Helen's Calibans: A Study of Gender Hierarchy in Derek Walcott's "Omeros"

Abstract

In book 1 of The Histories Herodotus implies that Helen of Sparta (alias Helen of Troy) was lewd and unchaste (an opinion shared by other fifth-century men of letters as well), for, says, is obvious that no young woman allows herself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.2 Herodotus also mentions another version of the abduction story (a version, however, of which himself seems quite skeptical), according to which Helen did not really go to Troy but ended up in Egypt, where she spent some at the court of King Proteus.3 Finally, according to Euripides in Helen, Hera, angry that she was not given the prize, gave Priam's son breathing image out of the sky's air4 so that Paris would hold a vanity (i.e., a shadow) instead of the real woman. Certainly, Helen's legend has endured numerous interpretations from many cultures, from classical mythology to the present, or, as Derek Walcott says in Omeros, his most extensive poetic work, Smoke wrote the same story / since the dawn of time (2.23.2). Caribbean culture is no exception. Resonant of the Homeric story yet at the same successfully adapted to the specificity of the region's tempora and mores, the Helen theme is multifariously present in Caribbean literature and folklore. From the popular Jamaican song Helena,5 to Stanley French's play The Rape of Fair Helen,6 to Walcott's Omeros and his recent stage adaptation of the Odyssey,1 Helen's myth and nature are now seen under a new, inter/metacultural perspective. Specifically in Omeros the St. Lucian poet, critic, and playwright Walcott treats Helen in an idiosyncratic narrative of Caribbean aspiration and inspiration. His version of Helen deviates considerably from the original matrix. For him, Helen's story is no longer the account of her abduction by Paris and her exile in Troy but rather that of her growth as a woman after the war. What is more, Paris himself is no longer accounted for in the text except through a pun implied by the name of the sunken battleship Ville de Pans (City of Vile Paris). This new Antillean Helen should not be seen as a victim but rather as the axis about which the entire horned island (1.7.2) and its elemental men rotate: Achille, a dignified version of Menelaus; Hector, Paris's counterpart and, like Paris, a man of duplicitous nature; Philoctete, a low-key character suffering from an incurable leg wound; the Vagrant Poet, a version of divine Homer himself; and Dennis Plunkett, the softhearted colonizer of a town he had come to love (2.22.3). In brief, Walcott changes the original story, in which the male captor victimizes his female captive, into a story of seduction this time, however, it is a seduction of the male by the female.