Of Muscles and Men

by Michael G. Cornelius

  Because mythic sources precede the Iliad, Homer can borrow from the oral tradition in ways that focus attention on his warrior-heroes. Yet Homer does more than merely borrow; he compensates for reducing Helen’s role in the plot by weaving the stories of battle with references to women experience. His story requires, for instance, the Judgment of Paris, a prior set-piece which contributes to the misjudgment of Helen, Paris, Priam, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Achilles and sets a causal chain in motion that affects thousands. So too does it require the inspiration made possible by the Muses. The emergent plot turns as well on goddesses who travel to Troy and determine events. More prosaically, Homer foregrounds the conflicts which arise around Chryseis and Briseis, the prisoners whose erotic service rewards Agamemnon and Achilles for heroism. These women are not mere tokens; they, too, impact the action, since mistreating the first leads to widespread death, and appropriating the second generates the rage that so clouds the thinking of Greek leaders. It is therefore difficult to see — amid the comings-and-goings of book one — how “the Iliad is the story of Achilleus,” as Richmond Lattimore confidently asserts or, more to the point, how its story, like narrative more generally, names men as subjects and women as both non-man and plot-space (17; de Lauretis 167). Hence readers would do well to question whether classical narrative, from its paradigmatic origins in Homer, is actually the province of men.

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  Ecphrasis and Narration by Other Means

  Helen enters book three when Iris, the herald-goddess, comes in disguise to report that Menelaus and Paris will soon fight to the death over her. At the time, she is working the loom silently, “designing into the blood-red fabric /

  The trials that the Trojans and Greeks had suffered / For her beauty under Ares’

  murderous hands” (3.128 –30). When Iris adds that the war may soon end, Helen dresses and leaves the room crying in quiet anticipation. Unlike King Priam, who cannot bear to watch his son fight Menelaus, Helen goes to the Scaean gate to see the combat. As she arrives, the Trojan elders speak warily of her almost inhuman desirability: “Whatever she is let her go back with the ships / And spare us and our children a generation of pain” (3.167–68). Homer doesn’t say if Helen overhears, focusing instead on her confession to Priam: Death should have been a sweeter evil to me

  Than following your son here, leaving my home,

  My marriage, my friends, my precious daughter,

  That lovely time in my life. None of it was to be,

  And lamenting has been my slow death [3.182–86].

  Decrying her decision to journey with Paris, Helen uses the first-person pronoun seven times in five lines, a fact which does not dispose readers in her favor. Once atop the western wall, Helen answers Priam’s questions— aiding the war effort by identifying the Greek heroes by name and quality — and calls herself a “shameless bitch” (3.190). That she ends book three in Paris’ bed speaks to how amenable she is to the power of others’ desire and plotting. Clearly, she is a narcissist-pariah whom the gods manipulated and may manipulate again.

  The Helen who weaves and the Helen who, under Iris’ influence, laments are at base similar, for each are narrators of a sort. The first Helen works the loom silently. Her account there is set against a “blood-red” background or history; together, the images represent Trojan and Greek trials and their attendant suffering. As she weaves, she signals key moments in a multi-temporal, yet unspoken, plot. Weaving in the epic has a reflexive dimension as well since it parallels Homer’s signifying practices. In other words, his text narrates Helen’s ecphrasis, which is a trope whose root terms mean “out” and “speak” and therefore signals mobility and orality. Her outspoken narration thus has the selective force of a singer transposed to women’s material culture. By extension, Helen works in two Homeric temporalities by weaving signs of heroic suffering, which she in part compelled, and by telling Priam her abject state of mind. Despite her separation from and considerable repression by others, then, Helen tells her stories. It follows that readers see weaving as recompense for her failings and language as a field of action. Plot is not just for men or heroes or even singers; as “the organizing dynamic of a specific mode of human understanding,” to borrow from Peter Brooks, its utterances and forms— however repressed —can return to serve women as well (7).

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  It would of course be a mistake to exaggerate Helen’s influence on the Iliad. She spends the epic in Troy, occupying a feminine plot-space, and waits more than she acts. Achilles, for his part, offers a variation on her example, since, by withdrawing from battle, he and his men initially reside in a less-masculine plot-space too. Together, Helen and Achilles are thus obstacles to peace as well as to narrative resolution for much of the plot. Homer fills the gap created by their absence with other warriors and battles but also with women. As the epic nears its conclusion, the Iliad again foregrounds a profound conflict — the negotiations, between Priam and Achilles, over Hector’s corpse —

  that it counterpoints to women’s actions. The concluding book shows, for instance, that Hera and Athena remain steadfast in their hatred, refusing to forgive Paris for spurning them and “honor[ing] the one who fed his fatal lust”

  (24.35). Thetis laments in advance the death of Achilles. Iris interrupts Priam’s mourning and compels him to go to Achilles and retrieve his son’s body. Hecuba sees that her husband prays properly before traveling to the enemy’s camp.

  Andromache cries for Hector, certain that Troy will fall and “All the solemn wives / And children you guarded will go off soon / In the hollow ships, and I will go with them” (24.782–84). Thus are plot resolutions— death for heroes, sexual slavery for women — announced and shown to be gendered. In the process, Homer’s heroic song shifts from the warriors to the embattled civilians, from outside on the plain of Troy to inside its walls. The latter plot-space is populated by older men, women, and children, and yet Homer insists upon its parallel resonance. Even Helen’s second, self-absorbed oration has a kind of grace as she recounts Hector’s kindness. Rage, unleashed, again vies with pathos for our attention. Thus do the gods spin the fates of humans, like so much carded wool, as Homer weaves mythic elements into a final, shared tableau.

  By ending the Iliad before the Odyssey begins, Homer emphasizes the epics’

  interdependence, since it falls to his second song to explain details unrepresented by the first. Bridging the two is a reflexive emphasis on spinning. In a remarkable metapoetic turn, Helen’s work at the loom anticipates Penelope’s focus as silent but significant weaver. For her part, Helen weaves as the Iliad more or less begins; Penelope weaves as the Odyssey more or less ends. Helen, a foreigner, fears that the Greek soldiers will storm Troy. Penelope, by contrast, is at home, surrounded by familiar objects and servants, but also repressed by circumstances. Having broached the walls of her palace, the suitors seek her hand — indeed, her kingdom — in marriage, should Odysseus not return in time. Like Helen, then, Penelope is at odds with those who share her plot-space; unlike her, she is devoted to memory, not forgetting, and her epic to “alternate story patterns,” itself an ecphrastic metaphor (Slatkin 228). She responds as Helen does, with seclusion, work, and sadness, and weaves a different object, a burial shroud, which will honor her father-in-law upon his death. Famously, Penelope weaves by day, keeping the suitors at arm’s length, and unweaves by

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  night. Her ecphrasis stalls— and thereby protects— her own marriage plot from revision by men.

  Penelope treats the burial shroud as a social responsibility, a necessary response to Laertes’ abject condition and widower status. A form of women’s work, it is also a means by which women make and sustain culture. Thus it is a mimetic object at once functional, with respect to ritual, and immanent to the text — a sign, that is, of the braided tissue of signification and reading (see, e.g., Barthes 159; Snyder 193 –95;
Filson-Rubin 151–52). Moreover, as Penelope labors, undoes her weaving, and elaborates what had been woven, she produces an object that differs from Helen’s but shares the same aesthetic practice. The imaginative substitution of Penelope for Helen, of burial shroud for story-cloth, of ecphrasis for ecphrasis, reinforces our sense that women narrate in ways that may elude men’s notice. The two faces of epic representation — that of the gods and heroes— should therefore expand to include a third: women and their signifying practices, since both comment upon and extend Homer’s Ur-narratives in space and time.

  Mobility and Genre Hybridity

  In the last sixty years, two films have helped to expand Helen’s authority beyond that accorded her by the Iliad. The first was directed by Robert Wise and shot in Italy. Dubbed into English, Helen of Troy (1956) is a CinemaScope peplum, complete with departures from Greek myth and not-quite-supernaturally attractive stars. Its women wear bullet bras under peplos; its men have glistening skin. Wise introduces Helen by placing her outside of domesticity. She is on a beach and has found Paris, who apparently escaped drowning at sea by tying himself to the mast of a ship, an invention with a clear debt to Odysseus’ fight with Poseidon. From the first, Wise’s Helen is unapologetically mobile, which may well be the film’s signature innovation. She is free to rescue Paris from his immobility and, soon thereafter, to nurse him to health. Helen has a kind of subjective mobility as well, since she represents herself to Paris as a slave, not as someone who is married to a king, before their contentious love takes form.

  Of greater interest for my purposes is Helen of Troy (2003), a USA Network miniseries, which has its own revisionist intentions. It begins with a voice-over from Menelaus, whose role inverts the Muses’ gender and implies other inversions will follow. From the first, his remarks interpolate viewers by addressing them directly: “You may have heard the story of Helen, a woman whose beauty launched a thousand ships and started the most famous war in history.” Once Helen departs, “ten thousand men, the best that the gods and dreams of glory could have fashioned ... [were] led by my brother, Agamemnon, the mightiest of the Greeks, and Achilles, who could strike down ten warriors with one blow.”

  As Helen’s witness-victim, he will tell “the real story” ( Helen).

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  The film opens with a weave of images that move forward and back in time. In the first image, Helen disrobes and walks among drunken royals before standing — in a sequence worthy of a 1980s seminar on feminist film theory —

  on a platform, alone. The kings and princes have formed a political federation to ensure that Helen’s husband is protected from the betrayals her beauty may inspire. They insist upon seeing Helen naked before she marries Menelaus to see if their decidedly homosocial alliance is needed. The opening sequence then shifts to the mini-series’ second episode. Helen has fled to Troy, and now the federation’s ships amass to revenge her infidelity — a tragedy in the making, as indicated by the ships moving across the screen from right to left. The assault on Troy’s beachhead ensues before the film cuts to Helen inside the city. A quick image of Troy’s citizens fleeing the federation’s soldiers from the angle of fate follows before we see Helen while an off-stage Priam reflects on whether to protect her and therefore fight the Greeks. Clytemnestra, wife of Agamemnon and Helen’s sister, then has two scenes. One represents a marriage proposal; the other alludes to domestic happiness with her daughter, Iphigenia, and beloved sister.

  A pattern emerges from these initial images. Director John Kent Harrison and writer Ronni Kern use the voice-over to announce crucial plot points, moving from domesticity to battle and back. Like Homer, they rely on our knowledge of mythology to limit their exposition. In the process, Harrison ties words in the voice-over to the image of those characters and events. Thus, we hear and see Helen, the ships, war, the valiant struggle, the golden walls of Troy, Agamemnon, Achilles, Paris, love, and so on. The approach is like the often-scorned technique of mickeymousing song and dance movements through editing; and yet, it produces a clever weave of word and image, summary and incident, oral and visual signifier. Together, the compound signs also announce individual plot functions, including, in rapid order, reconnaissance, delivery, departure, counter-action, and wedding. Tension is thus created before the sto-ryline proper begins. Viewers soon infer that legend and the Iliad are to serve Helen and her story at least as much as history and the godlike rage of heroes.

  An insightful reworking of myth opens the film proper. Hecuba is in labor, and a very young Cassandra runs through the palace, in a deft tracking shot, shouting, “Kill him, kill him.” Her childish command is prescient, since Alexandros has not been born and thus no one knows his gender. Frightened by the vision, Cassandra declares to King Priam that “If he lives, Troy will burn”

  ( Helen). As its back story begins, then, Helen of Troy changes legend twice, since Cassandra is too young to have been made a seer by the gods and her vision appropriates a dream in which Hecuba gives birth to a firebrand that spreads flames over the city. The double revisions speak to the role of children in the mini-series. More directly, they elevate Cassandra and, by extension, such younger women as Helen and Clytemnestra over their mothers, a peplum convention. Persuaded, Priam orders his newborn, swaddled in a purple weav-

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  ing, to be thrown from the highest point on Mount Ida. But Alexandros is left to die, not killed. A shepherd finds and raises him, thereby starting the parallel editing — of Paris and Helen’s back story — that follows.

  The audience is shown the young shepherd, now in a flash-forward, years later. Tracking an errant goat, he enters a cave and meets Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. It is the Judgment of Paris repurposed. Each woman offers a bribe for his vote in the impromptu, and ill-advised, contest. Speaking last, Aphrodite holds out a golden apple and promises the world’s most beautiful woman to him if he selects her. The apple makes a portal through which he sees Helen and she, from a distance, sees him. Wordlessly, Paris chooses love over glory in battle. Helen, in equal wonder, touches his cinematic image in the puddle below her.

  Both images dissolve into a shot of Helen on horseback, which introduces the motif that enables the Trojan defeat. A joyful and accomplished rider, she has left the city’s walls and its domestic constraints. Her relationship with the horse is both sensitive and mutual. Indeed, it calls diegetically to her three times as she walks to a bluff-edge alone and looks at a train of men coming to see her family. The camera, conventionally enough, captures King Atreus and princes Agamemnon and Menelaus in an over-the-shoulder, high-angle establishing shot. But, as Helen watches, it changes to her point of view. By allying Helen with the cinematic apparatus, Harrison increases her authority and signals her agency. From the first, then, she is less an object of representation and more its subject. It follows that we see what Helen selects for us to see, and even her reactions, shown in shot/reverse shot, are thoughtful. Pollux, the heir to the throne, arrives to admonish her, saying, “You know you can’t go outside of the city walls. Father is furious.” Apparently, Helen disobeys as she sees fit —

  and often. “Come on,” Pollux orders. “Let’s get you back and dressed.... You can’t go to a wedding looking like that” ( Helen).

  At this point, Helen is not orea Eleni but an older girl. Tall, gangly, lacking screen make-up, she is energetically curious, not conventionally feminine.

  Information about royals coming from Mycenae interests her more than her sister’s marriage proposal and wedding. Classicists expecting Helen to be stately and ethereal encounter, instead, a spirited and rambunctious adolescent (see, e.g., Roisman 144). Pollux, for his part, would school her in femininity so that she is proper, a goal that shades off into propriety and property. Despite his injunctions, Helen arrives late to the formal greeting with King Atreus, leaving Tyndareus— who has no presence in the Iliad— to introduce only his “most beautiful and obedient” daugh
ter. As Agamemnon tells Clytemnestra that he will take her for his wife, Helen interrupts the proposal and captivates the princes. Tyndareus would have her go to her room and be properly (re)dressed, but the princes intervene. Unhappily, he introduces her as “my youngest, still a child — an untamed and disrespectful child” ( Helen). The contrast between Helen and Homer’s narcissist, Helen and Clytemnestra, is pointed.

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  In Helen of Troy we meet a free spirit who borrows actions from the domain of the masculine and repurposes them; thus her mobility, not immobility, is often at issue. Harrison’s camera obediently follows as Helen walks, rides, looks, strides the palace’s halls, and sails the Aegean. It will fall to Pollux to tell her what she does not know: “Your beauty, your spirit, it makes men weak” ( Helen).

  Spiritedly, it will fall to Helen to tell him what only Paris may sense: she has had a vision and is uninterested in princes who visit and proposals and marriages because, defying tradition, she has made her marriage-choice.

  That future is delayed when Theseus, the king of Athens, enters the palace and kidnaps her. Kidnapping is narrative sleight-of-hand, at once a complication and form of misdirection. Common in classical warfare, as the examples of Chryseis and Briseis suggest, it removes Helen from her parent’s care —

  putting her into the masculine world — even as it infantilizes her. A foreigner, Helen thus washes up onto new shores, where she comes to love her captor, even offering herself to him before he is ready to love her. The rapid succession of departure and arrival emphasizes Helen’s unfeminine mobility; enacting her desire for Theseus extends mobility, as an organizing trope, to eros. In the process, the miniseries spans past and present, weaving Helen’s story into a modern genre, the sword and sandal film, as Theseus kills four Trojans during the kidnapping and, in turn, is mortally wounded when Pollux arrives to rescue Helen. She does not seek rescue — itself a re-gendering — and is horrified as Theseus kills Pollux and thus denies her a brother and Tyndareus an heir.