You call this
the face that launched a thousand ships
and burned the topless towers of Ilium.

But remember, my lords:
I never weighed an anchor
I never lit a torch
never sacrificed my child for a fair wind
never raped a seeress before a holy altar.

xxx

Somewhere Lady Discord is laughing.


Note: It's weird the way things you do foreshadow things you will come to do. I wrote this in the holidays, long before I ever thought of taking Women's Literature and long before I even knew such a course existed. But it's feminist, it is a re-vision of Helen's tale, it is a rejection of all the images male writers and storytellers have projected onto her (most obviously the Kit Marlowe reference, of course). It's an indictment of male violence (exemplified by what happened to Iphigeneia and Cassandra, appropriately enough at the beginning and end of the war respectively) for which she, through history and literature, has subsequently been blamed.

Anyway, this came about mainly because I'd read some poetry about Helen, which reminded me of Chen Yuan-yuan: two women separated by space and time, both accused, through story and song, of having started devastating invasions.