This painting of Helen of Troy, by Evelyn De Morgan, is to be found in the Wikipedia article, and is also used in a Guardian article: A broken idea of sex is flourishing. Blame capitalism
by Rebecca Solnit. She references the Trojan Wars to make this point:
It goes back before capitalism, really, this dehumanization that makes sex an activity men exact from women who have no say in the situation. The Trojan war begins when Trojan Paris kidnaps Helen and keeps her as a sex slave. During the war to get Helen back, Achilles captures Queen Briseis and keeps her as a sex slave after slaying her husband and brothers (and slaying someone’s whole family is generally pretty anti-aphrodisiac). His comrade in arms Agamemnon has some sex slaves of his own, including the prophetess Cassandra, cursed by Apollo for refusing to have sex with him. Read from the point of view of the women, the Trojan wars resemble Isis among the Yazidi.
Feminism and capitalism are at odds, if under the one women are people and under the other they are property.
She says that:
"Despite half a century of feminist reform and revolution, sex is still often understood through the models capitalism provides. Sex is a transaction; men’s status is enhanced by racking up transactions, as though they were poker chips."
In the article this painting that has been chosen (classic clickbait?), is captioned "Helen of Troy, the original woman-as-commodity", and yet, it is she that is often blamed for the Trojan War, so what does it say about us?
This question is asked by Emily Wilson in the New Statesman (and The New Republic) review of Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation by Ruby Blondell (Oxford University Press): Slut-shaming Helen of Troy. Her article begins:
Émile Zola’s gripping novel Nana (1880) evokes the rise, fall, and early death of a sexy blonde teenager, a celebrity actress and prostitute, who takes all of Paris by storm. She destroys every man who crosses her path before herself dying a dismal death of smallpox, portending the fall of the Second Empire.She continues in her review:
The novel is part of Zola’s series on urban industrialisation and its threat to traditional family life. Nana, although theoretically human, is a destructive and powerful machine, the engine of the new civilisation as well as the motor of Zola’s novelistic plot. Her sexual allure, figured as an irresistible scent, is in the end transformed into, or revealed as, the seeping putrefaction of the charnel house.
This is one of the most powerful modern versions of a far more widespread misogynistic trope. Heterosexual male desire for an exceptionally attractive woman tends to be projected onto the woman herself, who is then presented as particularly lustful. Since male desire can be experienced as mysterious, bewildering, and overwhelming, the woman herself must be destructive and deceptive, perhaps possessed of magical witch-like powers.
Ruby Blondell’s insightful study of ancient Greek representations of Helen of Troy notes the close connections between her subject and the Pandora myth. Both, she argues, spring from cultural anxieties about female beauty and female sexuality, centered on the figure of the parthenos – the girl at marriageable age, a liminal figure who must cross from the world of childhood in her father’s house to the house of her husband. “She must be sufficiently reluctant to suggest that she will not stray once she is married, but she must also actively desire her new husband” – a balance that constantly threatens to tip over. Helen, the most famous adulterous wife in the Western tradition, is figured as a woman who is constantly in this liminal state, and who repeatedly crosses over from one household to another: “many-manned Helen,” as Aeschylus calls her. She was (and is) the locus for exploring the questions of whether beautiful women are always necessarily bad, and whether female sexual desire is always a force of destruction. She is also – unlike modern versions of the promiscuous or adulterous woman – always presented as at least semi-divine, the ever-young, ever-beautiful daughter of Zeus, worshipped at cult centres all over Greece, especially in her native Sparta. Modern versions of misogyny usually do not account for the possibility that “bad” women might also be goddesses.
The best-seller about Helen of Troy by the television presenter Bettany Hughes, from 2007, bizarrely claimed to tell, and to celebrate, “Helen as a real character from history,” while acknowledging that her existence is only “a possibility” – as if the biography of a mythical character from three thousand years ago could possibly be reconstructed. Blondell has almost none of this naïveté: she notes explicitly that her subject is a set of cultural tropes, not a historical person. Helen was a construction of the Greek male imagination, and the myths and literary treatments of Helen can teach us nothing about the lives even of women in classical Greece, let alone women in Sparta in the Bronze Age: she is “a concept, not a person.” But these myths can teach us a great deal about the complex attitudes of ancient Greek men, mostly ancient Athenian men, toward women, female beauty, and male desire.
Abduction! NOT seduction?
The 1898 painting by Evelyn De Morgan under discussion here, and depicting Helen of Troy, has a Liverpool connection, commissioned as it was by William Imrie, a Liverpool shipowner who owned the White Star Line. He was once known as "the Prince of Shipowners". As regards the painting, the artist De Morgan chooses to ignore the Trojan War, and her abduction, and, according to the Wikipedia article:
De Morgan decides to paint, instead of weapons and battles, the wonderful pink clothes and the fascinated look that Helena puts on the mirror that is reflecting her beautiful face, elements that can be read as symbols of her inconscient vanity, which eventually brought a long and terrible war and destruction to the city of Troy, which we can see in the last term of the composition, on top of a hill. The presence of the moon-sun in the sky is also related to her feminine and voluble nature.Helen is represented as seductive, vain and self absorbed, not the subject or victim of abduction. Emily Wilson, in her review of Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation by Ruby Blondell, points out that:
Helen’s beauty is not subjective. A key premise of the myth is that she is beautiful in some absolute and total way that defies description, and hence can be represented only by entirely conventional means. Helen, like any other beautiful woman in the Greek literary tradition, has lovely cheeks, neat ankles, and pretty accessories. She is equally irresistible to any and every man. As Blondell neatly puts it, “a beauty that is in the eye of the beholder may launch a ship or two, but only a beauty upon which all beholders agree can bind a generation of heroic males under oath and generate an enterprise as cataclysmic as the Trojan War.”
From a young age, Helen was prone to getting abducted. When she was still a young girl the Athenian hero Theseus swiped her, but she was retrieved by her magical brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux. A little later, suitors from all over Greece began to court her, and took an oath that they would all fight together for her eventual husband.
Scenes of "abduction" make good "clickbait" material, from the Baroque art of Europe to Hollywood, as for example in The Rape of Helena by Francesco Primaticcio and . . .
. . . the 1956 Warner Bros movie "Helen of Troy".
Role reversal?
The Loves of Paris and Helen is a 1788 painting by Jacques-Louis David, showing Helen of Troy and Paris from Homer's Iliad, and now in the collection of the Louvre Museum. The Wikipedia article on Helen of Troy presents a detail of this painting, as shown below.
A preparatory drawing by David, Paris and Helen (1786), was included in the Getty Museum exhibition Gods and Heroes: European Drawings of Classical Mythology that featured drawings from the Renaissance to the 19th century that explore Greco-Roman myths.
The webpage at the iris Behind the Scenes at the Getty, Art & Archives has an article by Alexandria Sivak (January 27, 2014), headlined:
Ancient Myth, Contemporary Politics
with the subheading:
A fascinating drawing by Jacques-Louis David offers a sly commentary on French politics just before the Revolution
Sivak writes:
One of David’s finest creations of this period is the painting The Loves of Paris and Helen (1788), which is housed in the Louvre. A preparatory drawing, Paris and Helen (1786), is in the Getty exhibition. Unveiled to the public at the Paris Salon just weeks after the fall of the Bastille, David’s painting alludes to the indulgences of Louis XVI’s courtiers, who were thought to place their private interests above those of the realm. But it does so under the guise of the story of Paris and Helen, ancient characters whose tale is rich with drama.
First, a little background. Paris, son of the king of Troy, is chosen by the gods to judge a beauty contest between three goddesses: Juno, Minerva, and Venus. Paris chooses Venus and as a reward gets to marry the most beautiful woman on earth, Helen. Why the drama? Well, Helen is already married to Menelaus, who, as he seeks revenge, instigates the Trojan War as a result. To make it even more of an ancient soap opera, Helen is shot with Cupid’s arrow, which makes her fall in love with Paris and thus forget about her husband. Whoa.
Helen is standing, fully clothed, while Paris is sitting unclothed. In the drawing, Cupid is seen lurking in the shadows, looking proud of his dirty work. The composition is said to have alluded to a rumored affair between Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois (who, ironically, commissioned the painting from David).
This also explains why Helen assumes a standing, clothed position of power, while her lover is the naked object. Like Helen, Marie-Antoinette was seen as a debauched instigator of political and societal woes.
David's painting of Helen of Troy and Paris, her lover, includes a role reversal concerning their power relations, but at the same time to buys in to the scurrilous narratives being directed to undermine the monarchy, through revolutionary, but misogynistic attacks on Marie Antoinette.
Vigee-Lebrun’s Archduchess Marie Antoinette, Queen of France completed in 1778, shortly after the monarch had borne her first child in her early twenties,features her as the queen of fashion, monumentalized by her robe à la française–a construction of draped satin, gold braid and lace supported by a virtual undercarriage of panniers or hoops.Contemporary portraits of Marie Antoinette documented her dizzying rise and precipitous fall from grace. The virtuoso Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, France’s premier female painter, became her official court portraitist and completed over two dozen paintings of the Queen and her family. Vigée-Lebrun’s sumptuous renderings pay tribute to her sitter’s fair beauty and her trappings as monarch, fulfilling the aggrandizing mandate of the court.
As French republicanism gathered momentum, their Queen’s passion for fashion and her legendary extravagance became the focus of derision, earning her the name Mme. Déficit. While a descriptive engraving replicates and details the gold, pearls, plumes and diamonds that adorned the young Queen’s hair and her dress, a second print, the Coiffure of Independence, c. 1778 offers a pointed caricature of one of her infamous poufs–some rising above the height of three feet -and a creation of her hairdresser Léonard.
Here the victorious French frigate, ironically named La Belle Poule, is set aloft on a undulating sea of hair–a style that that the Queen had worn in celebration of the victorious entry of the French against the English in the War of Independence.
Grub Street
In the 1780s, the streets of Paris were awash with printed matter known as libelles, a seedier form of literature sometimes referred to as political pornography. The majority of libelles were published outside France and smuggled into the country. Several French libellistes were based in London, where publishing laws were more liberal and publishers could operate beyond the reach of the French government.
Most London libellistes rented rooms and printing presses on Grub Street, a notorious haunt for struggling writers, gutter journalists and smut pedlars. Some referred to these expat publishers as Rousseaus du ruisseau - ‘Rousseaus of the gutter’.
French libelles circulated misogynistic fantasies that were no less outrageous. In the six months preceding the revolution, most political pornography honed in on Marie Antoinette. The queen was an easy target for pornographers and satirists, being female, foreign, slow to deliver a royal heir and famously strong-willed. Attacking Antoinette’s alleged political influence was also a means of attacking the weaknesses of the king, without doing so directly.
Libelles came in a range of literary forms. They could be fliers or broadsheets, pamphlets, dramatic scripts, essays or collections of cartoons. The only common trait was that their content was slanderous and offensive.
The more serious libelles took the form of essays, which often presented as serious and legitimate journalism. These publications would promise to provide the ‘true story’ behind the crown, the royal family, notable aristocratic families or the goings-on at Versailles. They often cited a newly acquired cache of letters or ‘court insiders’ (never named, of course) as the source of their information.
In reality, many libelles simply repeated gossip of the day, embellished with a considerable amount of creative licence and flair. It is not surprising that this kind of gossip flourished. Unlike today, the French public was told little about the royal family, life at court or indeed the workings of government. There were few royal or government reports and no press at Versailles. This dearth of information was filled by the rumour mongers and the gutter press.
The volume and pornographic intensity of the libelles increased after the outbreak of revolution in 1789. Much more than before, this material honed in on the king and queen. Darnton estimates that before 1789, only about 10 percent of pornographic libelles targeted Marie Antoinette. From early 1789, however, the vast majority of these publications took aim at the queen. Antoinette had always been a figure of ridicule. The gutter press had long before dubbed her l’Autrichienne (literally ‘the Austrian woman’ but doubly interpreted as ‘the Austrian bitch’, chienne being the French word for a female dog).
The queen was depicted as having an insatiable sexual appetite. She needed constant satisfaction, it was claimed, but was unable to obtain this from her husband, who was either disinterested, impotent or inadequately endowed.
According to libelles, the nymphomaniacal but frustrated Antoinette sought sexual favours from her brother-in-law, from various court nobles, from servants, even from her own children. Stories had her plotting behind the king’s back and taking lovers, sometimes several times a day. Some visual material showed her surrounded by gigantic penises or engaged in acts of tribadism (lesbianism).
One of the earliest literary attacks on the queen was Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie Antoinette (‘Essays on the private life of Marie Antoinette’).
First published in 1781, this libelle reappeared in several forms over the next decade. It accused Antoinette of a litany of treacherous and immoral acts, including adultery, dalliances with the king’s own brother, lesbianism, masturbation, wasteful spending for its own sake and political intriguing against the king and the French people. In some 1789 editions, Antoinette was even accused of poisoning the young Dauphin who had died of tuberculosis in June that year. This scurrilous narrative was a precursor to contemporary anonymous fake news and unchallenged political advertising.
The events of 1789 opened the floodgates for an even greater torrent of hateful and poisonous literature.
Le Godmiché Royal (‘The Royal Dildo’) portrays Antoinette as a sexually frustrated user of sex toys. L’Autrichienne en Goguettes ou l’Orgie Royale (‘The Austrian bitch and her Friends in the Royal Orgy’) suggests Antoinette had a string of lovers, including the Duchess of Polignac and the Count of Artois, who was also the true father of her children.
The negligible extent to which these libelles had a significant influence on the de-stabilization of the French monarchy prior to the French revolution of 1789 is undergoing some historical revision. For example, Forgotten Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, by Simon Burrows. However, these so-called "Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France", as presented by Robert Darnton, may reveal some of the complex attitudes of post-Enlightenment discourse, and the emerging context of modernity, when it comes to the mobilization of the objectified woman, female beauty, and male desire, in a capitalist and patriarchal cultural system of social controls.
A concept! NOT a person?
Marie Antoinette, just like Helen of Troy, is in this context not a person but a concept, and as such becomes a highly functional and opportune target. While Helen was a construction of the Greek male imagination, the process of construction continues . . .
. . . see DC's Legends of Tomorrow
If Greek authors can teach us a great deal about the complex attitudes of ancient Greek men, toward women, female beauty, and male desire, what about the DC franchise today?
Sylvia Saint - my life as a sex goddess/commodity
A broken idea of sex is flourishing. Blame capitalism
In this world, women are marketed as toys and trophies. Are we surprised when some men take things literally?
Writing in the wake of the Toronto van attack, Rebecca Solnit says:
Since the Toronto bloodbath, a lot of pundits have belatedly awoken to the existence of the “incel” (short for involuntary celibate) online subculture and much has been said about it. Too often, it has been treated as some alien, unfamiliar worldview. It’s really just an extreme version of sex under capitalism we’re all familiar with because it’s all around us in everything, everywhere and has been for a very long time. And maybe the problem with sex is capitalism.
What’s at the bottom of the incel worldview: sex is a commodity, accumulation of this commodity enhances a man’s status, and every man has a right to accumulation, but women are in some mysterious way obstacles to this, and they are therefore the enemy as well as the commodity. They want high-status women, are furious at their own low status, but don’t question the system that allocates status and commodifies us all in ways that are painful and dehumanizing.
"Under capitalism" she says:
sex might as well be with dead objects, not live collaborators. It is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and playful and collaborative – which casual sex can also be, by the way – but that one person gets. The other person is sometimes hardly recognized as a person. It’s a lonely version of sex. Incels are heterosexual men who see this mechanistic, transactional sex from afar and want it at the same time they rage at people who have it.
Donald Trump surrounded by a "harem" of women commodified as "toys and trophies"?
The caption to this photo reads: The commodification of women is embodied by our president.
Solnit begins the conclusion to her argument beginning with a question posed by the supposed libertarian commentator (or,in other words, "another conservative"), Ross Douthat writing for the New York Times.
At the New York Times, Ross Douthat credited a libertarian with this notion:
“If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?”
Part of what’s insane here is that neither the conservative Douthat nor libertarians are at all concerned with the just distribution of property and money, which is often referred to as socialism. Until the property is women, apparently. And then they’re happy to contemplate a redistribution that seems to have no more interest in what women want than the warlords dividing up the sex slaves in the Trojan war.
Happily someone much smarter took this on before Toronto. In late March, at the London Review of Books, Amia Srinivasan wrote:
“It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies.”
Solnit concludes her opinion piece with this strong and telling paragraph:
What’s terrifying about incel men is that they seem to think the problem is that they lack sex when, really, what they lack is empathy and compassion and the imagination that goes with those capacities. That’s something money can’t buy and capitalism won’t teach you. The people you love might, but first you have to love them.
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