Helen and Trauma Narrative in the Iliad

This paper uses research in trauma studies to offer a new analysis of Helen in the Iliad. Psychological studies in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), continuous traumatic stress (CTS), and trauma following a sexual assault point to social isolation, suicidal tendencies, and self-blame as elements of trauma. Studies on sexual assault differentiate between two types of self-blame: characterological (blaming deficits within oneself) and behavioral (blaming one’s own actions). This research encourages a new understanding of the Iliad’s Helen. On three separate occasions, Helen blames herself for the Trojan War and fantasizes about having died before she came to Troy (3.171-245, 6.343-368, 24.761-775). Three repeated elements in these speeches—self-blame, a sense of hatred by her community, and suicidal ideation—represent Helen as traumatized.

Helen expresses characterological self-blame in applying to herself a dog metaphor (κύων, 6.344, 6.356; κυνῶπις, 3.180) and the terms “evil-devising” (κακομήχανος) and “chilling” (ὀκρυόεις) (6.344); she displays behavioral self-blame in using verbs with an active sense to describe her departure from Sparta (λιποῦσα, 3.174; ἔβην, ἀπελήλυθα, 24.766). Helen believes her communities hate her: she assumes the Achaeans criticize her (3.241-42), says the members of Paris’ family slander her (24.768-70), and sees Hector as exceptional for being kind to her (24.771-72). Her wishes for death (3.173, 6.345-48, 24.764) constitute suicidal ideation and should be distinguished from the other types of death wish in archaic poetry with which it has often been grouped. A distinction emerges between death wishes in which a character wishes they had never been born (e.g., Andromache, Il. 22.481; Hephaestus, Od. 8.312) and those in which a character, facing imminent death, wishes for an alternative way of dying (e.g., Achilles, Il. 21.279; Odysseus, Od. 5.308). Helen’s wishes stand apart from these types as suicidal ideation; she wishes that she had died—rather than that she was never born—in instances where she does not face immediate death.

This approach offers an alternative to scholarship that views Helen as seductive, manipulative, and/or responsible for the Trojan War (e.g., Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ryan, Graver, Ebbott, Worman, Roisman, Blondell, Karanika). For example, Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold see Helen as a seductress. They argue that her speech to Hector is a “lesson in the arts of seduction” and suggest her wish that she were the wife of a better man “undermines her protestations of innocence.” I shift the focus to her clarifying comment that she wishes she were the wife of someone aware of others’ indignation and disapproval (αἶσχος and νέμεσις, 6.351). In this comment, Helen resembles people experiencing CTS who worry about the harassment they face from their societies. She expresses the same sentiment both when she worries that the Achaeans have made her the object of shame (αἴσχεα, 3.242) and when she refuses to sleep with Paris because it would be too shameful (νεμεσσητὸν, 3.410). Viewing her self-blame alongside the other signs of trauma in her speeches, my approach helps us understand it as contributing to her characterization as traumatized rather than as positively asserting her responsibility for the Trojan War.