The targeting of women’s bodies in times of conflict has come to light as a

systematic strategy. Specific forms of violence, especially sexual violence, are

used against women in what has come to be defined as ‘gender-based violence’,
violence which targets individuals or groups of individuals by virtue of their
gender. Thus, though it is clear that men are also the targets and victims of
violence, it is the gendered nature of violence which marks women’s experiences as
different. However, violence against women during conflict cannot be separated from
violence against women during ‘peacetime’, and forms of violence, such as public
rape, designed to humiliate communities.

The war on women is an international perennial issue with increasing focus,

happening almost everywhere in the world now yet somehow grabbing less focus. But
this is something that we’ve been exposed to since the very beginning of time and
yet we, as a society, have always decided to ignore it for some reason. Through
this article, I intend to trace how the female body has been a site of battle since
the very beginning, even if we’re looking at a literature’s classics text.

Let us focus on the myth of Helen of Troy. Said to have ‘the face that launched a
thousand ships’, Helen of Troy has been remembered, judged – and hated – by every
age since she entered the written record 2,700 years ago. With great beauty comes
great resentment.

Helen of Troy, in Greek legend, the most beautiful woman of Greece and the indirect
cause of the Trojan War. She was daughter of Zeus, either by Leda or by Nemesis,
and sister of the Dioscuri. As a young girl, she was carried off by Theseus, but
she was rescued by her brothers. She was also the sister of Clytemnestra, who
married Agamemnon. Helen’s suitors—including Odysseus—came from all parts of
Greece, and from among them she chose Menelaus, Agamemnon’s younger brother. During
an absence of Menelaus, however, Helen fled to Troy with Paris, son of the Trojan
king Priam, an act that ultimately led to the Trojan War. When Paris was slain,
Helen married his brother Deiphobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus once Troy was
captured. Menelaus and Helen then returned to Sparta, where they lived happily
until their deaths. According to a variant of the story, Helen, in widowhood, was
driven out by her stepsons and fled to Rhodes, where she was hanged by the Rhodian
queen Polyxo in revenge for the death of her husband, Tlepolemus, in the Trojan
War. The poet Stesichorus, however, related in his second version of her story that
she and Paris were driven ashore on the coast of Egypt and that Helen was detained
there by King Proteus. The Helen carried on to Troy was thus a phantom, and the
real one was recovered by her husband from Egypt after the war. This version of the
story was used by Euripides in his play Helen.

Of all Helen’s roles in the literary and artistic corpus (and it is a long career –
she has been forgotten by not a single generation since she entered the written
record 2,700 years ago), it is her part as fantasy whore that has been most
tenacious. Her many sexual partners – the hero Theseus, her husband Menelaus, her
lover Paris, her second Trojan husband Deiphobus, and (some whispered) Achilles
after both he and Helen were dead – are trotted out by ancient and modern authors
alike as the gossip columns would the client-list of a high-class prostitute. And
so Euripides calls her a ‘bitch-whore’; she is Shakepeare’s ‘strumpet’; in Thomas
Proctor’s The Reward of Whoredom by the Fall of Helen (1578) she is a ‘trull’ and a
‘flurt’, an embodiment of prostitution’s ‘vilde filthy fact’; Chaucer may well have
been playing on words when he called her a ‘queene’ – a homophone for a ‘quene’ or
harlot, and for Schiller a ‘Helen’ simply meant a prick-tease, a tart, a slut.

Helen is not only treated as the cause of the Trojan war, but she is also a
helpless captive. She became the type of all women who bring woe to men. However,
this entirely negative view of Helen is made more complicated by the fact that
Helen is marked by undecidability.
Homer represents Helen in The Iliad who scorns her second husband, Paris, and longs
for what she left behind. Helen blames herself, and wishes that she had never
betrayed her husband,

"...if only death had pleased me then, grim death, the day I followed your son to
Troy, forsaking my marriage bed, my kinsmen, and my child" (Homer)

In this passage, Helen's vile nature, her remorse and self- hatred, the question
of her responsibility for the war have been left somewhat ambiguous and unanswered.

This leads us to only one question- Was Helen really to blame for the Trojan War –
or just a scapegoat?

The majority of responses to Helen since the Iliad nonetheless have centred on the
issue of her culpability.

In succumbing to the narrative of Helen and her role in the bloodshed, we also miss
the opportunity to explore more fruitful lines of inquiry. For Helen’s story is one
that should lead us to question why it is that women have so often been made
scapegoats in times of warfare, crisis and great political change. Only then might
we break free from the question of whether or not Helen was to blame for the Trojan
War – and start asking what role the men who carried the swords and spears played.