Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing by Margaret Atwood

"Stripping for Immortality: A Jungian Analysis of Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing"

Cliff Fosmore and Brett Ruby, 2008

Clearly, it makes sense that most women feel disgust and hate towards those who sell their bodies and degrade the integrity of females everywhere.  However, what if there is another side to the average, earthly woman’s hate of the “world’s oldest profession”?  “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing” is a poem about ethereal power and unmatched beauty.

            It cannot be overlooked that the name in the title is a very well known myth.  Helen of Troy, most beautiful woman in the world.  Such an allusion provides a clue as to the mindset of the speaker of the poem.  The stripper scoffs at those other homely females who tell her to “be ashamed of [herself]” and passes at the opportunity to attain “varicose veins” by working a regular day job.  These veins are clearly impossible for one so lovely and are a symptom of those simple mortals.  This archetype of beauty is reborn in the speaker as a woman upon a stage, looking down on her audience of “rows of heads and upturned eyes.”  The scene invokes a feeling of worship and awe and the speaker doesn’t hide the fact she entertains such an audience, calling the men her “beery worshippers”.  Surely, Helen of Troy should be worshipped, but the men do not see it as such.  They see her persona, the everyday beauty who sell’s her body for profit because she doesn’t know any other way.  What they miss is that in truth, they are paying homage to a true deity.

            What they miss is this woman’s reason to strip, her inner energy, her anima.  She holds herself in very high esteem whispering she “comes from the province of the gods” and that her “mother was raped by a holy swan”.  The allusion to Helen’s mother, Leda give’s a certain allure to the speaker and makes her higher than everyone else.  She admits that her worshippers would like to “see through [her]” but then returns that “nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency” meaning that while they look upon her naked form and think they know what’s going on, they have no idea.  They do not see her “rising…in the air” in a “blazing swan-egg of light” again alluding to her divine lineage, revealing her to be a goddess, looking down upon them all, taking in the idolization.  Through stripping and being transparent to them, she believes she will be forever cherished by her subjects and knows she’s above them all in a blazing light.  She challenges anyone who denies her birthright as a daughter of Zeus in this lamentation she calls a “torch song” suggesting a double entendre where her audience is oblivious to the existence of this great goddess they unknowingly worship and that it is also an energy that will “burn” anyone that lays a hand on her holy body. The “burn” is another allusion to Helen having caused the Trojan war showing her danger and power, her divinity.  She strips for the immortality, for the essence of her hidden anima, a reincarnate Helen of Troy.

(URL: AP English Literature )

Text:

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

 

Margaret Atwood

 

(URL: Poemhunter )