Helen’s Eidola in nineteen-century European imagination
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Helen in the Iliad 3, Offenbach’s La belle Hélène, Zola’s Nana, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, feminine beauty, male gaze, silenced voices of womenResumo
Nineteen-century European culture reimagines Helen of Troy and her forbidden love with obsessive interest. Starting with her first appearance in the Iliad, Helen displays her beauty to reluctant yet mesmerized audiences. Over millennia, scenes depicting a Helen-like woman as the object of gaze, contradictory feelings, and judgment occupy crucial places in literary works. My essay will examine how the spoofy version of Helen in Offenbach’s La belle Hélène relates to two tragic reflections, heroines in the novels of Zola and Tolstoy, Nana and, respectively, Anna Karenina, who are both explicitly linked to the Trojan saga. The focus will be on the narrative accounts in which crowds look at the beautiful heroine, while deriding or condemning her.
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Copyright (c) 2016 Dana Munteanu
Este trabalho está licenciado sob uma licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
