The Illiad

This morning we had to take Helena Iara to the doctor to do the teste do pezinho -- I'm not quite sure what the translation of that is to English, but it's where they take blood from the baby's foot in order to do a series of tests for congenital defects.  I thought that in order to build up the girl's courage before she had a lancet stuck in her, I should tell her a bit about her heroic namesake, Helen of Troy.

Now, the strange thing about telling a well-known story to someone who has never heard it, is that the teller has to hear it again from the perspective of the new audience.  And in telling the story of Helen and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Hector and Priam, I saw how perverse and terrible is this foundational myth of western culture.  Homer may tell the story with a wonderful flair for language, but I think we get the story basically from the side of the bad guys.

What, then, would a little girl hear as someone tells the story of Helen?  Leda, a married woman, refuses the advances of Zeus so much that she transforms herself into a swan to escape him, but even in that form, he rapes her, leaving her with a little girl, Helen.  Many men pay her suit, but her father finally sells her to the highest bidder, Menelaus of Sparta, who takes her to live in his totalitarian city, where he soon abandons her without friends or family to travel to Crete.  As Helen wiles away boring days under the unfriendly eyes of her husband's family and stormtroopers, she spies a dashing young Ionian, come to Sparta on a diplomatic mission.  In perhaps the first autonomous act of her life, she decides to flee her prison with the handsome youth (Paris) and they return to the city of which he is a prince.

We don't know much of whether Helen and Paris were happy together; Homer and other Greek myths tell more about the Greek's anger than about the lived experience of the lovers.  Everything we know of the Greek response, however, is terrible: the political power plays to force local leaders to sign up with Menelaus and Agamemnon to take advantage of the lovers' flight to invade another country.  Wives and fields and fishing vessels abandoned, so that whole communities went hungry.  And perhaps most dramatic of all, when the winds keep the Greeks in the harbor, Agamamnon kills his daughter as a sacrifice to force the winds to change.  Imagine telling this story to a little girl, and trying to say that these people are "the good guys."

One of the great things about contemporary children's literature (whether in Dr. Seuss or in Pixar films) is that it insists on taking sides, almost always with he weak against the strong, children against adults, the oppressor against the oppressed (think about Robots, the Lorax, Finding Nemo, Yurtle the Turtle, Shrek, The Princess Bride, and who knows how many more stories).  There is something wonderfully Marxist and Christian to this insistence on the rightness and eventual victory of the underdog.  So when we look at the story of Helen with the eyes of a little girl (or the eyes I project onto a little girl), we see that we are getting the story from the side of the bad guys.  Bad guys with very competent poets and playwrights, but bad guys none the less.