his rebirth. Her nurturance extends to
her tutelary capacity: she not only tells Odysseus that he must
make his trip to Hades, but also, once he returns, explains what
he must do for the remainder of his voyage. Milkman similarly
learns important information from Circe: the names of his ancestors and their history. She directs the course of his journey to his
ancestral home, Shalimar, a Gullah town on the coast of Virginia.
From Circe he hears the strange history of his grandfathers
corpse, which his father had buried in a shallow grave. The body
had been dislodged, washed upstream, and eventually put in the
cave, without a proper burial. The unburied corpse is a feature of
Odyssey 11 and Aeneid 6. It is as if Elpinor and Palinurus open a
portal for the heroes trips to the Underworld. Milkman declares
that he will bury the bones, unaware that they are in Pilates possession. Circe, like her namesake, gives him instructions on how
to locate the cave where he expects to find his grandfathers remains. Like Odysseus, Milkman must travel through water to arrive
at his destination, struggling through a stream and a thicket of
trees to reach the hill he must then climb. And here is where things
start to go askew for the reader anticipating a heros descent. Milkman
18
So Homers Circe, whose attributes of the potnia theron connect her in part
with the Great Mother, goddess of sexuality, death, and rebirth in the cycles of vegetation, has both life-giving and destructive functions: she holds the key to both love
and death (C. Segal, Circean Temptations: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, TAPA 99 [1968]
427). For her possible origins as a Near Eastern fertility goddess, e.g., Ishtar, see
also D. Page, Folktales in Homers Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 1973) 5169.

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sees the cave, but it is fifteen or twenty feet upwards. His climb
to the caves entrance is arduous; he rips his clothes and exhausts
himself scrambling up the rocky slope. Once there he notices another path (perhaps implying alternate narrative possibilities), one
that would have made this part of the trip far easier. Now inside
the cave, he manages to find the pit, but it does not contain the
gold that he set out to find, nor does it hold the bones that he
claimed to want to bury. Frustrated and exhausted, Milkman emerges
from this cavern with a ravenous hunger, as if his spiritual starvation has been physically manifested, and with a damaged watch,
its hands twisted as if time has somehow become distorted.
Circe seems to be able to change the quality of time. Milkmans
episode with her has been, despite his disappointed expectations,
a transformative experience. She is a liminal figure who mediates
between death and life, but she also sits at the portal between
two stories, not only the two sections of the novel, but also the
novel and the epic tradition. Under her direction time for Milkman has folded in on itself: he experiences a reversal of the birth
process and is then reborn. Milkman has of course been in the
Underworld all his life, existing as one of the dead under the control
of a Hades figure, his father. 19 He is climbing out of death into
life. 20 Although the trip to the cave occupies the same position as
the catabasis in the master narrative, it seems instead to be an
anodos, a going up. As he makes his difficult passage through
the stream, another citation of mythic prototypes, he is like a newborn
traveling through a birth canal. His destination, however, is curiously womb-like, a cave so dark that he is blinded by the absence
of light. He has embarked on the heros journey away from his
mother but now crawls back symbolically into the maternal body
a striking variation of the traditional catabasis, and a decided temporal
inversion.
If Milkmans damaged watch signifies a departure from linear
chronology, it also announces his release from quotidian temporality. He has been sent forth from a mundane existence as his
fathers minion into an epic landscape where his identity will be
transformed. And transformation is what Circe is all about. When
she dispatches Milkman to the cave, she effectively sends him into
a narrative matrix, a loaded symbol of other stories. The cave evokes
the Odyssean tradition, which gave birth to Aeneas descent to the
Underworld (also through a cave, Aen. 6.237242), 21 and those of
Dante and Milton. Milkman will emerge from the cave reborn into
19
Mobley (above, n.1) 102 points out the similarities between Macon Dead the
second and Hades: his wealth in particular, symbolized by his black hearse-like car.
20
In this respect Milkman differs from (but alludes to) the hero of another African-American novel. In Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (1952) the protagonist remains
underground. See the remarks of H. Bloom, Two African-American Masters of the
American Novel, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 28 (2000) 8993.
21
See Ogden (above, n.8) 6269 on the necromantic associations of the cave at
Avernus.

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a different world than the one he left behind; he will enter a mythic
continuum in which his view of the world and of himself will be
drastically changed. His voyage from here will be deeper south,
which represents, as it so often does in Morrisons fiction, the past,
correlative to his return to the womb. His encounter with Circe
has emphasized a different sense of time, what Julia Kristeva has
called Womens Time, circular and eternal, a temporality which
circumscribes a landscape strongly inflected as feminine but which
is also deeply resonant of established mythology. 22 In her revision
of the catabasis Morrison has emphasized the strong connection
between the midwife Circe and the womb-like earth, and set aside
the wise old man, Teiresias, whom Odysseus had to consult. 23
As Mobley recognizes, the cave has ritualistic significance as
a turning point in Milkmans journey because it begins his series
of encounters with life-threatening situations. 24 These initiatory tests
appear to be sequenced as a linear phallic (to use Kristevas terminology) temporal progression. Milkmans experience in Shalimar,
the home and name of his great-grandparents, is represented as a
continued citation of the Odyssey. He arrives in Shalimar without
recognizing it, as Odysseus does in Ithaca. Yet like Odysseus, he
has found his true home, where he encounters hostile males (first
in Solomons store) who insult and assault him. After his trials
are over, and once he has achieved the self-knowledge that has
been his true quest, he has a romantic affair with a Penelope-like
woman named Sweet with whom he shares a mutually satisfying
intimacy. This refashioning of the epic poem accentuates the initiatory aspects of Milkmans experience: his aggressive badinage
with Saul in Solomons store is a form of ritual insult or aischrologia,
a frequent component of initiation rites. Other features include the
change of clothing (his city suit for battle fatigues), his bath in
the sea with Sweet, and most significantly, the nighttime hunting
expedition with the elders of the town. 25 It is during the last that
Milkman experiences his epiphany in the woods, and comes to understand how thoughtlessly he had treated various women in his
22
J. Kristeva, Womens Time, in R. R. Warhol and D. Price Herndl, eds., Feminisms:
An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1993) 445.
23
Mobley (above, n.1) 121 over-interprets the blinding darkness of the cave as
an allusion to Teiresias. The motif of blinding, and the suggestion of a return to the
womb in the cave sequence, resonates with the Oedipal myth, especially since Milkman walks with a limp. The Oedipal imagery is beyond the scope of my essay, but
for a nuanced psychoanalytical reading of the motif see E. Branch, Through the Maze
of the Oedipal: Milkmans Search for Self in Song of Solomon, Literature and Psychology 41 (1995) 5284.
24
Mobley (above, n.1) 121.
25
See Page (above, n.10) 103, who synthesizes approaches which interpret the
mens collective skinning of the bobcat, Milkmans initiation into the black male community,
as an induction into his racial identity and past. The hunting, flaying, and evisceration of the animal are reminiscent of the atrocities performed on black men. Milkman
receives the heart of the bobcat, a symbol of his new heart in communion with the
natural world of the bobcat, and implying his rebirth as a new man and his penetration to the heart of himself, his ancestry, his community, and his universe.

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life, and how valuable his cultural heritage is to his sense of identity.
He comes of age, and anticipates a new sense of integration with
his family which will include bringing Pilate back to Shalimar to
give Jakes bones a proper burial.
While Milkmans experience is charted along a narrative axis
that corresponds to a male Bildungsroman, there is a calculated
twist in the narrative journey. We have noted how the encounter
with Circe marks the landscape as feminine, the very landscape
where Milkman will undergo his rite of passage as a hunter. His
initial impression of Shalimar, an isolated coastal village, emphasizes the women who are unencumbered by pocketbooks, bags, or
any baggage: These women walked as if they were going somewhere, but they carried nothing in their hands (259). Yet the chapter
which begins with a description of women quickly turns to the
archetypal myth in which a youth proves his masculinity by hunting with the men. While this tale is completed within the compass
of chapter 11, the remainder of the novel contests this apparently
heroic resolution. The mythic subtext is interleaved with the narratives of Hagar and Guitar. As Milkman is putting the pieces of
his story together, the jilted Hagar dies of a broken heart. Unlike
him she has not successfully completed her coming of age. 26 Instead she corresponds to Ryna, the woman whom Milkmans
great-grandfather left behind when he flew away, and whose story
offered by Susan Byrd serves to devalue Solomons flight. It is
during his visit with Susan that Milkman finally loses his watch;
the reader is alerted that the linear time of the Bildungsroman is
not what structures this tale after all.
The second to last chapter of the novel is permeated with the
voices of women, Pilate in particular, who sings a song of lamentation at her granddaughters funeral. This tragic turn of events
intersects with the heroic resolution of Milkmans coming of age
and as it so often is in Classical Greek literature, womens lamentation
is a disruptive energy. 27 Moreover, as Milkman is going through
his initiation process, hunting with the elders at night and bathing
in the sea with Sweet, he is being stalked by the murderous Guitar. The heroic resolution and citational practices that connect his
story to European literary history are further compromised when
Guitars bullet misses Milkman and kills Pilate as they are burying Jakes remains. The novel ends with Milkmans revision of the
Song of Solomon as he sings to Pilate, naming her as Sugargirl
and then leaping off a cliff in a reenactment of his great-grandfathers
flight. The linear tale with its teleology of the heroic quest is
now circumscribed by a ring composition, suggesting eternal repetitions of flight and song. We can choose to think that Milkman
26

Bakerman (above, n.14) 558.

In this respect Pilate is aligned with Demeter. For the disruptive potential of
womens lamentation throughout Greek culture see M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in
Greek Tradition (Cambridge 1974).
27

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has plunged to his death, like Icarus and Robert Smith, whose suicide
flight opened the novel, or that he has replicated the flight of his
great-grandfather Shalimar, and flown away. However our imagination completes the tale for us, two related structural qualities
are obvious: first, the story is a ring composition, coming back to
where it began with a man leaping into the air; second, the story
ends in mid-air, that is to say, it does not end.
This circularity, identified by Cedric Gael Bryant as a trope
of resistance, 28 obviates the concept of a linear conclusion. Bryant
observes that Morrison uses the circle as a unifying principle of
closure in much of her fiction, and that this circularity informs
Morrisons method of interconnecting narrative elements by reversing
causality. 29 I have already identified this cyclical temporality as
Womens Time, described by Kristeva as a specific measure that
essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple
modalities of time known through the history of civilizations . . .
cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm. 30
This brings us back to the midwife Circe, who stood at the threshold
of this part of the story, and whose name relates her to this cyclical quality. 31 In his optimistic reading of her role Page suggests
that Milkman reaches the womb of his family (the cave) by embracing the terrifying but guiding Circe who models Milkmans quest
by fusing Western and African-American cultural traditions, life
and death, and present and past. 32 From Pages critical perspective Milkman is able to fuse and integrate his fragmented family,
his position in the diaspora and the two cultural traditions, African and European, which are in harmony at the end of the tale.
But from the perspective of a feminist classicist, the synthesis is
perhaps not so well knit. There are significant fissures in the text
which remain unresolved at its conclusion, fissures which are opened
by Circe, who signifies the mythic narrative of the heros quest,
but who simultaneously deconstructs it. On one level of meaning,
as the careful citations of the sojourn on Aeaea make clear, Circe
28
C. G. Bryant, Every Goodbye Aint Gone: The Semiotics of Death, Mourning, and Closural Practice in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, MELUS 24 (1999) 98.
29
Bryant (above, n.28) 99.
30
Kristeva (above, n.22) 445.
31
The usual etymology of her name associates her with the hawk or falcon,
kirkos. Douglas Frame (The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic [New Haven and
London, 1978] 50), however, makes the very appealing suggestion that associates her
name with the Greek word for ring, krikos, which is also attested as kirkos. Frame
notes that Hesiod and other authors situate Circe in the west (Theog. 744), but Odysseus
and his crew meet her in the east after their visit to the Underworld (Od. 12.14). As
a child of Helios, she is associated with the sun, and her role in the Odyssey is both
to usher the hero into the underworld and to receive him back again from it. When
Odysseus and his men return to life and light, she is naturally equated with the
dawn. The complement to this would be that she is equated with sunset when Odysseus
and his companions venture into death and darkness (48).
32
Page (above, n.10) 100.

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functions as she does in the Odyssey: she is an initiatrix who sets

the hero on his path to symbolic rebirthbut not death, for he is
already dead. Her name alone, singular in its Homeric allusion,
denotes the male heroic pattern with its linear androcentric emphasis. Yet because she has existed in other narratives, including
epics, poetry, and novels, she also represents a never-ending cycle
of stories. Within the compass of the novel Circe is linked with
other female voices who convey Milkmans history: Pilate who sings
the Song of Solomon and recounts her family history, and Susan
Byrd who completes the tale. Circes position in this respect is
dually coded. Her name denotes the androcentric myth, yet she is
an agent who allows the hero to seek for something more than
his masculine identity, his place in the parade of heroes who make
the necessary trip to the Underworld with the help of female guardians.
This dualism is connoted in part by her gorgeous voice, the voice
of a sexy young woman. As narrator, Odysseus mentions Circes
voice several times; she sings in a sweet or clear voice as she
goes about her weaving (Od. 10.221 and 254). Correspondingly,
Morrisons Circe is possessed of a strong young cultivated voice
(242), the mellifluent voice of a twenty year old girl (240). In
the Homeric context female voices denote danger; the Sirens are
the most obvious example of this. 33 But in a novel that reverberates with the voices of women, Circes voice has a different timbre.
One way of accounting for the discrepancy between her corpselike appearance and youthful tones might be that her seductive voice
betokens a new story enclosed within an ancient tradition.
Circes activities in the Butler mansion contribute to the sense
that the old must be disassembled before the new can take its place.
It had been her job to clean and maintain the opulent household
with its priceless tapestries and imported marble. Now that the family
is extinct, and she alone survives, her self-appointed task has been
to dismantle and tear apart the edifice room by room. This
deconstruction of the masters house is a fitting symbol for Circes
function in the story. Her name suggests that she will maintain
the master narrative, and to a certain extent she does, but she also
disrupts that narrative, which is replaced by deconstructive reading of a literary edifice, the heros quest.
Wilfrid Laurier University
Classical World 99.4 (2006)

JUDITH FLETCHER
[email protected]

33
For further discussion on the baneful effects of womens voices in the Odyssey, see V. Wohl, Standing by the Stathmos: The Creation of Sexual Ideology in the
Odyssey, Arethusa 26 (1993) 1950.

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