Solving the Problem of Helen: Carol Ann Duffy's 'Feminine Gospels' (2002)

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The Actors of Dionysus asked me to participate in their Twitter series, with a straightforward pitch: read and record a piece of classics or classics-related literature that you think should be out there. These could be your own translations, your favourite translations, or a reception. 


Actually, it was not straightforward AT ALL, since I couldn’t for the life of me decide what to pick. 


I chose to share two of my great literary loves: Carol Ann Duffy and Helen (of Troy/Sparta). 





 I actually ended up having a blast recording this, and everyone was so lovely about it online that I decided to round off my ‘Solving the Problem of Helen’ series (for now, at least!) with a post about Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Beautiful’. As I have mentioned before, Helen is a bit confounding for contemporary feminist myth writers. None of the options for Helen 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. 

The questions that always recur are: 


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? 


Previously, I have discussed Margaret George’s Helen of Troy (2006) –– which is distinctive in its adaptive choice to portray Helen and Paris' relationship as a completely consensual romance –– and Claire Heywood's Daughters of Sparta (2021), a novel that gives us everything we didn’t know we wanted from a Helen adaptation: it gives us sisterhood, in that it is a retelling specifically focused on the relationship between Helen and Clytemnestra. 





After a brief digression into Clytemnestra’s reputation, I am back to discuss in more detail a claim that I made way back in 2019: that poetry is a form that affords Helen a better opportunity to be adapted, compared to novels. 


I’m not so sure I agree with that claim wholeheartedly any more, especially considering the novels mentioned within this series. Nevertheless, I have found in my research that modern poetry affords Helen an opportunity to be adapted by portraying her story without the narrative demand for comprehensiveness and realism –– poetry is a form that can empathetically explore Helen’s situation without necessarily engaging with the complex questions of Helen’s blame.


Which brings us to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Beautiful’, in the anthology Feminine Gospels (2002). 





Feminine Gospels holds a special place in my heart. “But Shelby!” I hear you cry. “Surely The World’s Wife (1999) is more up your street, what with it providing voices to either well-known or fictional female counterparts to famous men.” 


You’re right, I do love The World’s Wife, and it was my first introduction to Duffy in A-Level English Literature, which really started me down the path I’m on now… but I was also lucky enough to write the Literary Encyclopaedia entry on the Feminine Gospels. In it, I wrote: 


“Feminine Gospels (2002) is Carol Ann Duffy’s seventh collection of poetry. The anthology is often overlooked in favour of its predecessor, The World’s Wife (1999), described as the watershed of her career (Forbes 2002), but Feminine Gospels is an important part of Duffy’s literary corpus.”


“The collection encapsulates many of the key concerns that are recurrent throughout [Duffy’s] works, including: ventriloquistic command of voice; women’s experiences; contemporary culture; the contrast between the mythical/fantastic and the everyday. 


Moreover, these themes may be said to be exaggerated in the anthology; the title plays upon the idea of “the gospel truth” and in the collection absolute or universal truths become subjective and personal, stretched and subverted: tall tales. […] The eponymous gospels are untrue truths, fictionalised facts, exaggerated accuracies. In particular, universal truths of feminine experience are portrayed, parodied, and problematised in the anthology.”

(Judge 2021) 


While The World’s Wife is “preoccupied with the age-old war of the sexes and the ways masculinity has established itself as the norm, Feminine Gospels turns its attention to the relationship between women” (Michelis 2005).


Now, let’s get to the poem in question. 

(Read the poem HERE) 


“Beautiful” (Duffy 2002: 8-14) traces the legends of women who were deemed to be beautiful by their patriarchal society, specifically Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana. In each of the four sections of the poem, Duffy begins by outlining the mythos surrounding their iconic beauty and ends with their downfall. 


Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra (1963)

Cleopatra’s section begins “She never aged. / She sashayed up the river / in a golden barge”, and ends “her stories blethering / on his lips: of armies changing sides, / of cities lost forever in the sea, of snakes” (l.ii-1-3; l.ii-57-59); Marilyn’s begins with “The camera loved her, close-up, back-lit”, and ends with the voyeuristic image of the coroner noticing “the dark roots / of her pubic hair” (l.iii-1; iii-35-6). 



Marilyn Monroe


The final section, on Diana, marks a breakdown in the poem, as it starts with her “Dead”, because that is when she was truly idealised, whereas in life she was abused by the paparazzi and royal family to make her “Act like a fucking princess” (l.iv-21). 


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The first figure that Duffy presents in this poem, though, is the figure that has been upheld as the standard of beauty for nearly 30 millennia: Helen of Troy. This is the section that I read for Actors of Dionysus. 


Helen is described as “divinely fair, a pearl, drop-dead / gorgeous, beautiful, a peach, / a child of grace, a stunner”, (l.i-3-5) in which the list form is deployed to show the many legends surrounding her, and the different phrasings suggest a cacophony of voices describing her. This is echoed at the end of the section, where “Some said […] Some said […] Some swore […] Some vowed” (l.i-49-62) is repeated to allude to the oral history of myths in general, the polyphony of myths surrounding Helen in particular, and the dangers of rumours that are circulated about “beautiful” women. Furthermore, the increasingly sinister nature of the rumours – from being “smuggled / on a boat dressed as a boy” (l.i-58-9) to being hanged or metamorphosed into a bird and forever caged – form a critique of the toxic publicity to which Helen, here the archetype of beautiful celebrities, is subjected.

(Judge 2021) 


Overall, poetry lends itself well to dealing with Helen’s legacy, because it does not have to concern itself with novelistic devices such as characterisation, motivation, or plot, allowing it to focus instead on asking questions about her relation to and complicity with the discourses of women’s oppression. 


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I just wanted to add that I was so honoured to be asked by Actors of Dionysus to participate in their #DailyDose series: I can’t believe I am in such great company in the series. I urge you to check out their Twitter & their website, where their current project is on Black Voices in Myth! 


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Okay okay… I know why you’ve read this far. As promised, since my Actors of Dionysus video amassed 2,000 views (!!!), see below for the outtakes. For the longer videos, I recommend skipping to the end to hear the fuck-ups. I hope you like “UGHs” and self loathing. 




That one's my favourite... "DEFINELY?!"

















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