John Carroll University Carroll Collected Senior Honors Projects Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects Spring 2013 A Shade of Beauty Ambiguity in Jean Giraudoux's Helen Gabrielle Ruchames John Carroll University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/honorspapers Recommended Citation Ruchames, Gabrielle, "A Shade of Beauty Ambiguity in Jean Giraudoux's Helen" (2013). Senior Honors Projects. 12. http://collected.jcu.edu/honorspapers/12 This Honors Paper/Project is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Essays, and Senior Honors Projects at Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A Shade of Beauty Ambiguity in Jean Giraudoux's Helen By Gabrielle E. Ruchames Senior Honors Project Spring, 2013 Ruchames 1 I. Helen: Vision of Beauty Portrayed as victim, whore, and above all, the supreme incarnation of beauty, Helen's story has been told and retold throughout the ages in various forms. Homer's Iliad relates the most famous account of the Trojan War, which she is alleged to have begun. Gorgias wrote a rhetorical defense of Helen, Euripides used her as the subject of one of his tragedies, and Ovid composed a pair of fictional love letters between Paris and Helen. Moderns continued to use her in such works as Offenbach's operetta, La Belle Hélène, Pierre de Ronsard's Sonnets à la Belle Hélène, and paintings by Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, among others. After so many iterations, though, later writers must have asked themselves the question Goethe poses in the prelude to Faust: "Wie machen wir's, daß alles frisch und neu\ Und mit Bedeutung auch gefällig sei?”1 (ll.