In The New York Times review of The Circle, the review writer declares that “Mae, then, is not a victim but a dull villain.” This is referring to the development of Mae’s character throughout the novel. The reader is guided through the novel following Mae’s development at The Circle. Throughout her time at The Circle Mae begins to change from a victim of her environment to a villain encouraging it.

In the beginning of the novel, you are introduced to Mae as she is introduced into The Circle due to her new job there. The reader tends to see The Circle as euphorically as Mae does but as Mae begins to fall more in love with the company, the reader sees what is truly occurring. The reader begins seeing Mae as a victim of her environment as she is brainwashed into becoming another member contributing to The Circle.

At first the Circle has to force Mae to use her newly activated social media. They tell her that she must contribute to the Circle by sharing as much information as she can. Like most people, Mae is not used to constantly updating her social media accounts. What The Circle did to encourage people to participate on social media was create a ranking system that encourages its employees to move up in “PartiRank” by constantly staying up to date on all social media accounts. When she begins working her ranking is 10,328 but, over the course of the novel, she rises in rank as she becomes more sucked into the Circle. Her rank at one point even reaches the top ten of PartiRank with her having close to 2.1 million followers

As Mae becomes more and more involved she becomes blind to what could be perceived as right and wrong. She is sold on all the benefits the Circle’s inventions have to offer without seeing the potential disadvantages that the inventions could have on the population as a whole. The best example of Mae’s change from victim to villain comes after the death of Mercer.

A new technology she created, SoulSearch, crowdsources the finding of criminals by sending a picture of them to everyone who follows the Circle. When she shows an example of this, the criminal is found in a little bit over 10 minutes. When asked to do another example she decides to look for her ex-boyfriend, Mercer. He is located shortly after but gets in his truck in hopes of evading the people pursuing him.

This leads to Mae sending drones after him in hopes of talking to him. While talking to him, more people join in talking to him and he drives himself off of a bridge. When Ty warns Mae of the dangers of Completion, she ignores him. He sees what happens to Mercer and warns her that she has the power to stop more people like Mercer from dying. She decides to turn Ty in and warn of his intentions to stop Completion. At this point she is making the decision to continue the actions that killed Mercer changing the perspective of her as a victim to a villain.