User blog:AustinDR/PE Removal: Helen Vaughan



Okay, so....another one that I have to contest the inclusion.

The character Helen Vaughan the main antagonist of the short story The Great God Pan was recently approved on the grounds of her marrying wealthy men and then driving them insane, culminating in their suicides. And afterward, she would rob them. I had just recently finished reading the story, and I have a few problems with her.

Why Doesn't She Qualify?
One of the reasons? Her behavior is much too bizarre. The problem with the story isn't so much that there is anything offscreen - we get a pretty good visual of what happened in the story from the accounts that some characters gave - but the issue here? They are much to vague. Where exactly does it explain that Helen took sadistic pleasure at mind raping her victims into suicide? Yeah, after five counts of it, there is that indication that she does, but...Helen seems to be less of a character because all we know about her depends entirely on people's accounts of her. Helen herself never appears in the story proper. Because of that, it dampens Helen's motivations for doing what she does. I mean, she never appears in the story because she was tricked into killing herself by Villiers, and she never gets at least one line of dialogue. It makes everything about her more here say.

But from what I had researched, Helen's antics are meant to be seen as sexual in nature. The problem is that it isn't noted as such in the story aside from heavy implications. This was largely the result of the author Arthur Machen being unable to state it as such during the time period he was from.

So in short, most of where the original PE blog post went wrong was theorizing Helen's behavior based off of what little we have to go by, but because of the story itself deliberately leaving many of Helen's actions as vague, we have no solid scope of truly understanding why Helen does these horrible things.