It Takes a Woman to Show the Woman’s Point of View—It Takes Everyone to Listen

             Helen Doolittle made no mistake when she picked out Helen of Troy to vicariously vent her life through. History states that she was friends, and a patient of Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst.  History also states that she was a bisexual in a man’s world that held little understanding or forgiveness for people who strayed not only from gender roles, but the expectations of sexuality. 

H.D., as she is commonly seen as today, has tried to cement her place in the world of modernism in the same hallowed halls as T.S. Eliot.   She was accepted, but she did not feel as if she had reached her pinnacle of expression in the fading world of modernism.  Through her final long poem, Helen in Egypt, she not only brought in the aspects of looking deeper into the art and linking it with its origins, but she added the dimension of having the readers look deeper into the text in order to look into the life of H.D. herself. Like many other works, the ‘big reveal’ is at the end of her text, under the collection of ultra-reflective stories in Eidolons, which cements the notion that Helen in the text is really a reflection of Helen in reality. 

The first lines of the poem place Helen not in troy, “Alas my brothers / Helen did not walk / upon the ramparts, / she whom you cursed / was but the phantom and the shadow thrown / of a reflection;” (Doolittle 5).  The overall plot of the book is ingenious, as Helen, who started the war with the beauty of her face, is placed in Egypt instead, so the people who are fighting the war are fighting over an illusion, which in modern feminism, could be translated into men fighting over the illusion of the male gaze.   By using the context of the actual geography of Sparta and Troy, and then looking at where Egypt is, H.D. has drawn an upside down triangle, with the pinnacle pointing down at Egypt where Helen is.  The upside down triangle has two meanings, one is an ancient depiction of the womb, symbolizing fertility and the feminine, it is called the chalice.  Another more contemporary meaning is homosexuality, as many people have thought that the Nazi’s would denote the upside down black triangle for unsociable types, which might have included lesbians or homosexuals. Lesbians today use a black or pink inverted triangle as a symbol.  Helen being located at the tip of that triangle is not only at the farthest point from Sparta and Troy, but is also at the focal point of femininity.  If this symbol is also a gay symbol, by having men fighting each other over her, and her being at the feminine point on the triangle, then her sexuality might also be on display. 

               The title, and the first lines of the poem have painted a scene where Helen can be very free in some ways. The narrative in the play is deceptive.  There are italicized paragraphs before each story.  One might think that these are paraphrased summaries of the poems that come after them, but they are only words to help paint the setting.  It is like using prose to describe poetry.  For the layman who does not want to delve too deeply into art, picking up this book may be an immense mistake, as gods get renamed over and over again, and the dizzying array of events told through poetry is painstaking at best.  This is the biggest challenge to reading, and effectively understanding the work of H.D.. Yet, for those who wish to delve deep into art and literally educated themselves through this text, it is a rich treasure that yields a flavorful depiction of the female recounting of events, which is largely an ignored point of view.

              The Iliad, men are the ones doing most of the talking.  Women are usually helpless, and can only protest vocally by appealing to a part of men that was unnatural: their unwarlike sides. The Iliad actually in many ways makes the women seems wiser for their protests, since they appeal to reason, and have very few lines, which gives more power to their appeals, much like how people will lean in to listen to a whisper.

~How women are at the mercy of the Male gaze~

H.D. empowers Helen through her trysts with men such as Achilles.  While rape seemed to be common and commoditized females, Helen wore them like badges of honor.  Instead of being called a whore, she instead is a hero.  In book two, H.D. talks about how Helen being removed from the war is actually a freedom that she not endures, but embraces: “I do not want to hear Agamemnon /  and the Trojan Walls, / I do not want to recall shield, helmet, greaves, / though he wore them, / for that, I might recall them, / being part of his first / unforgettable anger; / I do not want to forget his anger, / not only because it brought Helen / to sleep in his arms / but because he was, in any case , / defeated; if he strangled her / and flung her to the vultures, / still, he had lost / and they had lost — / the war-Lords of Greece.” (Doolittle 18-19). It must be pointed out that the last part of that quote has a “—“ in it next to lost.  This could be a phallic symbol, and by the defeat (by Helen) they are symbolically castrated.  H.D. by the very fact of being a woman gives her the inherent ethos to rewrite this reaction of Helen.  Her rewriting of Helen’s role in the war, or more aptly Helen’s role in her own life and the lives of others is uniquely suited to the growing need to understand the feminine point of view.  Originally, as seen in

               H.D., by writing Helen in Egypt literally takes on the nearly voiceless Helen and gives her a life she never had in the original stories. She does more than give Helen the face that launched a thousand ships, she gave Helen life: her own life. By psychoanalytically inserting herself into the text, she infuses Helen with a life that she could never have had. This then adds to the overall strength of the retelling, since there is real experience behind the words.  It is in Eidolons that the truth starts to be revealed that H.D. is using Helen as her own Eidolon, but the prose and poetry do not make it immediately evident.  “Yes—Helen is awake, she sees the pattern; the “old pictures” are eternal, the ibis, the hawk, and the hare are painted in bright primary colours. But superimposed on the hieroglyphs is the “marble and silver” of her Greek thought and fanstasy.” (Doolittle 264).  This paragraph shows that Helen, H.D.’s true name, is Helen in the book.  It brings together the pattern, as in the quote. Marble is used perhaps to symbolize how the ideas of the past and the present have intermingled, like the striations of white shot through the smooth black. Being finished with Greek thought and fantasy really brings home the dream like quality of this passage. To the people who knew of H.D. in her life, and followed her, they would be well acquainted with her nuances and friendships, most notably at this point, her friendship to Sigmund Freud, who also likes to analyze dreams, since he believed they were repressed memories, or suppressed desires attached to a libido of the past.  H.D. through this assumption of communal knowledge of her was able to empower Helen in the text.  This is the most powerful tool she used in order to rewrite Helen’s role, and also the role of women in that time, and in her time.  If H.D. instead of being a notable woman at the end of her years was a man, then Helen in Egypt would not have the same power, or might not have any power at all, since they very gender of the author empowered by her own experiences lent the rewriting of the tale an urgency and importance that even in contemporary terms, is a powerful retelling of a woman’s experiences in a world full of men ruled by men.

               H.D.’s new outlook on Helen is a perfectly timed capstone to the Modernist era, since it shows how perspectives should not be overlooked.  There is also a feeling that she is saying something else that lends even more power to her tale. She is saying that art should be appreciated, but just delving into the past and making is present isn’t enough, the comprehension of the ideas needs to evolve with the times as well.  Just as contemporary readers in their own era are going to have to look at her work from their own viewpoints, Helen in Egypt is going to mean something different to an audience of another era. By using her own gender, her own experiences, and taking on the traditional male point of view and giving it a twist that is meaningful in a myriad of ways. H.D. has shown that the traditions of old may be a lesson: Don’t learn everything from them, because there is always another point of view. Sometimes it takes a woman to tell a woman’s story, but everyone should listen.