after Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”
You’ve heard this tale a thousand times in a thousand different ways, but there was a girl thousands of years ago on some stupid island or peninsula whose face launched a thousand ships.
.
The story starts, as always, with Zeus. Either it starts because he turns himself into a swan and knocks up Queen Leda with Castor, Pollux, and Helen, or it starts when he wants to stir some shit and picks some random second-born Trojan prince to decide which of three goddesses are the most beautiful. The goddesses try to bribe the prince in a bunch of different ways, but Aphrodite promises him the most beautiful woman in the world.
He takes her up on her offer.
Somehow that’s still Helen’s fault.
.
Helen was the princess of Sparta and had already been abducted once already to be the child bride of some other demigod, but her brothers rescued her. Her father still sold her off to the highest bidder. That’s the long and short of every minute of her life.
Helen was married to Menelaus and:
Helen is happy with Menelaus. Aphrodite gives her to Paris anyway.
or
Paris abducts Helen while she was screaming and crying and rapes her.
or
Paris was a suitor she preferred while she was being paraded around, but Menelaus won her hand which is ridiculous because he wasn’t even there.
or
Helen never wanted to marry at all, but that didn’t matter to anyone.
Not once was she asked.
The outcome is the same: Helen of Sparta is married to Paris of Troy, and her face launches a thousand ships.
.
Agamemnon was there in Menelaus’s stead when her father was courting suitors for her. Agamemnon ended up marrying her sister and sacrificing her niece for better weather, and that’s her fault too. Blood for weather. Blood for war.
Her sister hates her ship-launching face and hates her husband-brother-in-law’s murderous hands, so she slits his neck for killing their daughter, and then their son slits hers for killing his father. Blood begets blood begets blood.
.
The war goes on and on and on. One thousand ships and ten thousand deaths.
.
Troy’s descendants will say that there was a gift given under false pretenses filled with soldiers, and:
Helen betrays Troy and distracts Trojan soldiers with her beauty so the Greeks can bring her home, or the other way around, but having a face people are distracted by isn’t a choice.
or
Helen sits inside with the white-armed Andromache and laments in silence. Spartan women are steel-armed not white-armed. She was supposed to be a warrior or a hunter, not trapped inside like a little wife.
or
Helen sits out the war in Egypt. The gods send a doll in her place to Troy. If that was an option the whole time, they should have just given Paris a doll in the first place. That’s all he really wanted. Both sides really.
.
Hector kills Patroclus so Achilles kills Hector so Paris shoots Achilles’ heel so an archer shoots Paris. Troy burns. Helen does nothing, which if you’ve noticed she has done beautifully throughout. It is all she is allowed to do.
.
The Greeks enslave Andromache, and Odysseus throws her baby from the battlements—or maybe the baby grows up and kills him, or maybe he adopts the baby and raises him as his own, or maybe the baby grows up to fuck his mother and kill his father. Oh wait, wrong story.
.
After Troy burns:
Helen is sent home to Menelaus, and he kills her.
or
Helen is sent home to Menelaus, and they never speak of Troy again.
or
Helen is raped and killed in Troy by either the Greeks or the Trojans in a rage.
or
Aeneas finds her in the burning of Troy, but Aphrodite saves her life. She never once asked to be saved.
or
Her niece Iphigenia sacrifices her to a god. How’s that for fair play?
or
Helen is taken by Apollo to Mount Olympus because she’s a demigod too. And fuck the Greeks and Trojans anyway. And fuck Menelaus too.
or
Helen has no idea what’s going on in Troy or Sparta because she’s in Egypt.
When Troy burns, Helen is too far away to smell the smoke or hear the wailing in the streets or the moaning of the men trapped under their own buildings and battlements. She hunts deer with her daughter, who got to come with her this time and was never forgotten about or abandoned. Iphigenia was never sent to her father’s sacrificial altar on her wedding day under false pretenses, and instead makes flower crowns from the Nile-side lotuses. Clytemnestra is there, sipping wine with Cassandra—who, while we’re dreaming, was never enslaved and never survived a god spitting lies in her mouth. Hell, Dido is there too, and she never burns. Medusa is never beheaded. Medea never kills her children. Philomela’s tongue is never cut out, and she and her sister are never turned into birds. Eve hears all this good news and wings it over from Eden. When she shares fruit with Pandora, neither of them are blamed for man’s follies.
When Cassandra speaks of happy endings here, the women in this ending get to believe what she says. They get to believe they’re not just an instrument in some man’s epic poem, but the masters of their own fate.
Lavinia Darr is the pen name of a queer, disabled, feminist-horror author. She works in journal production at a small academic press specializing in mathematics, alongside her cat who would much prefer she put down the laptop and instead figure out how to break open her rib cage so he may crawl inside.