Page 14 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Thesis. Beautiful Homeric Helen of Troy, in her red weavings, represents the arduous bloody strife men are willing to endure for her sake,
“Helen in the chamber; she was weaving a great web,
a red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaeans, struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god.”16
Her weavings of the tragic, violent experience of war mirrors, and allegorizes the universal weavings of Lady Beauty herself. Just as beautiful Helen weaves the war struggles of Troy endured for her sake,17 Lady Beauty weaves the war struggles of Europe endured for her sake. Thus, Helen becomes, as the wise elders see, terrible beauty’s extended metaphor.18 So supernatural is the radiant glory of beauty, whether in its physical or ideological beauty, that it collapses time and space. Whatever Trojan war struggles Helen, as Lady Beauty, weaves in her fabled tapestry of ancient times, these eerily come to pass in the modern aesthetic tapestry of Hitler’s Nazism. Lady Helen’s weavings of suffering and misery, also an archetype of Homer’s poiesis,19 not only mirrors the Iliad’s epic madness and
16 Il.,3.125-128.
17 Il.,3.125-128.
18 What is suggested is that an extended metaphor refers to an allegory.
19The Scholia suggest that Homer has created an “archetype of his own poíesis.” “For the association in ancient Greece between poetic composition and weaving, and for Helen as Homer’s parallel,” Roisman suggests to refer to “Scholia bT on Iliad 3.126– 27: (“the poet has formed a worthy archetype of his own poiesis”). See Clader 1976, 7– 9; Kennedy 1986; Suzuki 1989, 40; Austin 1994, 38.” This footnote was gathered from footnote 18 from Hanna Roisman’s article. Roisman, H. “Helen in the Iliad: causa belli and victim of war: from silent weaver to public speaker.” The American Journal
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