Names in the Helen Story: A Startling Insight

I realized, just a few days ago, that there was an interesting coincidence in the names of characters in the Helen story.

Most of the names are just names I like, such as Janet, and Sylvia, and Eleanor, and Evelyn, all of which are names I have liked for years.  (I also like Kay, which is not my real name, but a Nom de Plume, which is to say, a pen-name, literally.)  I also like biblical names, such as David, Rachael, Naomi, and so on, though there aren't too many of those.  John and James are probably the exceptions.

Now, I'm not too much of an expert in this area, but the story of Rama and Sita is parallel to that of Helen of Troy;  in each case, a young queen is abducted by an enemy king.  In the case of the Greek legend, as recounted in Homer's Iliad, Helen is abducted by Paris, prince of Troy, because the goddess Venus promised him that he would have the most beautiful woman in the world as his lover.  Paris takes her away to Troy, and this sets off a decades-long seige of the city of Troy by a Greek coalition, which ultimately ends with the sacking of the city, and massive bloodshed.

The legend of Rama and Sita, attributed to the bard Valmiki, tells of Prince Rama, who marries the lovely princess Sita, and makes her his queen.  On their honeymoon, or at any rate, while they are holidaying in the countryside attended by only a small entourage, Rama leaves Sita alone briefly, when the enemy king Ravana, who is also a sorceror, comes upon her disguised as a handsome young stag, and carries her away to his mysterious magical island kingdom. 

Sita spends many months in a magical garden of king Ravana.  Somehow she succeeds in withstanding his amorous overtures--or does she?  The pivotal point of the story is whether Sita's virtue survived the imprisonment.

Once Sita is rescued and returned to Rama's court, there is great public curiosity about her ordeal, and when Sita's twin sons are born, their paternity is at issue.  Either Sita requests to be given a test, or Rama insists on a test, which amounts to a paternity test.  But Sita passes all the tests of purity, but is so traumatized by the doubts cast on her virtue that she leaves Rama.  (Actually, she calls on the Earth to open up, and receive her into its bosom.)

Did you notice that--entirely by coincidence, of course--the names of our lovers are Helen and Sita?  The plot of the present story (the story of Helen Nordstrom) has nothing to do with conventional concepts of virtue, so the names Helen and Sita have no symbolic significance whatsoever.

[Spoiler alert!  But don't panic; the Helen story is hardly a whodunnit of any sort.]  Helen is a young girl of great musical talent, whose sleeping libido is released by a chance encounter with a beautiful woman.  As a teenager, she is incorrigibly promiscuous, and has passionate--and often concurrent--affairs with numerous girls, and a few men as well.  But in her senior year in college, she encounters a foreign girl, Lalitha, who has a profound impact on Helen.  Helen, who at that time was the companion of Hollywood A-List actress Marsha Moore, finds herself irresistibly attracted to Lalitha, and Lalitha finds herself returning the attraction.  When Lalitha is ordered back home by a tyrannical father, Helen follows, but finds herself powerless to prevent Lalitha from being married off to a man the latter does not love or respect.

The visit to India is extremely costly to Helen; it stretches out for ten years; she is diagnosed with a brain tumor (which, of course, could happen anywhere, and cannot be blamed on India per se); loses her memory, and is repatriated without identification.  Luckily, a friend recognizes her, and a little more than a year later, Lalitha (who has returned to the US independently, neither Helen nor Lalitha knowing that the other has returned) finds Helen, and triggers the return of memory.  The two lovers pledge to each other in an unofficial ceremony, and the future looks promising.

But Helen has a wandering eye.  A lovely babysitter enters their lives, and presently Helen and Lalitha break up, and after many misadventures, Lalitha and Helen each find themselves with different partners, and though they mend their differences and become close friends, their romance cannot be rekindled.

Sita is Lalitha's kid sister, a decade younger than her.  By a great fluke, Helen and Sita are thrown together during the making of a movie, and frequently thereafter.  Helen is in disguise for the movie; she pretends to be a undiscovered actress.  Sita falls in love with this actress, and after she learns that it had been Helen, falls in love with Helen.  When Helen suffers amnesia a second time, Sita prepares to abandon her admiration for Helen as a hopeless cause,  but somehow the two women recognize their feelings for each other. 

I imagined Sita as a girl of a serious disposition, extremely loyal to her older sister, to whom she clings tenaciously, and whose opinion she values highly, and whom she admires as being the musician of the family--indeed the only family she has (apart from Suresh, Trish, and their daughter), since they have no ties to family in India.  Sita's fascination with Helen is sort of  initially derived from Lalitha's gratitude to Helen.  (Helen, after Lalitha had left her, pursues her to Baltimore, where Lalitha and Trish, and Lalitha's son, Suresh are in dire straits.  Helen persuades them to return with her to Philadelphia, and settles them with an apartment, and employment.  Lalitha never forgets that Helen came to rescue her twice: once to India, and once to the slums of Baltimore.)

The foregoing summary, apropos of nothing, prepares the way for a sort of follow-on book, not really a sequel, but simply written for fun, because I so enjoy writing about Helen and Sita, and thus far their interaction has only been a little bit here, and a little bit there.  (Sharon-Sita episodes can't be counted among them, because Helen acts so differently when she's disguised as Sharon.)

Well, that's basically all.

I was looking around for images of Helen of Troy, and Sita of  the Ramayana, but I was dissatisfied with those available.  Each of these women was considered a paragon of female beauty, but historical artistic depictions tended to go overboard with whatever features the artists considered to be appropriately superlative.  So some images of Helen of Troy are adorned with enormous breasts (because breasts were "in" for centuries in the West, unfortunately), and images of Sita showed her invariably with a bland expression; evidently bland expressions have been "in" for millennia as well.  A couple of pieces of art depict Sita--only a couple--with a grave face.  After all, on one hand she expected her husband to give her the benefit of the doubt, but on the other hand, as the consort of the King, there were public relations expectations.  The image shown here depicts Sita in a mood that could be either grieving, injured, or frustrated; or perhaps just preoccupied.  I was unable to identify the artist.

This representation of Helen of Troy is by Evelyn De Morgan, evidently someone on the fringe of--the Pre-Raphaelites.  I'm pleased to note that the Pre-Raphaelites did not value the ponderous breasts that other romantics were wont to endow their female figures with.  Let's face it: women do have breasts, but more is not always better.

Evelyn De Morgan seems to consider that vanity is a characteristic of Helen of Troy, though I am not certain that Homer indicated so.  The mirror is a hint.  (It is a work of fiction, anyway, so it doesn't matter, I suppose.  But being a pivotal character in the legend, I dislike the fact that vanity should be her central property of Helen, rather than, say, being crazy about footwear.)

Anyway, these illustrations of two of the most celebrated human beauties of mythology are frankly disappointing.  One reason that commentators give is that these women were considered ideals, and therefore not appropriate to represent in artwork.  That excuse doesn't really work, because there are so many depictions of the goddess Venus.  If she wasn't an ideal, who was?

Except for the ultra-curly hair--which is definitely a coincidence--I would not take this piece of art to be a model for Helen Nordstrom.

As a visual model for Sita Maunder, though (Maunder is not the family name of Lalitha and Sita; it is the name of the missionary family that brought Sita to the UK), the Sita picture is not bad.  I imagine Sita with an expression that is relaxed, but serious.  I also imagined her with rather straight brown hair, even black hair; and I imagine her without any jewelry, except maybe ear studs.  But more on that in another post.

Kay