According to the biblical narrative, in the beginning of time, Eve partook of the fruit off the forbidden tree and so doomed humanity to a life of sin. There have been many people who have interpreted this story as a demonstration of the sinfulness inherent in womanhood, a common motif amongst much literature and art, still to this day. One such example of this is perhaps present in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, a fitting comparison between the fall of humanity and the fall of one foolish scholar.
In Scene Twelve, Faustus when forced to face his mortality, asks Mephastophilis to bring him “heavenly Helen” (Marlowe 12.75) so that her “sweet embracings may extinguish clean/These thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow” (12.76-77). This comes just after an unknown Old Man appears and tries to get Faustus to reconsider his deal with the devil and save his soul from eternal torment. Instead of taking the man’s advice, Faustus turns to sleeping with Helen whose “face...launched a thousand ships,/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium” (12.81-82). He even states a little bit later that, “heaven be in these lips” (12.86). Not only is Faustus putting a woman above his relationship with God and the salvation of his soul, but Helen herself isn’t even a woman. Faustus states earlier in Scene Nine when asked to present Alexander the Great to the Emperor that, “it is not in my ability to present/before your eyes the true substantial bodies” (9.39-40) that the Emperor would wish to see, because they have “long since [been] consumed to dust” (9.41). He amends this problem by saying that he can conjure “such spirits as can lively resemble Alexander” (9.44). Faustus admits that he cannot bring to life the actual people that have died, and instead, he conjures spirits to take their forms. However, it isn’t always spirits, for in Scene Five, when Faustus asks Mephastophilis for a wife, the demon responds that Faustus cannot have one, but that he’ll “fetch thee a wife in the devil’s name” (5.145) before bringing in a “devil dressed like a woman” (5.145 [stage direction]).
In sleeping with Helen, Faustus is at best, sleeping with some spirits and at worst, sleeping with a literal devil. She tempts him away from the message of the Old Man and away from salvation as he praises her and regards her as higher than god. In this instance, she is acting as a representation of the first sin, where Eve tempts Adam into disobeying God. Also, Helen herself is connected to the fall of Troy, where her beauty tempts Paris into stealing her away to his home, bringing the Greeks and Troy’s destruction down on them. Helen, and therefore women, is the fall of Adam, the fall of Troy, and the fall of Faustus.
Works Cited:
Marlowe, Christopher. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams, 9th ed., A, W.W. Norton & Co., 2012, pp. 1128–1163.
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