Helena
Helena functions as the play's most humanly vulnerable comic figure — the character whose pain at rejection and disbelief at acceptance give the forest comedy its emotional undertow. Her self-deprecation is funny and also not entirely funny, and the play benefits from the tension between those two things.
Appears In
Biography
Helena is the play's most openly self-deprecating character — tall, fair, and convinced of her own undesirability in a way that reads as comic but carries something real beneath it. She loves Demetrius, who transferred his affections from her to Hermia before the play begins, and her response to this rejection is not dignity but a kind of compulsive self-abasement: she tells Demetrius where Hermia and Lysander plan to flee, hoping to win his gratitude even at the cost of betraying her friend.
When both Lysander and Demetrius are enchanted to love her simultaneously, Helena's reaction is not delight but suspicion and distress: she is certain they are mocking her, and the more ardently they pursue her the more convinced she becomes that she is the victim of an elaborate joke. It is one of the play's most quietly devastating comic situations — a woman so accustomed to being unwanted that being wanted by everyone feels more humiliating than being wanted by no one.
Her final reconciliation with the now-correctly-enchanted Demetrius gives her what she wanted from the start of the play, but the route to it — through betrayal, forest chaos, and the sustained suspicion that love, when offered, must be a trick — gives the resolution a complexity that the comedy does not pause to fully examine.
Motivation
Helena is motivated by love for Demetrius that persists despite — and is perhaps intensified by — his clear indifference. She is driven to increasingly undignified lengths by a desire not just for his love but for simple acknowledgment that she is worth something, a need the enchantment satisfies in the wrong way before the right correction arrives.
Personality
Helena is one of Shakespeare's most psychologically interesting comic figures: her self-deprecation is too persistent and too specific to be entirely comic, and her inability to accept love even when it is offered reveals a degree of internalised rejection that the play's happy ending does not wholly resolve. She is also funny — her long speeches of lovesick complaint have a rhythmic self-awareness that suggests she knows exactly how she sounds and is doing it anyway — which is a different and more interesting thing than simply being a victim.