Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, by Anne Carson
Maria Zoccola
I’m a little bit obsessed with Helen of Troy. This is not news to anyone who knows me, or in fact to anyone who happens to have seen me on any social media platform created by man or machine in the past few years. My lifelong interest in mythology recently culminated in a poetry collection I published with Scribner in early 2025, a book called Helen of Troy, 1993. The collection reimagines the Homeric Helen as a dissatisfied housewife in small-town Tennessee in the early nineties, blending myth and modernity through persona poems that pay homage to both the Iliad and Chuck E. Cheese. Embarking on this project meant indulging my fixation on Helen of Troy far beyond the poems I was writing myself: I sought Helen out in television shows, comic books, stage plays, advertisements. I tracked her through mythology and scholarship. And, too, I hunted down other poets and writers who were engaging with Helen through inspiration and adaptation, calling her down from whatever afterlife she might currently be inhabiting to serve as muse for creative projects large and small.
I’d already been saving one particular Helen work to read after I’d finished my own collection, as a kind of reward for my perseverance: Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a version of Euripides’s play Helen by the great Anne Carson. I’m personally something of a Carson mega-fan. I’ve inhaled her work across poetry and translation and stage adaptation—to me, Carson represents the very best of what a lifelong engagement with the Classics and a rigorous commitment to a creative life can produce. She turns a phrase on the blade of a knife. Her images become weapons, her characters small ticking bombs. “A heart surgeon told me once, / no need to worry: once the cutting starts, / a wound / shines by its own light,” her play announces. Carson’s version of the Euripides is under sixty pages, and yet I knew it would unzip the back of my skull.
Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a mashup of the end of the Trojan War and 1950s Hollywood, and the spotlight is trained directly on its single suffering speaker. Norma Jeane Baker (the real name, and realer persona, of Marilyn Monroe) is staying at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles to work on a film with the director Fritz Lang. Her residence in the hotel does not seem quite voluntary; she is not free to come and go or to see her family—or rather, Helen of Troy’s family, daughter Hermione and husband Menelaus. Moviemaking takes a long time, and as a consequence, Norma Jeane has been shut up in the Chateau Marmont for over ten years. To keep him from interfering, her husband has been informed that Norma Jeane has instead been kidnapped and taken to Troy. Menelaus has spent the intervening decade fighting the Trojans for Norma Jeane’s release, a project of double utility, as it has kept him occupied and allowed MGM to invest heavily in the film rights to the war. Alas, Menelaus has recently discovered that Norma Jeane hasn’t been in Troy at all: instead, a magical cloud in the shape of a woman formed a very convincing body double, a cloud that dissipated once returned to Los Angeles. Norma Jeane’s troubles, therefore, are many: placate her deceived husband, worry about her absent and pill-swallowing daughter, and find a way to escape Fritz Lang and the Chateau Marmont.
While Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is not a scene-for-scene retelling of the Euripides, it grows directly from the rich soil of the original plot. In Euripides’s Helen, an eidolon goes to Troy in Helen’s place while Helen waits out the war in Egypt, where King Theoclymenos is now angling for her hand. When Menelaus shows up at the war’s end, the two plot to sail back to Sparta right under the king’s nose. By recasting Helen of Troy as Marilyn Monroe, Carson yokes together two women so weighed down by their respective symbolisms that the resulting mouthpiece seems to pulse on the page, her speeches echoing across centuries and geographies with a terrifying resonance. Helen and Norma Jeane are twin figureheads of the fetishized feminine, women who have “the same power—to stick in the throat of Desire,” as Anne Carson said in a rare interview for LitHub. In Carson’s play, Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane is trapped, deprived of agency and humanity, her name and fame a shell inside which the real woman curls unseen. “She’s just a bit of grit caught in the world’s need for transcendence,” remarks the play’s chorus character, who is in fact Norma Jeane in the guise of Truman Capote. In the Euripides, Helen’s eventual escape from Egypt points her to a bright and honorable future; her piety and faithfulness to Menelaus have earned her a happy ending. In Carson’s play, Norma Jeane’s escape may bring a change of physical circumstance, but there can be no freedom from the objectification Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane represents:
Rape
is the story of Helen,
Persephone,
Norma Jeane,
Troy.
War is the context,
and God is a boy.
Oh my darlings,
they tell you you’re born with a precious pearl.
Truth is,
it’s a disaster to be a girl.
Carson intersperses the scenes of her play with linguistic meditations on relevant Greek words, such as άρπάξειν, “to take,” which Carson traces through the Latin (rapio) and into the English (rape). The conclusion: “Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.” Norma Jeane Baker of Troy refuses to cover its eyes, however. Its speaker stares down the audience, daring us to look away, we who are complicit in the appetites consuming Helen/Marilyn/Norma Jeane down to nothing, who are here, in the end, still to take from her. To me, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is an Anne Carson masterpiece, original and sobering, a shining entry in the world’s library of Helen of Troy adaptations. I keep it on the shelf next to my Homer and Vergil. (And next to my own book—please forgive a poet her shy adoration.)
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and has spent many years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025), earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick.