#gender posting

Helen confounds these neat distinctions between domestic and heroic memory by violating the norms of each gender. She makes a parody out of Iliadic forms of remembering kin—the kind of memory valorized by both Nestor and Agenor—because, as a woman, she has no business sailing to Troy and not minding her child and parents. The similarity of Sappho’s phrasing to the Iliadic imperatives serves only to remind us of how the male model of remembering during battle is being perverted for a woman’s (Sappho’s and Helen’s) poetic purposes. In a different way, Helen also violates the Penelopean model of memory by escaping from husband and house, removing herself both physically and mnemonically from her situation as the wife of Menelaus. Helen does not remember according to either the male or the female paradigm, but in the process of transgressing these norms, she illuminates some of the complex interconnections between the arts of memory and poetry.