In the process it reveals the mixture of anxiety and desire with which we encounter stories and the different stories we make out of their omissions and absences. The book shuns the temptation to trudge through variations on a theme or impose false teleologies and avoids, above all, any attempt to close the story down by explanation or interpretation. It honours the myth’s elusiveness that lies in its recurring, and perhaps obsessive, repetition. Katherine Duncan-Jones, University of Oxford Laurie Maguire’s Helen of Troy is a book about a myth. Often silent and virtually invisible, Helen reveals herself, in Laurie Maguire’s richly original examination, as a potent and enduring figure in Western culture. In addition to the ‘Faust’ legend in its various renditions, Helen’s mysterious presence is also discovered in Victorian and Modernist fiction, as well as in contemporary poetry – above all Derek Walcott’s epic Omeros – in contemporary fiction, including graphic novels, and in film. Shakespeare, for instance, linked her closely to the morally wavering Cressida.
Yet, as Professor Maguire shows in the excellent chapter entitled Blame, Helen has often been viewed as culpable even in her passivity. And though she was celebrated for having triggered major military activity – her face launching those ‘thousand ships’, a phrase interestingly re-spun in modern times – she is herself essentially passive, a victim of rape and/or abduction. For the majority of writers, whether historical or literary, her appearance is essentially a blank, to be filled in – or not – by the imagination of aftercomers. Though she was held to be the most beautiful woman of antiquity, there is no agreement about the specific details of Helen’s beauty.
Praise for Helen of Troy In her witty, scholarly and wide-ranging study Laurie Maguire explores the deep contradictions inherent in the myth of Helen of Troy.
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