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Happily Ever After? the Odyssey

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Happily Ever After? the Odyssey Happily Ever After? The Odyssey Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation Ruby Blondell Print publication date: 2013 Print ISBN-13: 9780199731602 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2013 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199731602.001.0001 Happily Ever After? The Odyssey Ruby Blondell DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199731602.003.0004 Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines Helen of Troy in Homer’s Odyssey. Despite her redomestication after the Trojan War, the Odyssey’s Spartan scenes are replete with hints of the threat that Helen continues to pose to masculine control. She is not only unusually assertive and outspoken for a Homeric woman, but comes much closer to divinity than her counterpart in the Iliad. Among other things, she is endowed with a drug that erases negative emotions and a magical ability to mimick other women’s voices, both of which symbolize the power of her erotic beauty and especially of her voice. This supernatural dimension aligns her with "dread goddesses" like Circe and Calypso, whom the hero, Odysseus, must learn to resist in order return to his wife, the virtuous, self-controlled Penelope. Penelope is the opposite of Helen, whose marriage to Menelaus serves as a negative foil to the hero’s own. Yet even she has a beauty and manipulative skill that put her under the suspicion that hangs over all women. Keywords: beauty, “dread goddesses”, Helen of Troy, Homer, Odysseus, Odyssey, Penelope, Trojan War It makes you blind, it does you in; It makes you think you’re pretty tough; It makes you prone to crime and sin; It makes you say things off the cuff. You just get out what they put in, And they never put in enough. Love is like a bottle of gin, But a bottle of gin is not like love. Page 1 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 16 October 2019 Happily Ever After? The Odyssey —The Magnetic Fields The Helen of the Odyssey is discreetly excised from most popular retellings of this epic. The romantic imagination seems to recoil from the prospect of Helen and Menelaus living comfortably at home together in Sparta after the war. This is, however, where we find them in Odyssey book 4, in an elegant if uneasy and passionless alliance where husband and wife both fulfill their roles with due decorum but no sign of affection. We encounter Sparta through the eyes of Odysseus’s son, Telemachus. He and his companion Peisistratus, the son of Nestor, are traveling in search of Odysseus, who has been missing since the fall of Troy. They arrive at a splendid palace, radiant with the gleam of precious metals, which Telemachus, overcome with awe, likens to the palace of Zeus himself (4.39–59, 4.71–75). The narrator identifies it, however, as the house of Menelaus (4.1), eliding the fact that he obtained it only by marrying Helen. As the mistress of her husband’s household, Helen herself plays the part of the perfect royal wife, passing her time in wool working and acting as a gracious hostess to his guests. Proper hierarchies are maintained, with the patriarch duly established at the apex. Helen orders the servants to make up beds for their visitors (4.296), and she herself (with the female servants) receives orders from Menelaus to prepare a feast for them (15.93–94). Helen’s presence at Sparta betokens Menelaus’s victory in the male struggle to possess her, as an object to be regained regardless of her own desires. Though (p.74) the Odyssey does not do Helen the indignity of portraying her as an overtly contested object, she takes her place, with her beautiful hair and cheeks (15.58, 15.123), among her husband’s countless beautiful possessions (cf. 15.75– 76, 15.114), many of them gathered, like her, on the expedition to Troy. Wealth accumulation seems to be Menelaus’s speciality—the one skill at which he surpasses other heroes. According to other sources, it was this that allowed him to obtain Helen in the first place (above, p. 31). The Trojan War has now reaffirmed her status as the ultimate treasure, installed at the heart of Menelaus’s opulent home. Helen acknowledges the propriety of her return to Sparta, blaming herself for her past transgression in language that evokes the Iliad. Once again she calls herself “dog-eyed” (4.145), and speaks of the remorse she felt during the war. On one occasion, she says, after Odysseus had killed many Trojans, the other Trojan women wailed shrilly, but my spirit rejoiced, since my heart had already turned toward going back home, and I lamented the madness (atē) that Aphrodite gave me, when she led me there, away from my dear fatherland, abandoning my daughter, my bedroom and my husband, a man by no means lacking in either wits or beauty. Page 2 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 16 October 2019 Happily Ever After? The Odyssey (4.259–64) These words align Helen, as in the Iliad, with the sympathies and interests of her male audience, and distance her—this time explicitly—from the other women at Troy. She goes further than in the Iliad, however, claiming positive joy at the slaughter of Trojans (in stark contrast with the grief of the other Trojan women) and an active desire to return home. She betrays no hint of wrestling with her desire for Paris, and her polite praise of Menelaus adds a new dimension to her expressed preference for him in the wartime epic. This self-serving speech functions, like her regrets in the Iliad, to deflect male anger by presenting the persona of a good because repentant woman. It implies not only that she is back in her proper place, but that she embraces her redomestication. Her impulse to break the bounds of normative domesticity—the impulse that defines her essence as a mythic character—appears to have been extinguished. Decorous and resplendent as it is, however, the house of Menelaus is shadowed by Helen’s transgression and its consequences. Memories of the war suffuse its occupants with melancholy, reminding us of the price that was paid to regain her. The Odyssey’s Spartan scenes are, moreover, replete with hints of her extraordinary nature, hints suggesting the reasons why Menelaus was willing to pay such a price, the folly of doing so, and the threat she continues to pose to masculine control. (p.75) Marriage—the problem embodied in Helen’s very person—is thematized strikingly at the outset of Telemachus’s sojourn in Sparta. When he arrives, a double wedding is in progress. One couple consists of Achilles’ son (so identified) and Hermione, the daughter of Helen and Menelaus, who is endowed with “the beauty of golden Aphrodite” (4.14). The second bridegroom is Menelaus’s illegitimate son, Megapenthes, who is marrying a local Spartan girl. The first couple evokes Achilles’ shadowy relationship with Helen, here consummated in the next generation. As for Hermione, her likeness to Aphrodite is an obvious reminder of her mother, and the poet goes out of his way to note that she is Helen’s only child. It is even hinted that his wife’s failure to produce a son may be the reason Menelaus conceived Megapenthes with a slave woman (4.10–14)—unless it was simply because of her absence at Troy. Either way, Megapenthes’ conspicuous role in Menelaus’s ménage underlines the deficiencies in his marriage. An illegitimate son may be beloved, as this one clearly is, and in the absence of legitimate sons may serve as an heir. But his status is still secondary and his well-being precarious (cf. 14.200–210). Megapenthes’ name, which means “great grief,” underlines Menelaus’s most salient trait in this epic, his constant grieving, in a way that ties this sorrow to the failings—reproductive and otherwise—in his marriage to Helen. Nor is there any evidence that Megapenthes (of whom we know virtually nothing else) carried on his father’s line. He seems to have been invented specially for the Page 3 of 23 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. Subscriber: University of Washington; date: 16 October 2019 Happily Ever After? The Odyssey occasion, to create a poignant contrast with Telemachus, Odysseus’s legitimate son and heir. As Helen herself will remark, Telemachus looks exactly like his father, but has grown up deprived of him thanks to her “dog-eyed” self (4.141– 46). The Odyssey, then, like the Iliad, is predicated upon Helen and the failure of marriage that she represents, and thus upon the threat she poses to the kind of prosperous domesticity here presented for the admiration of a young and impressionable male visitor. Menelaus welcomes the visitors, and soon reduces Telemachus to tears by speaking of his grief over the war, especially the loss of Odysseus. At this moment Helen emerges from her bedroom and takes her seat among the accoutrements that mark her domestication: a golden distaff and a silver wool basket trimmed with gold (4.130–32).
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