Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood. By LAURIE MAGUIRE. Chichester and
Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xviii + 258. Paper, $35.00. ISBN
978–1–4051–2635–9.
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CJ Online 2010.02.02
Laurie Maguire’s (M.) Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood was not the
book I expected. As someone interested in the appearance of classics in
film, I was misled by M.’s title, thinking that the focus of this book
would be how Hollywood has transformed antiquity’s Helen for the big
screen. While M. does take filmic versions of Helen into consideration,
they receive little sustained treatment and make up only a small part of
her analysis, which M. more accurately describes in the first sentence of
her preface as a “literary biography.”
That said, M. generally succeeds in her aim of presenting a thorough
exploration of Helen’s “literary afterlife” (p. ix) in English
language sources (with the exceptions of attention to German sources in her
treatment of the Faust tradition, and a neglect of American poetry in
general). I note for CJ’s readership, however, that M., who is professor
of English at the University of Oxford, approaches her topic securely from
the perspective of her own discipline. Although in the course of her
extensive research she has consulted a handful of classicists, the majority
of experts whose help she acknowledges (p. xii) are medievalists,
Renaissance specialists and Shakespeare scholars housed in departments of
English. M. also relies on English translations of Greek and Latin texts,
although she seems to have done so in a responsible way. In addition,
M.’s statement that her narratological approach “avoids … the
eclecticism common to most studies of Helen to date which tend to mix
archaeology, history, literature, and mythology without any sense that they
are separate disciplines” (p. x) betrays an important bias, as the
mixture she disdains is one way of describing the field of classics itself.
I would argue that the multi-disciplinary approach she refers to is an
equally valid way of examining a figure like Helen: M.’s dismissal
ignores the fact that those of us who study the ancient world may have
different objectives that require more comprehensive methodologies.
Fortunately, this bias does not detract from the overall value of M.’s
study, which for the most part achieves its particular aims effectively.
Indeed, one advantage of M.’s approach is that she views Helen as a
character who persists through time rather than as a figure from antiquity
whom subsequent authors have appropriated, as many classicists—myself
included—are prone to do. This enables M. to pinpoint essential truths
about the Helen archetype that are easily missed if one views the
Greco-Roman character as the “real” Helen and later manifestations as
derivative. For example, by using works from the Iliad to Wolfgang
Petersen’s Troy to show that Helen is “systematically linguistically
suppressed” (p. 14) from Helen narratives, Maguire successfully
demonstrates that, rather than being a mere byproduct of a plot that
centers on abduction, the presentation of Helen as “both absent and
absence itself” (p. 13) is fundamental to a complete understanding of her
character.
M.’s survey is impressively broad in scope, including depictions of Helen
in epic, drama, poetry, opera, novels and film, and covering sources from
Homeric times through 2006. Rather than using the chronological approach
her title implies, M. approaches her subject thematically. In the
introduction, where Helen’s life story is presented sequentially, this
disregard of chronology is, in my opinion, ill-advised: the effect of
drawing not only on ancient texts—themselves often varied and
contradictory—but also from sources across the centuries is a bit
dizzying. While M.’s freedom from classical bias may count as an asset
elsewhere, here she might have done better to anchor her analysis by
presenting Helen’s story as it stood in its original cultural milieu,
particularly as she seems to make no assumptions about her audience’s
familiarity with either the events of the Trojan War or Greek mythology in
general. As it stands, this overview of Helen’s life is at times both
sprawling and confusing.
On the other hand, M.’s thematic approach works well in the main
chapters, and is indeed essential to the book’s greatest strength: M.’s
ability to see continuities in the presentation of Helen across time and to
tease out broader meanings. As a result, her analyses of ancient and modern
sources become mutually enlightening. M. does this most successfully in
Chapters 1 (“Narrating Myth”) and 2 (“Beauty”), and in the earlier
parts of Chapters 3 (“Abducting Helen”) and 4 (“Blame”), where she
methodically examines elements crucial to Helen-narratives. M. has much to
say on such topics as the role of absence in Helen’s story and the
“textual shudder” her presence provokes; the function of mythic themes
in Helen narratives; the problems associated with Helen’s beauty, both in
terms of representation and in the issues it raises when she interacts with
other characters; the nature of beauty and its relationship to nostalgia;
the theme of abduction; and competing views on the subject of Helen’s
responsibility. Scholars from many disciplines will be interested in M.’s
insights and observations on these and related subjects.
M. seems less concerned, however, with offering the sort of broad analysis
that leads to such insights as the book progresses. In most of the later
sections of Chapters 3 and 4 and throughout Chapter 6 (“Parodying
Helen”), rather than identifying recurring issues by examining continuity
and difference in narrative treatments of Helen, M.’s exploration of
texts in which Helen figures is largely reduced to a series of summaries,
and the analysis she does provide is applicable chiefly to individual
texts. While I can see valid uses for such a survey, in sections focusing
on individual texts I was generally left wanting the sort of
contextualization and analysis of larger trends that M. presented so well
in the earlier parts of the book. And while this shortcoming might have
been offset by a thorough conclusion that brought these texts together and
posited some broader significance, M. instead includes a short and
unsatisfying conclusion at the end of Chapter 6. In addition, Chapter 5
(“Helen and the Faust Tradition”), seems anomalous: while M. does
consider the role of Helen here, the chapter is far more about the Faust
tradition itself than about how the depiction of Helen in these narratives
fits into the larger picture of Helen as a phenomenon.
M.’s research has been thorough and meticulous, including everything from
the Homeric epics to texts both ancient and modern that have been largely
forgotten. Although she is generally conscientious about identifying her
sources, M. occasionally gives a less familiar detail without indicating
its source, especially in her introduction. At other times, she looks to
less prominent texts while downplaying more canonical ones: in the
introduction, for example, she exhibits a prediliction for Dictys of Crete,
while making a seemingly conscious attempt to de-emphasize Homer’s
accounts. In the analytical portions of her book, I also found the lack of
sustained attention to the Odyssey disappointing, especially since the
interchange of tales between Helen and Menelaus in Book 4 has much to say
about the subject of blame in particular. In these chapters (particularly
1, 3 and 4), however, M. does wisely turn first to the Iliad, using it
(sometimes along with other ancient texts) as a springboard to launch her
discussion.
Occasionally, M.’s generally admirable tendency toward thoroughness leads
her to present tangential information in an unnecessarily sustained way, so
that material seems forced in for the sake of inclusiveness at the expense
of focus and coherence. Thus in Chapter 3 M.’s discussion of changing
rape law in the late 16th century is far more detailed than is necessary to
illustrate her point that the use of the term raptus has made it
historically difficult to differentiate rape or abduction from adultery
(pp. 100–2). So too, an exploration of precisely who Jane Stanley was
adds little to the analysis of her A Daughter of the Gods (pp. 193–4),
making M.’s discussion more about this text than about her ostensible
subject, Helen of Troy. While interesting independently, these digressions
distract from M.’s larger purpose and from what momentum she has achieved
in her analysis, a fault she seems to recognize when she points out these
very examples and attempts to rationalize their inclusion in her preface
(pp. x–xi).
It seems fair to acknowledge that some of these criticisms stem from where
my own interests in Helen lie. And M.’s book is in any case an impressive
achievement that should prove valuable to any scholar looking at the
character of Helen or Helen-narratives, no matter what their discipline. M.
has marshaled an impressive array of sources on Helen and provided valuable
summaries and commentaries on most of them, and the connections she draws
and the insights she offers are often informative and enlightening. This
book is thus an important contribution to the continuing conversation about
just what has made Helen such an intriguing and enduring character across
the millennia.
KIRSTEN DAY
Augustana College
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