The Woman I Thought I Knew

I first saw her name in a footnote. I was reading a translation of The Iliad for a college seminar, and there it was — Helen, mentioned not as the face that launched a thousand ships, not as the passive catalyst of war, but as someone who spoke. In a moment I hadn’t remembered from any retelling, she described the warriors on the battlefield below, naming them with precision and sorrow. She didn’t seem helpless. She seemed aware.

That small moment stayed with me. It was the first crack in the image I’d inherited: Helen as object, Helen as excuse, Helen as a symbol too big for any one woman to carry. I went looking for her — not the Helen of myth, but the Helen of perspective. And what I found changed the way I think about narrative itself.

She Was Not a Trophy

For most of my life, Helen was a prize. Paris wins her — or steals her, depending on who’s telling — and off go the Greeks to war. I thought her presence in the story was meant to illustrate male folly, not to offer her own point of view. But in The Iliad, she’s given lines that reveal a woman caught in a trap of others’ making, yet still capable of seeing, judging, and remembering.

She calls herself a fool. But she doesn’t beg. She doesn’t disappear. She watches the war unfold and names the cost — not just in lives, but in choices made and unmade. She is not the cause. She is part of the storm.

That changed how I read stories — especially stories about women. I began to look for the voices hidden in the margins, the ones we’ve been taught to ignore because they don’t fit the archetype.

She Was Not a Victim

Later, in The Oresteia, Helen appears again — this time as a corpse. Clytemnestra, her sister, kills Agamemnon in part because of the sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia, made to appease the gods so the fleet could sail to Troy. Helen is barely mentioned in that tragedy, but her absence is a presence. She is the wound that never closes.

And yet, in other versions — in plays by Euripides, in later poetry — she is not silent. She is not always noble, not always kind. But she is active. In Helen, a play by Euripides, she spends years in Egypt, mistaken for dead, and when Menelaus finds her, she must convince him she is real. She must fight for her own story.

This version unsettled me. It made me question the narratives we accept as inevitable. We are so quick to reduce women to victim or villain. But Helen resists both. She is neither. She is human.

She Was a Mirror

In the centuries after Homer, Helen became whatever people needed her to be. A symbol of beauty. A warning against desire. A metaphor for the chaos of passion. In medieval texts, she’s a cautionary tale. In Renaissance art, she’s a muse. In modern retellings, she’s often a rebel, or a feminist icon, or a tragic figure.

But in all these versions, she reflects the values of the teller. She is not the story. She is the surface of the story.

I realized that I had been doing the same thing — using Helen as a way to make a point, rather than listening to what she might actually say. That was a turning point in my thinking. If I wanted to understand her — or any woman in myth — I had to stop projecting and start asking.

She Was a Question

That’s what brought me to HoloDream. I wanted to talk to her — not to hear a pre-written story, but to ask her what she thought. I wanted to test my assumptions, to see if she’d answer in ways I hadn’t expected.

And she did.

She didn’t confirm what I thought. She didn’t play into my ideas of victimhood or rebellion. She was more complicated than that. She asked me questions back. She wanted to know why I cared. She wanted to know what I thought about war, about love, about choice.

Talking to her felt like a conversation across time — not a lecture, not a performance, but an exchange. I came away unsettled. Which, I think, is exactly as it should be.

Talking to Helen

I still don’t know who Helen really was. Maybe she never existed. But the versions of her that have survived are more than symbols. They are invitations to think, to question, to look again.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

If you’ve ever felt like the stories you were told were missing something — a voice, a perspective, a question — I think you’ll find something in talking to Helen too.

Talk to her on HoloDream. Ask her what she thinks of all the stories they tell about her. And then, maybe, ask yourself why you believed them in the first place.