Amazing Helena

Falling in love with a guy, trapping him into a life-long loveless marriage, fining out he’s been trying to get with someone else while you’re supposedly ‘dead’… What’s a girl to do? In Helena’s case as we read in All’s Well That Ends Well, she solves all her problems by tricking her husband into having sex with him and then gets pregnant with his child. In the 2012 best-selling thriller Gone Girl, (MAJOR SPOILERS SO DO NOT READ AHEAD OF THIS!) the lead character, Amy, fins out her husband is cheating on her. So, she does what any strong, smart woman would do- she fakes her death, frames her husband, uses his frozen sperm to get herself knocked up, and pins her disappearance on an old lover who she brutally murders in his house. While As You Like It is definitely not as extreme as Gone Girl, both of these characters are a lot alike. They both go after what they want, even though they aren’t expected to do so. Helena lives in a time where women weren’t generally allowed to fight like she did to keep her husband, while Amy is in a marriage where her husband doesn’t expect a lot of love from her anymore.  Both of these women are also pretty good at manipulating people. Helena is pretty quick to get Diana and the widow in on her plan, and Amy is incredible at getting her old lover, Desi, to drop everything and hide her. Helena, however, isn’t completely crazy. She doesn’t feel the need to fake a rape and slaughter an innocent man just to get her husband to stay with her forever. I feel  that if As You Like It was to be written nowadays, it would be pretty similar to Gone Girl. But, on the contrary, there is no way Gone Girl would ever fly in any time period except for ours.

That Weird Medieval Switcheroo Pregnancy Trope

Shakespeare’s play “All’s Well That Ends Well” is resolved happily when Helena reveals that not only is she alive, but in fact, it was she that Bertram slept with, not Diana, and she’s even pregnant with their child! Everything settles into place: chaste Diana will earn herself a hefty dowry from the King, Helen consummates her marriage to Bertram, and… Well, you know. It’s in the title.

We don’t often see narratives like this anymore, or at least, not positive ones. Helena’s trick, presenting herself as someone else in order to fool Bertram into having sex with her, would never turn out “for the best” in the modern day. Rather than a story of comedy, bringing things to a cheery close, that sort of plot would be found in a horror story about a rape – especially in this era of technological concerns such as identity theft and other forms of internet based identity deception. (By the way, has anybody written the futuristic barcode-identity dystopia version of this story yet?)

A credit card stealer... claiming to find out if your card has been stolen.
Just another day of  liars lying on the internet, right?

But by early modern standards it’s just fine. Maybe even funny! Helena’s cleverness gives her the life and the love she’s dreamed of. How is that possible?

There’s some weird precedent for this kind of thing. Shakespeare isn’t just pulling this out of his elaborate joking sexual metaphor for a butt. One that comes to mind is the story of Uther and Igraine, the parents of Arthur Pendragon, or King Arthur. Yeah, the one who pulls the sword out of the stone and all that.

There are many different versions of the story, but here’s a short version of a popular one: Igraine’s husband, the Duke, rides off to battle while Uther has Merlin bewitch him to make him look like the Duke. Then, so disguised, he has sex with Igraine. Igraine gets pregnant, the Duke conveniently dies in battle, and afterward Igraine and Uther marry so that Arthur, future King of England, is a legitimate child.

Ringing a few bells? Okay, let me reword a few things.

Uther wants to bed/wed Igraine, so he pretends to be somebody else. She gets pregnant, he marries her, and they live happily ever after with their legitimately born elite-class child. Helena’s actions are basically a gender reversal of Uther’s. In “All’s Well” the main differences are that they’re already married (though not consummated, kind of important back then) and she wants to get pregnant.

If you ask me, Shakespeare’s doing something interesting here. Sure, Uther and Igraine aren’t the only story of mistaken-identity-cheating in old stories, but they’re unique in that it turns out alright. The fact that it turns out alright is made possible by the fact that Uther is a powerful high-born man, and Igraine – often by as little as 3 hours! – becomes an unmarried widow, so he has every right to “claim” her, in a sense.

Helena looking at Bertram, Bertram looking away...
Shakespeare sets up nicely for Helena to get what she wants.

And in a similar sense, Shakespeare’s decision to begin the play with that half-complete marriage legitimizes this trickery as something that can work from a female standpoint. What if she and Bertram hadn’t been married? Why, she’d be a seductress of some sort. But because the King married them, she’s only getting the sex he’s legally required to give her – by early modern standards of course, since this is all rape by ours, but marital rape and informed consent weren’t concepts back then.

Helena gets pregnant, Bertram’s in love with her after all, the end. Ta-da! Shakespeare takes a plot that previously required patriarchal ownership to make it work, makes it about a woman, and succeeds by using the marriage standards of the time to put her in power instead.

Not half bad.

Leave Her Virginity Alone

Being the only child of a well-known doctor, people can assume that Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well is a well-educated woman with some background in her late father’s profession. But even with this assumption, boys Helena’s age only value her on the basis of her sexuality:

Wow...A "withered pear"? Thanks.

“Your date is better in your porridge than in your cheek, and your virginity, your old virginity, is like one of our French withered pears: it was formerly better, marry, yet ‘tis a withered pear (1.1.145-9).”

This metaphor towards her virginity has the same crudeness as a conversation in Arrested Development between Michael and his mother Lucille:

“Michael: It [the family cabin] is going to be up in Tahoe a couple more days. Maybe you could take a date.
Lucille: How am I supposed to find someone willing to go into that musty old claptrap?
Michael: [Long awkward stare] The cabin… Yes! That would be difficult, too.”

Both scenarios refer to the vagina as a horrid and vile part of the female anatomy. But no one expresses this unsavoriness when it’s associated with reproduction and furthering of a man’s name throughout generations:

“Out with’t [virginity]! Within t’one year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse (1.1.136-8).”

Ohhhh, now I get it. When a baby is the end product the vagina is not so bad, but any other function that’s necessary for the good health of the woman, and for reproduction itself, then it’s condemned. Helena’s is horrid because she refuses to give it up. Lucille’s is vile because she’s an older woman and no longer fertile. Makes complete sense.

But here’s what kills me about this logic, it creates this idea that women should be ashamed to talk about any other biologically natural function of the female body. Female sexuality is only positively spoken of when in it’s toward something societally desirable. Any cramps, pain, itching, keep that stuff private. And no, it’s not the most pleasant topic, but why should I keep my own “victoria” a secret when men can openly make references to their “disco stick”? And, bringing it back to the literature, why must Helena’s virginity be condemned when she exercises full possession of her sexuality by deciding to save it for what she determines as the right time? Preferably, when Bertram and her consummate.

Helena is right to stand by her virginity. She has the right to hold onto to her virginity without it being called a “withered pear”.  And even though she receives harsh critiques, she creates a plan to use her intelligence and medical background knowledge in order to gain what she wants and uses her femininity with power and respect. She saves the King and she marries Bertram on her own terms. Helena shows true feminine power. She shows that a woman can use her intelligence and  doesn’t need to compromise her sexuality to get what she wants.