The Problem of Helen: The Trojan Women

So, I just finished reading The Trojan Women by Euripides (I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a bit of a Euripides fan) and it raised an interesting question for me: can we blame Helen for the fall of Troy? If you don't know, The Trojan Women explores the aftermath of the sack of Troy, particularly what happens to the women of Troy, who have been taken as slaves by the Greek soldiers. Both the Trojans and the Greeks feel that Helen is responsible for the war (for good reason), but Helen herself argues that she is innocent. Helen tells Menelaus that Aphrodite made her run off with Paris and that after Paris was dead she tried to go back to Menelaus.

That sounds like a pretty lame excuse to me, but it doesn't seem fair that the entire war should be blamed on Helen either. Depending on the source, I've come across two different versions of the Helen of Troy story, one that says she was kidnapped and one that says she went willingly. Personally, I can't imagine that someone in her situation would have had any choice in the matter.
But, if you look at it from a modern perspective, even if she did go with Paris willingly, she didn't really do anything wrong. In the modern era, a woman has every right do divorce her husband and remarry, so why do we deny Helen of Troy that right? She certainly didn't choose to marry Menelaus, so why is she so hated for leaving him? She didn't ask the Greeks to follow her to Troy and, in a practical sense, they probably would have gone to war with the Trojans anyway, Helen was just the excuse.

Even if you buy the theory that the Trojan war was fought purely for her sake, it's not really about her; it's about Menelaus' pride. When Menelaus encounters Helen in The Trojan women, he says that he is going to kill her because she has shamed him. He doesn't care about getting Helen back, he just wants revenge on the people who made him look bad.

Although Helen is guilty of some serious errors in judgement, I don't think we can fault her too harshly. This is especially true since Menelaus was certainly not faithful to Helen. There is a double standard in Greek drama, most aptly represented in the Clytemnestra/Penelope parallel. Women must be faithful to their husbands, even if their husbands are seldom faithful to them.

The Trojan Women is an interesting text because it shows how women choose to negotiate the obligation of faithfulness they feel to their husbands and the necessitates of survival. Hecuba, the wife of the, now dead, King Priam, tells Helen that if she truly wished to escape Troy, she would have killed herself, as "any wife would do". But, when she herself is placed in a similar situation, Hecuba too chooses life. Although the Trojan women speak with scorn against women who marry twice, or have more than one lover, they submit to being the wives and concubines of the Greeks because they understand that it is necessary to their survival. Andromache, Hector's wife, even surrenders her son to the Greeks to be killed.

There is an odd parallel here. The Trojan women are full of advice for what Helen should have done, but they themselves seem reluctant to take this advice. It seems that survival is the natural choice, no matter what they argue. I don't think Helen went to Troy willingly, but even if she did, we cannot fault her for trying to survive.

I don't think that's what Euripides intended for the reader to get out of the play. Oh well. 

Just readin'