How Do You Solve a Problem Like Helen?

So here we are again: You, me, and a mythical woman makes three. In my last blog post, I wrote about Briseis, and promised you more insight into the women who form my first chapter: Penelope, Briseis, and Helen. Consider Penelope “pending” for the time being, and set your sights on the ever-beautiful, ever-problematic Helen. Though she is most famously known as Helen of Troy and, when referencing her early life, she is Helen of Sparta, I choose instead to just call her Helen - you know who I mean, I know who I mean, and anyway why should she be named after her father’s or husband’s land? 

'Atomic Leda' Salvador Dalí

I tend to start these blog posts with the original myths, and then analyse from there. It always feels weird and forced, and like I’m telling you all stories you already know, and that feels particularly prevalent here because Helen is such a famous figure from Greek myth (more on that later). Nevertheless, I will persist, both because I love my sense of order, and because Helen has one of the weirdest conception stories in mythology (which is saying something because, well, myths are weird). Zeus raped her mother, Leda, in the form of a swan (which is horrible and bizarre on so many levels, I know), but Leda had also had sex with her husband Tyndareus, the King of Sparta. Thus she fell pregnant with two sets of twins, one pair mortal, and one pair immortal. She gave birth to Castor, Pollux, Clytemnestra, and Helen, but there is some confusion about which ones are twins - Castor and Pollux are called the Twins, and are represented by the Gemini constellation, but in the myths it is explicit that one of them is mortal and one is immortal, so perhaps although they are siblings, they’re not twins. It is clear, though, that Clytemnestra is mortal, and Helen is immortal. This became inescapably evident when Helen was hatched out of a swan egg that Leda … birthed? laid? 

Then, Theseus and his pal decide that because they are demigods, they should marry daughters of Zeus. So his friend goes to abduct Persephone from Hades, and gets stuck there forever, and Theseus sets his sights on Helen. Does it matter that she's approximately 7-10 years old? Nope, but he leaves her with his mother Aethra, who becomes her most trusted maid, until she is old enough. It’s all very disgusting. Anyway, a couple of years later, her brothers come and rescue her, so no harm no foul I guess. 

Then, Helen approaches marriageable age… probably about 15, Ancient Greece was gross. Tyndareus was anxious because so many great suitors arrived to try to win her, including the two sons of Atreus: Agamemnon and Menelaus. Odysseus is there but, true to form, he has his eye on a different prize to Agamemnon and Menelaus. He wants to marry Penelope, so he offers Tyndareus an idea in exchange for his chosen bride - Helen chooses her husband from the suitors, and they all swear an oath that they will defend the chosen husband against any attacks he would surely attract with such a coveted possession… hmm. Well, Helen chooses Menelaus, they all swear an oath, and they all live happily ever after. 

Until one day, Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena ask a lowly herdsman called Paris to judge who is the prettiest. They all try to bribe him, Hera with riches, Athena with war valour, and Aphrodite with love, and he chooses Aphrodite. She guides him to Troy, where it transpires that he’s the lost prince, who was cast out as a baby because he was predicted to be the downfall of Troy … I hope that soothsayer got a pay rise or something, but that’s really not the point here. To get him acclimated to royal life, he goes with his brother Hector (who deserves so much better than the shitty hand he is dealt and I could rant about this for hours but I will stop for now) to see King Menelaus to feast and talk about trade or something equally political and boring. Paris leaves with a little bit more than the usual gifts from hosts - Queen Helen is stowed away on the ship. Agamemnon and Menelaus call to action all of the ex-suitors of Helen, who are bound by oaths and persuaded with promises of glory and riches, and they sail to Troy. And thus begins the Trojan War. 

'Helen of Troy' Frederick Sandys

Now, we’re getting to the real problem with Helen: Did she consent to go with Paris? Did she love him? Or, did she love Menelaus, and she was stolen by the Trojan prince? Or, did she not love either of them, and she made the choice because of a desire for … action, adventure, variety, notoriety &c.? Did she have any power to make the decision at all, or had she always just been the property of the men around her? 

And here’s where the feminist perspective comes in because, honestly, none of these options are particularly empowering. Either she’s a master manipulator, in which women are vilified and blamed for men’s actions and she is a heartless succubus, or she's a powerless victim with no agency, blamed for a war which she played no active role in. 

Perhaps this is why she isn’t a primary focus for any of the authors I’m researching. You can’t tell the story of the Trojan War without Helen, of course, but the authors don’t really reimagine, reinvent, and excavate her character in the same way that they do female figures such as Briseis and Penelope. They seem to use her to further accentuate the female figures that they are focussing on:

• In Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, Briseis compares her situation to Helen’s, because Helen’s ‘fate was decided without her knowledge’ (Barker 2018: 131) when Paris and Menelaus duelled for her, and Briseis ‘sat there like a tethered goat, knowing my fate was being decided on the other side of that door.’ (Ibid., 150) when Agamemnon and Achilles both fight to claim her after Chryseis leaves.

• In The Penelopiad, Helen is a bully and oppressor of Penelope. This is particularly prevalent in the chapter title ‘Helen Ruins My Life’ (Atwood 2005: xi), which Penelope intends to show how she has been negatively affected by Helen’s actions, but instead it shows the childish, whiny characterisation of Penelope. Though, I do enjoy when Penelope calls her cousin a ‘septic bitch’ (Ibid., 131). 

So none of my novels do a particularly good job of excavating Helen’s character. Luckily, because she's such a famous character, there are other literary instances where Helen is reimagined in feminist contexts. For instance, I think it’s particularly interesting that in her novel, Atwood portrays Helen as a ‘septic bitch’, but in her poem Helen of Troy does Countertop Dancing, Helen is reimagined as a stripper, who monetises her exploitation: ‘Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way / you cut it, but I've a choice / of how, and I'll take the money.’ (Atwood 1995: l.17-19). As a countertop dancer, Helen has more body autonomy, since she can demand that the men not touch her, with the badass line ‘Touch me and you'll burn.’ (Ibid., l.84), unlike in the Ancient Greek context where she was a commodity to be taken by her husband, stolen by Paris, and won back. 

This leads me to think that poetry is a form which affords Helen an opportunity to be adapted, which she is denied in the novels. This is supported by Carol Ann Duffy’s poem Beautiful, which traces the oppressions and downfalls of women who were deemed to be beautiful by their patriarchal society, specifically Helen, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. In each of the four sections of the poem, Duffy begins by outlining their iconic beauty and ends with their downfall. I promise that this poem is really important when thinking about modern adaptations of Helen, and that it’s a powerful critique of the toxic publicity that Helen, here a symbol of beautiful celebrities alongside the aforementioned figures, is subjected to. It’s definitely not that I bloody love Duffy and jump on any excuse to talk about her, and I’m definitely not trying to draw a link between my undergraduate dissertation on Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry and contemporary gender politics and my current research. Definitely not. 

You might remember me mentioning the playwright Ellen McLaughlin in my blog post Let’s Talk About ‘Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby!’ - she adapted Euripides’ Helen and does something really interesting with it. McLaughlin uses anachronisms to draw parallels between Helen’s experiences and women’s oppressions because of their looks throughout history. She sets it in a colonial Victorian hotel and there is dialogue about television, movies, and magazines, but the most interesting anachronism is the conversation between Helen and Io. Io was raped by Zeus and turned into a cow by Hera, and her myth is one of the earliest from the Golden Age, while Helen’s story is late Bronze Age. McLaughlin is aware of the power of anachronisms, citing her choice to include the conversation between Helen and Io because ‘Io is one of the most ancient examples of the moral girl raped by Zeus. […] I liked the notion of these two icons of exceptional female fate conversing with each other.’ (Ibid., 126), and she views them as ‘bookends’, the beginning and end of women being punished for their beauty in Greek myth (Ibid., 127). Most notably, McLaughlin asserts that her characterisation of Helen is ‘an odd conflation of every modern notion of beauty bound to celebrity from Jackie through Marilyn to Diana, as much as she is the quintessential Helen of myth.’ (Ibid., 124), which is an interesting consistency with Duffy’s poetic adaptation of Helen. Though McLaughlin refers to Jackie Kennedy while Duffy refers to Cleopatra, they both identify Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana as modern women who had identifiable fates with Helen. Therefore, although the novels have apparent difficulties adapting Helen, she remains an important woman to adapt, as her myth has been echoed throughout history. 

Ultimately, I think Helen’s mythology is in some ways too big to adapt. Did she love Paris? Did she choose to go to Troy? Did she want the war? What side did she want to win? Did she want to return to Menelaus, Sparta, and her daughter Hermione? Did she have any autonomy? These are some of the many questions that adapting authors would have to consider before adapting Helen. Perhaps poetry doesn’t require so much detail, and maybe drama works better with this inscrutability. Or, maybe, feminism still has some ways to go when it comes to dealing with beauty. Whatever the causes, it’s clear that Helen is a Problem™, but a fun one at that. 

Cover Art: 'Helen of Troy' by Fortunino Matania