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.