The dramatic monologuemonotony" (15). This still air is suffocating to her; at the end of the
monologue, she complains, even as she views distant lightning, "the air /
Clings faint and motionless around me here" (22). Leighton, in one of the
rare extended discussions of this poem presently available, notes the
resemblance of this island's voluptuous stillness to the ultimately untenable
stasis sought by the speakers of Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" (1832,
revised 1842), themselves mariners seeking respite from the rigors of
Ulysses's journey in Homer's Odyssey. 32 And yet Circe herself undergoes a
daily experience of multiple transformations, wrought, in an autoerotic
fashion, by herself upon herself. Looking at her image she exclaims, "oh,
lips that tempt / my very self to kisses" (19). Like Narcissus, she addresses
the reflection of her own "perfect lovely face" (19) in a still pool, and asks,
"should I be so your lover as I am, / drinking an exquisite joy to watch you
thus / In all a hundred changes through the day?" (19). Her most intense
pleasure is in her own diurnal transformations; in this respect she most
resembles Aurora, the goddess of the dawn in Tennyson's dramatic mono-
logue "Tithonus," who daily experiences "mystic change" (AT 55) only
gaining in beauty with every new morning.
This intense experience of self-satisfaction leads paradoxically to the sort
of self-division we remarked in Webster's "A Castaway"; addressing her
own reflection, Circe declares: "I love you for him till he comes" (19). At a
number of points in her monologue Circe refers to the man whom she
knows is destined to wash ashore, one who might drink from her cup and
stand "unchanged" (19-20). The arrival of this man (whom we know to be
Ulysses, not only through Homer but also through Tennyson's "Ulysses," a
dramatic monologue with which this poem is in implicit dialogue) may well
occur this very night. As she speaks, a storm is rising and she sees a ship,
now a "shuddering hulk" (19) in the distance, struggling vainly against it;
her monologue ends, "It were well / I bade make ready for our guests
to-night" (22). These final lines suggest further transmutations of her guests
into zoological specimens. But in pointing to the future arrival of Ulysses,
her closing remarks suggest also a kind of violent alteration to be wreaked
upon herself. Leighton writes that Circe "wants the thrill of change and
experience [of the sort enjoyed by Ulysses] for herself." 33 We might extend
this insight still further, however, in surveying the modes of change to
which Circe desires to submit herself.
In the course of her monologue, Webster's Circe articulates a longing, I
would argue, to pursue experience less like that of Ulysses than like that of
the nameless men whom she transforms into creatures only more truly
themselves. A creature of self-division, Circe idealizes the revelation of a
coherent, if abased, identity. Certainly, she defines herself in the context of
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