SOURCE: "All's Well That Ends Well: Longing, Idealization, and Sadness," in Shakespeare's Reparative Comedies: A Psychoanalytic View of the Middle Plays, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 121-46.

In the excerpt below, Westlund examines the character of Helena, particularly in regards to her longing for Bertram, and her sexuality.

The play most often defines character and action, like the language out of which they are created, by "striving through intractable material for effects which hardly justify the struggle." Let us begin with Helena, the most fully developed character. In the first scene she responds to Lafew's kindly farewell remark, "you must hold the credit of your father," by launching into a soliloquy beginning: "O, were that all!" To underscore this negation of what we expect she says "I think not on my father. . . . What was he like? / I have forgot him; my imagination / Carries no favour in't but...