One of the best descriptions of glamour isn’t a description of glamour at all. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte’s dark and stormy novel, Catherine Earnshaw explains to her maid Nelly the intense hold her dreams have over her: “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”
Like Earnshaw’s dreams, glamour colors the way we see the world and changes how we want to experience it. The promise it offers—an escape from the ordinary business of life, communion with beauty, and transcendence—is intoxicating. But it is also dangerous and deceitful. Glamour glosses over reality and presents a picture of how life ought to be. When we try to collect on its false promise, we get in trouble.
Helen of Troy is perhaps the first recognizably glamorous figure in all of Western civilization. “Here is a narrative not just of beauty, sex and death,” writes Bettany Hughes in her biography of Helen, “but of eternal longing, a story born out of the first civilization on the Greek mainland. Civilization is restless, greedy—it always wants more, what it does not have.” Helen’s face launched a thousand ships because she ignited desire and longing in men. Her story reveals the hold that glamour has over us all and the consequences of our pursuit of it. The powerful snare of her beauty led the
