Simulation, Violence, and Resistance in Euripides' Helen

Abstract

Euripides’ “new Helen,” as Aristophanes (Thesm. 850) identifies her, occupies a tenuous position between the aggressive imposition of power (divine, political, and erotic) and resistance. In Hera’s replication of Helen, the goddess would nullify Helen’s identity in order to remove the stakes of a military conflict predicated upon Helen’s singular beauty. Although Helen’s eponymous heroine seeks to differentiate herself from her divinely fabricated clone, she nevertheless re-enacts a pattern of abduction, duplicity, and martial violence which has always haunted her story. Paradoxically, her efforts at resistance, both to human coercion and to the threat posed by her double, come to simulate the irony, deception, and seduction that characterize the eidôlon (and, by extension, the prior tradition around Helen that the eidôlon embodies).1 Accordingly, as Jean Baudrillard suggests in the quotation that introduces this essay, Helen’s universal mythic embodiment of beauty, seductive allure, and disarming cleverness should give us pause in assigning authenticity or priority to any of her instantiations, since each Helen is always “the simultaneous equivalent of all the others.” The tension between Helen’s struggle to assert her unique personhood and the weight of a mythic tradition that places her at the center of war, retribution, and abduction emerges powerfully in Euripides’ Helen. At stake, then, are the mythic explanation and justification of a primeval war fought repeatedly