"The Best Imitation of Myself": Helen and her Artistic Streak

Tracy Jamison Wood (University of California, Santa Barbara)

In Euripides’ Helen 262-263, Helen initiates something very strange indeed: the obliteration of her infamous beauty. She wishes she were wiped clean of her beauty, much like a statue or a painting so that her fellow Greeks would not hate her so much. These two lines, in my opinion, say more about the play and Helen as a character within it than any other of the other 1692 lines say in the play. Deborah Steiner in her Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought discusses briefly that when characters in 5^th century drama refer to themselves or others as statues or paintings, “…they seek to express dimensions of feeling, experience, or personality that might otherwise go unremarked” (51). Helen is certainly illustrating numerous, complex dimensions of her personality by her words, and I wish to further explore the huge impact these words make on our understanding of Helen in this play. Helen’s desire to destroy her beauty, the essence of who she is as a character, in fact only emphasizes her beauty (opposite of the desired effect). In a way, she compares herself to an art object, a blank canvas/statue on which one can project what one desires. My goal in this paper is to see how Helen’s longing to re-create herself through artistic means actually directs our gaze towards her beauty, her body, and the creation of desire, all of which things she claims she wants to erase.

Even if Helen were to wipe clean the paint from the statue of herself, she cannot fix what is already made by the sculptor, but she can paint it (or wipe away the paint) to try to conceal the beauty of the marble. Clearly, the material of the statue itself – be it Parian or Pentelic marble – would carry most of the beauty; wiping herself clean of paint would certainly leave her far more featureless, but it would not make the actual essence of the sculpture any less beautiful. The shape and gentle curve of her cheekbones or the fullness of her lips would not be erased by a removal of paint, and certainly the removal of opaque layers of paint over the garment-covered body would make her far more desirable by rendering her nearly naked! In essence, one could say that Helen wanting to remove her beauty like paint on a statue, is a fatally flawed metaphor, destined to fail: she cannot be made less beautiful, as it is her very nature. Her attempt to cast herself in the role of author/sculptor/creator ultimately fails, since, though she wants to be made less beautiful by wiping herself clean of her beauty, she does and indeed cannot do so.[1] Helen is merely the colorist, as Nikias was to Praxiteles, according to Andrew Stewart’s Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece (99); she has control over her “make-up” but not her innate, natural beauty.

Whether we see Helen as a Praxiteles or merely a Nikias, Helen-as-artist constructs two spectators of Helen-as-statue: herself and her voyeur; it is as though Helen is inviting the reader/viewer into her boudoir while she is at her toilette. The very act of removing her beauty redirects our gaze as spectators to a number of various incarnations of Helen; by creating a replica of herself (only less beautiful), she adds this image to the myriad others already within and meta-theatrically outside the play. In addition to this statue, her cloud-eidolon as created by Hera, and Helen the speaking character in the play, we also have the memory of all her other mythological baggage as well as the image of the actor on the stage playing the part of this pastiche Helen.