CHAPTER 33
Marguerite Johnson
Feminists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have embraced Sappho as a symbol of female emancipation and political and social protest. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Suffragettes, and feminists living in the diaspora of Paris’ Left Bank championed Sappho. As second wave feminism developed in the United States in the 1970s, Sappho became an icon of their struggles and their victories. As feminists sought to reclaim women’s history, Sappho became emblematic of, and entwined with female scholarship, translation and pedagogy.
This chapter focuses on Sappho and the feminist movement during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It considers her place in both Suffragette literalized theatricality (Apter 1996: 15) and speeches for rhetorical protest. As a point of comparison and contrast, it discusses her appropriation by women such as Natalie Clifford Barney and her turn-of-the-century Parisian salon. Moving to the era of second wave feminism in the United States, the chapter provides examples of the many references to, and appropriation of Sappho and her work, particularly by radical lesbian feminists. The chapter ends with some case studies of Sappho in the twenty-first century.
Suffragettes
An early activity aligned with the western feminist agenda was the recovery of female role models as sources of inspiration. Looking back to the past to energize and inspire present conditions and to fortify future ambitions has marked feminist movements since the twentieth century. Historical figures such as Boudicca (Johnson 2014) and Joan of Arc (Warner 2013) were part of the rhetoric of western feminism in the twentieth century, providing a symbolic language for women to protest their status via recourse to heroines of the past. Sappho was part of the rhetoric of the British Suffrage movement, represented alongside other historical women in A Pageant of Great Women, conceived and produced by the Actresses’ Franchise League, written by Cicely Hamilton, and directed by Edith Craig (Johnson 2014). The play made its London debut at the Scala Theatre on November 10, 1909, inspired in part by William Henry Margetson’s classically-styled painting for the Women Writers’ Suffrage League, which depicts woman being snatched from justice (female) by prejudice (male). Designed to promote the movement and raise funds for it, A Pageant of Great Women involved female activists representing the great women of history, organized into groups: saints, rulers, scholars, artists, heroines, and warriors. Each historical woman spoke several lines, then remained on stage, “silently building up a powerful, visual body of evidence in the debate on women’s enfranchisement between woman and prejudice and presided over by Justice” (Cockin 2005: 527). Sappho’s representative is the first to enter in the section titled “The Artists” and the first to speak:
Thy voice, oh Sappho, down the ages rings!
Woven of passion and power, thy mighty verse
Streams o’er the years, a flaming banner of song!
(Hamilton 1910: 29)
In the published text, financed by the Suffrage Shop in 1910, photographs of the main characters were included. Sappho, represented by Eva Balfour, wore a diaphanous swathe of white fabric; depicted standing, lightly plucking a lyre, her eyes directly at the viewer. The published version also contained biographical notes on the historical women (Hamilton 1910: 53–69), which represented a significant contribution to the nascent concept of women’s history. The entry on Sappho reads: “Sappho.—Born in Lesbos about 630 BC; died about 570 BC Poet; styled by Plato ‘the tenth muse’” (Hamilton 1910: 57).
The inclusion of Sappho in A Pageant of Great Women marked an important shift in her public representation. Not only was Sappho heralded for her artistry, she was freed from the longstanding obsession with her sexuality. Like the other historical women, Sappho and her achievements were normalized. She was interpreted by women who sought not to pathologize her desires with newfangled medical diagnoses, nor to straitjacket her poetry with rigid philological zeal. She was simply and unequivocally a role model, as voiced in a speech by Matilda Joslyn Gage:
Although so much has been said of women’s unfitness for public life, it can be seen, from Semiramis to Victoria, that she has a peculiar fitness for governing. In poetry, Sappho was honored with the title of the Tenth Muse.
(Gage 1852; 1978: 128)
Gage, an early American Suffragette who was active during the nineteenth century, was among the first feminists to reference not only Sappho but numerous other women to highlight their significant place in history. Gage, like Hamilton, emphasizes Sappho’s poetic genius and thus challenges the relevancy of the prurient appropriation of her and her songs by male biographers and artists. She achieves this by simple omission of such details.
To correct the pages of history, and to rewrite the male canon that traditionally cast women as decidedly “other,” was a vital political action of first wave feminists. Before Gage and Hamilton and the thousands of feminists they typified, the imperative to rebel against the anti-woman historical and literary refrain was voiced by Jane Austen. In the concluding pages of Jane Austen’s 1817 novel, Persuasion, Captain Harville comments to Anne Eliot:
But let me observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose and verse … I do not think that I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon a woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.
(Austen 1817: 204)
Anne replies:
Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in a much higher degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow a book to prove anything.
(Austen 1817; 2007: 204)
Anne Eliot’s reply to Captain Harville’s observation that male authors destroy women’s collective reputation is insightful: men have the advantage of controlling narratives because they have the advantage of education. Her response goes to the heart of one of the most compelling agendas of early feminists; namely, their fight for education and artistic expression. It also explains why Sappho, and Austen herself (who also featured in A Pageant of Great Women in the category of “Learned Women”), were important heroines of the Suffragettes.
It is anachronistic to consider whether Sappho or Austen would have donned the green and violet of the Suffragette movement. But this did not stop male scholars and writers weighing into such debates. In his endless dedication to keeping Sappho on the pedestal he constructed for her, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in response to J.-M.-F. Bascoul’s La Chaste Sappho de Lesbos (1911) with its proto-feminist poet, declares there “was no mascula Sappho and she would not have joined the suffragettes” (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1913: 16; in DeJean 1989: 219). This was the great philologist’s response to the subject of women in the French Third Republic (1870–1920), which included the championing of women’s history. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was concerned with the anachronisms that characterized the burgeoning field of feminism as a historical subject in France, which had become “as fashionable as feminism itself ” with “[s]cholars and feminist writers … [identifying] signs of historical feminism in every conceivable time and place” (Offen 2017: 344). Bascoul’s La Chaste, one example of the retroactive application of the appellative “feminist” to the poet, offended Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s ideal Sappho. It was also regarded by his fellow scholars as typical of the French abominations in the name of Sappho (Shorey 1913: 361).
Women of the Left Bank
The appropriation of Sappho during the years of the Suffrage movement and the French Third Republic coincided with her resurrection and revisioning by a bohemian enclave of women on the Left Bank in Paris who created a movement known as “Sapho 1900.” While the role of women in the cultural circles of the Left Bank has traditionally been assigned to that of muse, revisionist feminist historians began to challenge this view in the mid-1980s. Shari Benstock (1986), for example, has argued that women such as Natalie Barney surpassed attendant roles in their indifference to male constructions of the female as the muse to male genius. These women were concerned with some of the same issues integral to the Suffragette movement; particularly a determination to revive, reinterpret, appropriate, and embody historical women. Sappho was their foremost icon. However, it was Sappho as synonymous with lesbianism, reinstated during the fin de siècle, evidenced in Charles Baudelaire’s controversial poetry collection of 1857, Les Fleurs du Mal (Olmsted 2016: 102–136; Johnson 2021a: 39–58), which inspired them. Harriette Andreadis also emphasizes “two important sociocultural developments” that “came together to create the perfect context for continued citations of Sappho and for her adoption as lesbian patron saint”:
… not only had homosexual identities and the language used to describe them begun to crystallize into their modern form by late mid-century and then solidified by century’s end throughout most of Europe, but the stunning discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri with their Sappho fragments was made at the turn of the twentieth century.
(2011: 26)
Natalie Barney (1876–1972), an American heiress and expatriate, was a leading doyenne of Parisian bohemia for over sixty years; first in Neilly and, later, at 20 rue Jacob on the Left Bank (Johnson 2021b: 59–76). Barney wrote plays, poetry, and novels, entertained and patronized artists and writers, and lived openly as a lesbian. Barney also identified as a feminist, having been profoundly affected by a scene she and her young sister witnessed as girls on a trip to Belgium:
Before settling in France, we visited Belgium. Our parents, wanting to linger at their leisure in the Belgium museums whose horrific paintings scared us, entrusted us to a guide with instructions to take us to the Zoo. … How indignant we were (this may have been in the Netherlands) to see a woman and a dog pulling a milk cart together while the man sauntered alongside, calmly smoking a pipe. From that day on we were feminists.
(Barney 1960; 1992: 5)
In 1920, Barney published Pensées d’une Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon), which opened with her views on feminism in the section called, “Sexual Adversity, War, and Feminism.”
Here is an essentialist philosophy on the qualities of both men and women in which Barney argues that men are naturally drawn to war, while women operate from a basis of love. She further claims that the act of love is more courageous than the act of killing. In another section, “Misunderstanding,” she wrote about homosexuality, expanding the title in the second edition (1921) to “Misunderstanding, or Sappho’s Lawsuit,” which consists of historical writings on same-sex desire with additional notes by Barney.
The profound influence of feminism on Barney’s life and lifestyle, which she aligned with the freedom to express feminine sexuality, namely lesbianism in her case, was also intertwined with the undeniable influence of Greek culture. Benstock (1986: 277) records that it was the heiress Eva Palmer (1874–1952), mostly likely Barney’s first lover, who introduced her to the world of ancient Greece, including the works of Sappho. However, Suzanne Rodriguez correctly states that it was in fact a youth whom Barney referred to in her journals as Alcée (French for Alcaeus), who was really John Ellerton Lodge (1878–1952), the son of a prominent American politician. Barney was 15 years old, and Alcée was two years younger. According to Rodriguez, Alcée showed Barney a book, “published in 1885” (2002: 54), which was clearly Sappho: memoir, text, selected renderings and a literal translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. The impact on Barney was intense, as she records in an unpublished manuscript, Mémoires secrets: “the greatest poetess of ancient Greece shared my attraction” (Rodriguez 2002: 54). From the same manuscript, Barney quotes a poem by Alcée that compares her to Sappho:
Come, let us stand together
Thou and I, my Sappho.
(Rodriguez 2002: 54)
While Eva Palmer was not the first to introduce Barney to Sappho, she certainly contributed to her fascination with the poet. Palmer, a wealthy and highly educated American, became most famous for her lifelong commitment to the study and promotion of Greek antiquity. Her knowledge of the Classics was extensive and, in 1893 while the Palmers were vacationing in the same location as the Barney family, Bar Habor in Maine, she and Barney starred in an amateur production organized by several adolescents of the well-heeled holiday-makers. According to Rodriguez, it was in fact Barney who entrusted her young friend with Wharton’s book, and Palmer recited Sappho in the original, draped in Grecian garments, next to artificial Grecian columns.
Benstock rightly contends that it was Sappho’s poetry and an appreciation of a Greek culture that provided Barney with “an alternative to the heterosexual imperatives of the Christian world” (1986: 277). Benstock quotes one of Barney’s letters, which includes her eulogizing on the importance of Sappho to her: “[Sappho’s] poetry and her music are but the accompaniment of her loves. … When she speaks, she seems to exist only for art; when she loves, one knows that she lives only for love” (Wickes 1977: 52; Benstock 1986: 270). During the years she resided on the Left Bank, from 1909 until her death in 1972, Barney continued to foster her love of the ancient Greek world and its language, as well as her passion for staging productions, some inspired by Greek antiquity, others by the songs of Sappho, as well as original works, some of which she wrote herself. Barney’s house at 20 rue Jacob was well-appointed for such activities, being possessed of an adjoining wooded garden, complete with a Doric temple named Temple àl’Amitié (Temple of Friendship), which she restored: see Johnson 2021b: 61–62.
It may appear at first glance that the appropriation of Sappho by a bohemian such as Barney would be different to that of a Suffragette. However, Sappho was something of a unifying entity as a figure worthy of detailed biographical record and literary revival. Additionally, both groups of women materialized their admiration of Sappho through public and private performance. Elsewhere I have discussed the British Suffragettes’ use of dramatic appropriations of Boudicca through the “theoretical framework of dramaturgical analysis to better articulate the processes and ideologies associated with social movements engaged in opposition to power structures” (Johnson 2014: unpaged). This same technique is evident in the Suffragettes’ employment of spectacle in A Pageant of Great Women, which featured both Boudicca (Boadicea) and Sappho, and in the pageant-protests they enacted in costume. While Barney’s Sappho-inspired pageants were private occasions, they nevertheless match the literal embodiment of historical women by the Suffragettes to articulate a feminine aesthetic and liberation contingent on feminist discourse.
One of Barney’s principal literary and intimate partners, and the woman who affected her life most profoundly, was Renée Vivien (1877–1909). An expatriate from England who, like Barney, made the Left Bank her home, Vivien was also open about her sexuality and was determined to live outside societal norms and boundaries. In her biography of Barney, Rodriguez (2002: 111) outlines the personal qualities and shared interests that bonded the two women, including being “connected by their feminist vision of a world in which women were not only as free as men, but superior to them as well.” Together, Barney and Vivien came close to successfully taking their idolization of Sappho further than the performances in her honor, through plans to establish a school along the lines of Wilamowitz’ legendary “School of Sappho.” Both women traveled to Lesbos in 1904 and were so transfixed by the island they discussed establishing an all-female poetry school there. Barney records their fervor in one of her memoires, Souvenirs indiscrets (Barney 1960; 1992: 45).
Access to classical languages was, essentially, an exclusive privilege of elite men, which was symbolic not only of the oppression of women, but the working classes as well (see Nagel 2002: 61). Therefore, prior to the 1909 sojourn to Mytilene, Barney, and Vivien sought tuition in Greek to compose their own Sappho-inspired poetry and to produce translations of the original works (see Fabre-Serris 2016: 94–95). In 1902, Barney published Cinq petits dialogues grecs (Five Short Greek Dialogues) under the pseudonym, Tryphe (from Pierre Loüys’ erotic novel of 1896, Aphrodite). Joan DeJean discusses the collection in relation to Barney’s debt to male predecessors like Loüys and his precursor, Baudelaire, as well as her own refashioning of Sapphism:
As in [Bauldeaire’s] “Lesbos,” Sapphism is a “cult” to which one is “consecrated,” an exclusive bond that the initiate cannot break without being pronounced “unworthy” … Barney inaugurates the Sapphic fiction … by assaulting her reader with a definition of Sapphism as a totalizing “cult” experience, a pseudoreligious experience that requires those who would be believers to sacrifice everything else to it, to give up all aspects of a traditional “normal” life … Barney offers a “cunning perversion” of the standard defense of pederastia … she proclaims its female counterpart to be the initiation of the young female to the perversion of all public values.
(DeJean 1989: 280–281)
In 1903, Vivien published Sapho, traduction nouvelle avec le texte grec (Sappho: A New Translation with the Greek Text), the first work in French to make available almost the entire collection of Sappho’s oeuvre (see Fabre-Serris 2016: 96–102, also Johnson 2021b: 65–66). As Hamilton went on to do in the published version of A Pageant of Great Women, Vivien records the life of her historical subject (in both a Preface [1903: i–v] and a Biographie de Psappha [1903: vii–xii]). However, unlike the traditionally pure, even prudish by contemporary standards, representations of historical women by the Suffragettes, women of the Left Bank such as Vivien privileged their role models’ sexuality. Therefore, Vivien discusses Sappho as both poet and lesbian (Fabre-Serris 2016: 96). Importantly, Vivien discounts and indeed removes Phaon from Sappho’s biography, stating that his usual presence amounts to nothing more than a myth created by writers following a popular tradition (Vivien 1903: x). This dismissal of the legendary ferryman then sets the scene for Vivien’s emphasis on, and exploration of Sappho as a lesbian, which extends to her perpetuation of the “School of Sappho.” As with the works of many scholars who support the schoolmistress reading of the life of Sappho, Vivien references the names of women recorded in the fragments and testimonia as the poet’s pupils in both poetry and same-sex desire (1903: ii–iii).
Like Barney and Vivien, Virginia Woolf regarded the acquisition of Greek as an important part of a woman’s education. However, Woolf occupied a different position on Classics, including the study of Sappho, to the women of the Left Bank. While feminist historians and literary critics have tended to make claims of Woolf’s personal distress at alleged gaps in her Classical education, revisionist scholars such as Colleen Lamos (2006), have emphasized Woolf’s early access to Greek. Lamos (2006: 152) details Woolf’s study of Greek from the age of eight, and her continuation of the subject as an older pupil from 1899 to 1900 (149). Lamos demonstrates that Woolf’s engagement with Classics per se was detailed and multifaceted, which goes a substantial way in explaining the many effortless references to Greek authors in both her fiction and nonfiction. While Woolf’s expertise in Greek may not have matched that of her brothers, and she lamented having not spent enough time as a girl “learning Greek grammar” (1993: 103), her knowledge was more than sufficient, as demonstrated in the (misleadingly titled) 1925 essay, “On Not Knowing Greek.” For Woolf, a woman who did know Greek, her references to Sappho, and other Hellenic poets and authors, were part of her larger rhetorical strategy of protesting against women’s lack of adequate education, including Classics. In a second rhetorical strategy, evident in Part Six of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf cites Sappho—alongside Lady Murasaki and Emily Brontë—to illustrate women’s historical ability to create works of genius (Woolf 1929: 91).
Woolf’s oftentimes deliberate and ambiguous positioning of herself as an inept reader of Greek (see, for example, Woolf 1920, 1992) resulted in decades of feminist scholarship that rendered her the victim of the patriarchal monopoly of Classics, which was a half-truth; for while formal education did ostracize women’s access to the discipline, social privilege provided compensation. Nevertheless, her references to Sappho publicly challenged socially embedded ideologies around female intellectual inferiority.
Second Wave Feminism
As first wave feminism gave rise to the second wave, women continued to champion Sappho as a symbol of female empowerment, freedom, artistic genius, and lesbianism. Arguably the most famous title of the lesbian-feminist movement of the early period of second wave feminism was Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism by Barbara Love (1937–) and Sidney Abbott (1937–2015). The book names Sappho in the title, includes a poem in the Acknowledgments (see Johnson 2007), and depicts her on the (original) cover as a young hippie who is photographed in profile plucking a lyre in the style of a Greek vase. Sappho is not mentioned again. However, the book is a powerful testimony to the symbolic potency of the name “Sappho” to feminists and lesbians of the era of protest and sexual revolution. At the time of Love and Abbott’s book, homosexuality was illegal in the United States, as it was in England during Woolf’s lifetime, and in France during Barney’s. While the law was particularly concerned with sodomy between men, women were reluctant to live openly gay or bisexual lives, unless they had financial security and, perhaps more importantly, lived within protective avant-garde enclaves. Abbott and Love wrote the book partly in response to the violence and discrimination directed at lesbians during their era. Indeed, as Katie King discusses in her analysis of the publication, Sappho was being murdered in the Age of Aquarius:
Individual women are invoked, their names given, and their deaths described as the severe consequences of their lesbianism. Here was a rhetoric of “suffering” rather than “oppression,” and an invocation of the personal rather than specifically political statement.
(1986: 76)
Publications such as this one contributed significantly to the debates around lesbianism, gay rights per se, and feminism during the following decades. The symbol or icon that was Sappho for women such as Abbott and Love, signified in part some sense of what Adrienne Rich later defined as “lesbian existence” and “lesbian continuum” (1980: 648). In “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich discusses both phrases accordingly:
Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range – through each woman’s life throughout history – of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.
(1980: 648)
To demonstrate her premise, Rich offers historical examples of shared or communal social life among women (1980: 649), characterized by the words of Audre Lorde as “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic” (Lorde 1979: 56; Rich 1980: 650). Sappho is an obvious example for Rich to include, and she points to the “celebrated ‘Lesbians’ of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century BC” (1980: 651). The determined adherence to an Archaic-style Sapphic sorority by second wave feminists, particularly radical and/or lesbian feminists, is indicative of the results of their forays into recovering female history, usually referred to as “herstory” or, by the term “Gynocriticism” (Showalter 1997). However, such explorations often went horribly wrong, as evidenced in the work of Rich’s literary and scholarly ally, Mary Daly and, arguably more controversial, feminist archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas. But speculative history was not the preserve of second wave feminists, as evident in the promulgation of Sappho the schoolmistress by conservative philologists (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff), soft-core pornographers (Loüys 1894; see DeJean 1989: 278–279), and earlier feminists. Thomas Jenkins may single out ethno-psychologist, George Deveraux to be added to this list, as he gave the schoolmistress motif a modern, American slant in his description of Sappho as a “games mistress,” further modernized by Jenkins as “gym teacher” (see Deveraux 1970; Jenkins 2015: 52–53).
Sappho’s shadow also stretched in other directions during the age of second wave feminism. Her presence as a female poet of recognized brilliance and the regeneration of her iconic status as a lesbian exerted a powerful influence on women of the French feminist school, particularly Monique Wittig (1935–2003). Les Guérillères, Wittig’s 1969 radical feminist novel, first translated into English in 1971, and an example of écriture feminine, is a fantasy that chronicles a war between the sexes, in a which les guérillères—women from a matriarchal-inspired collective—rise against the patriarchy. More inspired by the Iliad and the myths of the Amazons than the works of Sappho, Wittig lists the poet among numerous females whose names are printed in groups between the episodes (Wittig 1969; 1971: 54).
In the Author’s Note to Le Corps Lesbien, Wittig’s 1973 novel, translated as The Lesbian Body in 1975, she cites Sappho among the select members of the lesbian feminist canon:
When one has read the poems of Sappho, Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, the poems of Sylvia Plath and Anaīs Nin, La Bâdtarde by Violette Leduc, one has read everything.
(1973; [1975]: 9)
Throughout the novel, Sappho features as the superlative archetype of lesbian identity and embodiment. She is incorporated by Wittig in scenes of female-female erotica that reveals familiarity with the poet’s oeuvre, with intertextual allusions to Poem One and several fragments. Wittig merges Sappho with Aphrodite, as illustrated in a scene of lesbian ecstasy in which the narrator worships the poet-goddess in a joyous act of cunnilingus:
You smile motionless. I am kneeling at the seashore, you, you are standing before m/e arms folded, m/y mouth opens to entreat the divine incomparable Sappho.
(1973; 1975: 57)
The sacred act performed, Sappho is then envisaged as a divine witness to the merging of two women’s bodies in the impending sexual act:
I entreat Sappho she who gleams more than the moon among the constellations of our heavens. I implore Sappho in a very loud voice. I ask Sappho the all-powerful to mark on your forehead as on m/ine the signs of your star. I solicit all smiling Sappho to exhale over you as over m/e the breezes which make us pale when we contemplate the sky and night comes.
(1973; 1975: 57)
While the reclamation of Sappho as a woman poet, and as a woman’s poet, established a significant historical precedent for women throughout the twentieth century, radical feminists such as Wittig took ownership of her in ways that made her an extreme icon of lesbian freedom and hedonism (for further discussion, see duBois 2015: 155–157). Additionally, Wittig’s employment of écriture feminine in her fiction went on to have a significant influence on later lesbian-feminist writers, such as Jeanette Winterson. In Arts and Lies (1994), Winterson returns to Wittig’s style of écriture feminine with its emphasis on language-as-sex/sex-as-language and makes it the linguistic basis for the voice of the character, Sappho (see Burns 1996).
The recovery of Sappho—or, more accurately the sexual politics of lesbian feminism she symbolized—was challenged during the 1970s. Even leaders of Women’s Liberation, such as Betty Friedan, actively sought to disassociate from “women-identified-women” in order to represent a public image of heteronormative feminism (see Tate 2005; Poirot 2009). Sappho and her ilk were not welcome in the mainstream fight for women’s rights. But Sappho remained. And while there have been two more waves of feminism since the 1980s, followed by postfeminism, Sappho continues to be part of feminist and/or woman-centric agendas and productions, manifest in the arts, scholarship and translation, and sexual politics. Naturally, there are substantial variations in the twenty-first century appropriations of Sappho compared to those of the twentieth century, which testify to the profound societal shifts resulting from first and second wave feminism. The variations or differences are seen in the move away from the use of Sappho and hundreds of other historical women as powerful symbols of political protest. The women of the past, so much a part of twentieth-century feminism, have been replaced by female politicians, human rights leaders, celebrities and activists from all demographics, whose presence on the public stage is a powerful testimony to the struggles and victories of the past. In this context, the reception of Sappho may appear at first glance to be completely depoliticized. However, while there has been a recalibration in the use of Sappho as a feminist and lesbian icon, she has not left the building. Instead, she has moved rooms.
The Twenty-First Century
In the arts, Sappho has featured in several feminist/lesbian/lesbian-feminist works of the twenty-first century. These works usually bear little resemblance to the radical reinterpretations of her that marked second wave feminism, although traces remain in novels such as Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap (2003), written by a second wave feminist, but without the intense radicalism of her sisters (see Ball 2005). In Jong’s novel, Sappho is a sexually liberated bisexual, adventurer, career poet, mother, lover, superwoman. Such a wildly hyperbolic characterization may reflect the derring-do of radical feminist writing, albeit not from a lesbian-separatist perspective but a liberal feminist one, akin to Jong’s own politics. Jong’s Sappho does, however, jump off the Leucadian cliff, and is rescued by a man; neither action being particularly appealing, one may suggest, to feminists of any persuasion. Sappho’s Leap followed closely on the heels of Peggy Ullman Bell’s Psappho: A Novel of Sappho (2000), which also characterizes the poet as a bisexual explorer of human emotions and a woman engaged in seemingly endless personal crises. In both these forays into Sappho for the twenty-first century, she is clearly no longer a “right on” woman, nor a patron of écriture feminine, but a somewhat romantic, melodramatic figure. One may suggest she is even a little silly, but that would be to fault the fictional creation, not the creators. More dynamic was Sappho’s foray into popular culture in 2000, in season four, episode 22 of the television supernatural drama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). In the episode, entitled “Restless,” the character Willow dreams she writes Sappho’s Poem 1 on the bare back of her girlfriend, Tara. The scene marked an important moment in television history; namely, its portrayal of lesbian eroticism in an unabashed, normalized manner in an immensely popular series screened during primetime. Jenkins regards the episode as significant for Classical Reception Studies:
… here we begin our exploration of what happens when contemporary artists appropriate, or “receive,” a classical text: in other words, here we begin our examination of how (and why) ancient literature continues to be inspiration for contemporary social agitation. Even as late as the turn of the millennium, a lesbian story arc on television ran afoul of both popular attitudes towards sexuality as well as network censors, who allowed the erotic storyline of Tara and Willow only as long as there was no “kissing” (or worse!): that is, as long as Tara and Willow’s homosexuality remained notional rather than physical.
(2015: 3)
The use of Sappho functions as not only as means of Jenkins’ “social agitation” but, as he goes on to discuss (2015: 16), the means of queering the scene and its principal players while at the same time avoiding censorship. It is worthwhile to pause here, however, and to question Jenkins’ use of the adverb “afoul”; for while “there was no ‘kissing’ (or worse!),” eroticism—gay or straight—sometimes operates in more nuanced ways.
If the fictional Sappho entered the new millennium without her feminist and lesbian energy, except for Willow and Tara, she soon recovered herself. The emergence of queer as a social and theoretical discourse that marked the gender and sexual politics of the twenty-first century has also—as evident in the episode “Restless”—queered Sappho. The poet has expanded her status as lesbian icon and has gone on to champion the LGBTIQ community in a broader, more sexually diverse system of identity politics and activism. The reception of the poet in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has tended to be collective, attracting groups of scholars working as papyrologists and translators; writers and artists sharing aesthetic values and political agendas; feminist and lesbian activists agitating for social change. This is evident in several feminist and LGBTIQ communities and events, including the International Eressos Women’s Festival, organized by Sappho Women (since 2010), a non-profit organization. The festival is an annual event for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning women, which began in 2000, and held on Lesvos (modern Lesbos). In its celebration of LGBTIQ culture, the arts and entertainment, the International Eressos Women’s Festival is a materialization of the dreams of women such as Barney and Vivien, who envisaged a Sappho-inspired community on her island. While the lesbians of the Left Bank may not have condoned the movement from lesbianism to queer, the existence of such an event exemplifies the achievements in same-sex politics, human rights, and well-being, which in part have their roots in the private celebrations of the women of the Parisian diaspora and the British Suffragettes’ use of drama and spectacle.
Sappho has also moved online as new communities and individuals continue to embrace her as a symbol of feminism and as a lesbian trailblazer. The online platforms that feature Sappho, representative of major digital fora, include Tumblr, Vimeo, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, all of which include sites that reproduce her work, evoke her as a source of inspiration, and/or extol her as an icon of the women’s movement and lesbian activism. The sites range from academic, sometimes philologically-focused, which are aimed at augmenting tertiary education; to personal responses; to support groups; to activism. Other sites communicate individual (occasionally collaborative) creative responses to the poet through the creation of personal pages featuring art, poetry, prose, and music. As Siobban Hodge (2018: 137) writes: “the new modes of transmission and engagement with this ancient poet share much in common with more traditional platforms in that they can be highly subjective, dynamic, and linked with transforming notions of feminist identity.” As an online presence, Hodge regards Sappho as a “rallying point” (2018: 138) for twenty-first century feminists and people who identify as lesbian or bisexual (2018: 143).
The introduction and development of the World Wide Web opened an extensive online community for both feminists and lesbians. The innovation provided women all over the world with contact in cyberspace and enabled them to engage anonymously (if desired or needed). Amy T. Goodloe discusses the history of lesbians online, to contact same-sex attracted women since the earliest days of the Internet:
Starting with the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) of the 1980s and continuing through the phenomenal popularity of e-mail and the Web in the 1990s, lesbians have used the Internet to share their stories, build community, find partners and friends, agitate for political reform, and discover what it means to be a lesbian.
(2000: 200–201)
Sappho lent her name to various websites from the late-1980s, including the email Discussion List called “SAPPHO,” which was founded by Jean Marie Diaz (“Amber”) in 1987 (Goodlore 2000: 201) and continued until the late-1990s. Although most subscribers identified as lesbians or bisexuals, as a heterosexual, Diaz not only wanted to provide a safe space for lesbians online, but a community for all women (see Wakeford 1995; Case 1996; Hall 1996; Isaksson 1997; Wakeford 2004).
Discussion Lists like “SAPPHO” have spawned hundreds of similar sites, and these are continually beginning and ending, morphing and reinventing themselves, and their namesake. The fluidity that characterizes many iterations of online Sappho is testimony to the changes in both lesbianism and feminism since the first and second waves of the Women’s Movement. The separatist lesbian-feminism of groups such as Barney’s and the robust politics of radical feminism have largely been superseded by Queer. The same goes for Sappho. With the development of Queer and its social and political offspring, such as diversity and intersectionality, Sappho is often evoked in name only now; Queer being indicative of both the progress and, therefore, the broadening of sexual politics of the twenty-first century. Additionally, as previously mentioned, the twenty-first century has numerous role models, from politicians to singers, whose feminism and/or LGBTIQ identity provide living, breathing examples for women to admire and emulate. In this sense, Sappho and other historical women may not appear to be as needed as much. Indeed, her early advocates—women such as the Pankhursts, Barney, Woolf, and the women of the 1970s—may be seen to have replaced her as more relatable, not so historically-distant heroines in the campaigns for women’s rights. However, this is not the case.
FURTHER READING
For an excellent collection of articles on Sappho in an ancient context, see Greene 1996a; for a companion collection on the reception of Sappho, see Greene 1996b. On Sappho in feminist and lesbian histories, see Marks 1979; Gubar 1984; Doan and Garrity 2006. On Natalie Barney and Sappho, see Souhami 2004. A fascinating study of Sappho in the history of the creation of lesbian identities and communities through the British periodical, Urania (1916–1940) and Arena Three (1964–1971) is in Spongberg, Cine, and Curthoys (eds) 2005.