Gender Studies and H.D.'s Helen

In Greek mythology, Zeus’ daughter Helen was so beautiful that her abduction by the Trojan prince, Paris, started a war between Troy and Sparta. The myth of Helen of Troy is the subject of H.D.’s poem, “Helen.” When analyzed via the concepts of gender studies, “Helen” illustrates several ideas central to this division of literary criticism: the woman’s role as an object in the unfolding of a story, the lack of a female voice, a fear of female sexuality, and the resulting punishment and hatred of women. 

“Helen” is crafted in such a way as to point out that, although the myth cites Helen as the motivating force for the Trojan War, she is not an active participant. The action is left entirely to the male characters. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey notes the presence of “an active/passive heterosexual division of labor” in another mode of storytelling: modern film (1449).

She points out that this “split between spectacle and narrative supports the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen” (1449). Whereas the male character fills an active role in narrative, the female character is important only through the action that her presence induces, Budd Boetticher observes: 

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance. (qtd. In Mulvey 1448)