#blondell

[dilutedh2so4]

Sappho’s choice of the grammatical neuter for the love object in line 4 (“whatever” one desires, not “whomever”) contributes to the implied objectification of Paris, who, as the object of Helen’s desire, sets her in motion without any indication of agency on his part. It was (probably) not Paris but Aphrodite or Eros who “led her astray” (11), presumably by holding out an alluring vision of Paris’s beauty, as Aphrodite does in Homer (Il 3.390–94). Paris thus exercises the passive power that beautiful women wield so often, with or without their consent—the kind of power the Trojan elders attribute to Helen in the Iliad. The declaration of Helen’s own surpassing beauty opens her to the prospect of objectification in her own right, but this prospect is left unacknowledged. Unlike Alcaeus or Ibycus, Sappho insists in the strongest terms on Helen’s beauty, but she conveys its erotic power only obliquely, by asserting the beauty of anything that arouses erōs. She ostentatiously avoids presenting Helen as a (destructive) object of male desire, instead allowing her to retain both her beauty and her agency.

Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Ruby Blondell.

Greek Bronze Mirror with Helen and Paris, late 4th century BCE.

[monicareconstructed]

Joan Blondell by Color Me Six Ways to Sunday

[shalpilot]

ok but i am better at drawing hair now

[chiseler]

Night Nurse

The Production Code, set down in 1930 but brazenly flouted for the next four years, was a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” for movie makers. Those behind Night Nurse appear to have used the Code’s proscriptions as a checklist of elements to include.  Undressing scenes? Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell keep needing to change into and out of their nurse’s uniforms—on camera. Use of liquor? Stanwyck gets a job looking after the children of a perpetually soused divorcee, and the hero of the film is an amiable bootlegger. Adultery? The dipsomaniac is carrying on a tawdry affair with her chauffeur (a thuggish Clark Gable.) Methods of crimes are explicitly shown, as is vigilante justice; and “apparent cruelty to children or animals,” also forbidden, is the central engine of the plot. As for Gable socking Stanwyck on the jaw, and Stanwyck jumping in Blondell’s bed because there’s a skeleton in hers—well, those are just freebies.

Night Nurse epitomizes the speedy, uninhibited, rambunctious quality of pre-Code, so unlike the genteel, gleaming polish of classical Hollywood films. It’s not an amoral movie by any means; indeed the endangered-innocents plot could derive from a silent melodrama, except that in place of D.W. Griffith’s lily-white maidens and pure-hearted heroes we get wisecracking dames and a hero who, when sent out to fetch milk for a starving child, breaks into a grocery store to get it. That a bootlegger saves the day demonstrates where Americans during the Hoover years placed their faith: not with the authorities (personified by a twitchy, corrupt doctor on the take), but with the guys who kept the booze flowing.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[chrys-is-here]

you can see her eyes now! What an improvement over crystal/facet. I think she’d be very soft in that sort of smooth and squishy way.

[dilutedh2so4]

Helen, as we saw, speaks of herself as a “statue” (agalma) (262), and the same word is used for her double (705, 1219). Similarly, when Theonoe calls the double a mimēma, or artistic “imitation” (875), she is echoing language used earlier by Teucer when he first lays eyes on Helen. Believing her to be a stranger, he calls her “the murderous image of a woman” — which correctly describes the eidōlon — and perceives her as an “imitation” (mimēma) of the Helen who was fought over at Troy (72–75).

He sees her, that is, as the double’s double. The Helen on stage is, in fact, as unreal as the eidōlon, even though she too moves, speaks, and acts (in more senses than one). Whereas her double is a divinely sculpted figure, Helen’s fictitiousness is that of a masked and costumed actor “sculpted” by the playwright. As a literary construct, she is a “double” of her poetic antecedents, her virtuous persona parasitic on the adventures of her twin.

Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation

[dilutedh2so4]

Is it really true, however, that Helen’s act is presented with disapproval in this poem? Many scholars have argued, to the contrary, that Sappho is celebrating the active assertion of female desire. Certainly, the poem emphasizes Helen’s erotic agency to an unprecedented degree. Like Alcaeus in his fragment 283, it does so in part by appropriating aspects of Helen’s own voice from the Iliad. [...] The poem thus resembles Alcaeus 283 in drawing upon Helen’s own perspective in the Iliad , by acknowledging her transgression while ascribing it to a combination of divine influence and her own agency. In comparison with Alcaeus, however, Sappho puts considerably more emphasis on the latter. She does so largely by demoting Paris from Alcaeus’s active “deceiver of his host” to the nameless object of Helen’s desire.

Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation, Ruby Blondell.

[dilutedh2so4]

Castor informs us that Helen will be worshipped as a goddess after she “reaches the end of her life” (1666–69)—a careful locution, which avoids suggesting that she ever actually grows old or dies. Nor will this Helen be limited to the conventional gender role seemingly embraced by her human persona [in Euripides' Helen]. There is no indication that she will accompany her husband to the Isles of the Blessed or be linked with him in cult. On the contrary, Castor specifies that she will be honored with ritual feasts at her brothers’ side (1668). The divine Helen will, it seems, be active independently of her husband, transcending the geographical and ideological constraints of her human marriage. The woman who is most beautiful and best defies such limitations to become a goddess exempt from the rules restricting ordinary women’s lives.

Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation.