Written by Bethany Hicks-Gravener
In 1995, Margaret Atwood published her poem Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing in which she reimagines the prolific figure of Helen, from ancient mythology, as a modern-day sex worker at a club. The poem is narrated from the point of view of Helen herself, allowing us an insight into the inner workings of the character’s brain. Atwood portrays Helen to be intelligent, aware of her surroundings and the way others perceive her, both through her line of work and through her appearance. For the reader, we are also aware of the fact that the Helen who exists from her internal monologue of the poem is not the same Helen who appears to those who visit the nightclub. The Helen that she portrays herself to be is different from the Helen who exists in her head, as is the case in so many modern and contemporary interpretations of Helen’s character.
Atwood’s poem was published right at the tail end of the Second Wave feminist movement, which focused more on the liberation of women as opposed to the attainment of equal rights. In the 1970s, there was a boom in popular feminist theoretical thinking published, allowing the feminist ideas of the Second Wave to become more integrated with everyday thinking through reading and everyday consumption. By the time that Atwood was writing Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing, over twenty years had passed since the publications of these books, allowing feminist ideologies to take a bolder step forward in the world of fictional literature. One standout component of Second Wave feminism was the idea that the personal was political, and that the patriarchy was reinforced through more ‘personal’ institutions such as marriage, the bringing up of children, and personal sexuality.
Atwood’s Helen knows how she is perceived by others through her line of work and she weaponizes this point of view to her advantage, “such hatred leaps in them, // my beery worshippers!”. Helen is so successful as a dancer because she is able to feed into what those around her want her to be – she knows they want to hate her and so she allows them to. Much like the Helen from Homer (and other ancient authors), the men who surround her cannot deal with the fact that they both despise her and are obsessed with her. To quote Sreelakshmi and Sanny’s 2022 article, her customers “despise her because they despise themselves for admiring what she stands for. Their contempt for her is merely a reflection of their contempt for themselves.” They choose to place their hatred into the idea of her because she represents perfection and explicitly highlights their own personal failures. By making her ‘modern-day’ Helen a dancer, Atwood perfectly assigns the same role in society that the Helen of mythology had – she was there to be seen but never attained for the masses. For women, Helen is a source of criticism and envy—they wish to be her in both looks and because of the power she wields: “the world is full of women // who’d tell me I should be ashamed of myself.” Helen is a constant reminder for them of the person they are not, but she is also a figure of disaster, she can take their men from them just by the idea of her (men both dying in a war fought over her name, but also because of their sexual desire for her). For men, they can lust over her, as much as it pains them to do so, but they will never be able to have her. And it is that unattainability which drives them even further into hatred for her but also an obsessive need to have her in some way and to stake their mark on her.
In terms of the Second Wave Feminism Movement, Atwood’s Helen can be argued as a reflection of women in general stepping away from patriarchal views of the female body and female sexuality. Helen shows a move towards female ownership of ‘personal’ institutions, and a first step in female choices about such institutions, “exploited, they’d say. Yes any way // you cut it, but I’ve a choice // of how, and I’ll take the money.” In Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing, Atwood does reflect male ideas concerning the objectification of the female body however, what makes the poem such a standout, and feminist, take of Helen’s character is that she is so aware of this. She knows how she is viewed and she chooses to own her sexuality through her choice of employment. At the end of the poem, although it does feel quite jarring at times, the key takeaway is that Atwood’s Helen has choices, she is a free woman who is not tied to a man, she has not been taken from one place to another just because a goddess decreed it so. She has the choice of movement and freedom, and she chooses to manipulate her body and her beauty to become a mask of herself for her own benefit. Atwood’s Helen has freedoms that Homer and Euripides’ Helen never had.
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. ‘Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing’. From Morning in the Burning House. Canada: McClelland and Stewart, Inc, 1995.
Sreelakshmi, A.N. and Sanny, Susan. ‘Revisiting Myth in the Sphere of Gendered Objectification: An Analysis of the Poem “Helen of Troy does Countertop Dancing” by Margaret Atwood’. Comparative Literature: East & West 6, no. 2 (2022): 236-249. https://doi.org/10.1080/25723618.2022.2158559.
Thornham, Sue. ‘Second Wave Feminism’. In The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism, edited by Sarah Gamble, 25-35. London: Routledge, 2001.
Vieira, Ana Paula Raspini. ‘Goddess or Countertop Dancer: Mythological Female Figures in Margaret Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House’. PhD diss., Federal University of Santa Catarina, 2014. Accessed 20th January 2026. https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/123230/326986.pdf?sequence=1
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