Helen

Many plays rely on a plot twist to overturn the audience’s assumptions. Helen, however, is unique in that its plot twist comes at the very beginning, in the introduction of the main character, laying the foundations for the whole tone of the play. Euripides’s use of this minor counter-narrative about the Helen story rather than the mainstream version (based on the works of Homer) would have come as a surprise to the audience. There is a second twist regarding Helen—not only a twist regarding her story (namely, that she was in Egypt rather than Troy), but a twist regarding her moral character. Helen was widely assumed to be the worst representative of her gender, a woman driven by vanity and self-seeking pleasure, who by her unfaithfulness to her marriage dragged the world to war. In Helen, however, Euripides presents her as faithful, compassionate, and wise beyond the common expectations of her gender. Through these twists, Euripides both subverts his audience’s expectations and brings the theme of appearance versus reality to the forefront.