Re-Queering Sappho

Once, at a small dinner party with some fellow classicists, a genuinely lovely and brilliant male colleague floated a pet theory of his: Sappho was actually a man. It’s a perverse idea, but not an outrageous one. Sappho has long been celebrated as the lone female voice of Ancient Greece, and none of the writings of her many ancient fans ever questioned her gender. But one of the first things students of classical literature are taught these days, once they’ve learned how to decline a noun or two, is to rigorously detach the authorial persona you find in a text from any sense of historical biography.

This approach is especially encouraged for lyric poetry. The genre is typically narrated by a beguilingly emphatic first person voice, a style often elusive in other archaic and classical Greek literature. We are taught to think of this persona as a sort of mask someone would put on at a symposium when they were moved to recite poetry; to consider the poem’s personal expressions of individual feelings is, we are told, naïve. So why couldn’t the persona of “Sappho” have been constructed by a man? After all, we know educated women were a rarity (at best) in archaic Greece, and male poets regularly constructed female characters to be played by other men in Greek drama. We have no trouble with the concept that, say, Euripides was a man who wrote the character Medea to be performed by a man.

But still, as a gay woman, I felt my hackles raise at the idea. After half an hour of back and forth with my colleague — in which I, of course, failed to prove a negative — I resorted to pleading: “This is our one thing. Can’t we just have this one thing?” When he realized how upset I was, my interlocutor quickly ceded and apologized. But why did I care so deeply? Why do I so badly want a female Sappho? And why do I so badly want a queer Sappho?

It’s not as if I didn’t know that I had chosen to pursue a field in which the object of study is work produced almost (and, yes, perhaps absolutely) exclusively by men, and viciously misogynist men at that. And yet, so often that work glitters with beauty and humanity. I love ancient Greek literature, and one of the ways that I have continued to love it, despite my visceral abhorrence of many of the organizing values of the culture that produced it, is to think of its authors as creators of texts rather than as historical figures. But intellectual exercises aside, I can’t deny my personal investment in the lone voice of the woman who loves and longs for other women.

In the past couple of decades, crusaders against the colonization of the past with our modern contemporary assumptions, models, and categories have cautioned against using the lower-case “lesbian” label to describe the poetess who resided in Lesbos. These critiques (always by male philologists) generally contain some entangled combination of the following assertions: the poems themselves are not as gay as you think they are; the term is anachronistic, and describes an identity category that did not exist in antiquity; and, in the raunchy genre of Athenian comedy, the character “Sappho” was obsessed with dick. These critiques betray a narrow and masculine misunderstanding of the nature of queer female erotics, a condescending assumption of naïveté about the nature of identity and identification, and the uncritical transmission of the deeply misogynist ancient reception of the Poetess. The supposedly progressive resistance to the colonization of the past begins to look an awful lot like the colonization of its narrow female margins by men.

A favorite game of some of these critics is to pull out Fragment 31, written from the point of view of a woman overcome as she watches a man and a woman speaking. The poem has traditionally been translated from a female perspective directed at a female object of desire, but some critics have labored greatly to demonstrate that the Greek is, in fact, more ambiguous — and, while paying lip-service to preserving ambiguity, strongly suggesting that the poem is about heterosexual desire. (Consider Most p. 31, n. 74: “It might be noted that Catullus uses Sappho’s poem as a model for a heterosexual poem.”)

These same critics choose not to address those poems in which female-female eroticism is less ambiguous — Fragment 94, say, in which Sappho nostalgically reminds her departing lover (all translations by Carson):

for many crowns of violets and roses
at my side you put on
and many woven garlands made of flowers
around your soft throat.
And with sweet oil costly
you anointed yourself
and on a soft bed
delicate
you would let loose your longing

One critic writes,

‘Sapphic’ and ‘Lesbian’ have become convenient labels for a female sexual orientation directed exclusively at other women. By a common circularity, Sappho’s poems could then be read in this light as documents of early Lesbianism; as such, they have been of enormous importance to many women writers, who have found in their Sappho a precedent, a model, and a justification (and have forgotten, or did not know, that the impulse towards this classification derived entirely from considerations of male sexuality).
(Most p. 27)

To address the parenthetical first, it seems what Glenn Most means by “this classification” is “lesbianism.” He may be correct: the earliest contemporary reference I can find to the term is a journal of sexual dysfunction, an imposition of male physicians on women they perceived to have been disordered. It’s not entirely clear to me when women started using “this classification” for self-identification (though a trip through the OED’s historical definitions of ‘lesbian’ and ‘sapphist’ was highly entertaining).

I would imagine that these brave women found in the imposed name of their supposed sexual disease a tradition worth embracing — a set of beautiful fragmented poems about the love of one woman for another, full of detailed imagery of flowers, women, and fruit, with an attention to private, embodied experiences of lust, loss, and longing. Slurs assigned to marginalized categories of people have often been taken up as proud identity markers. The doctors who pathologized women for displaying same-sex desire did not invent lesbianism.

The poetess provides a challenge to widespread contemporary reception, because the popularity and cultural significance of her poems is accompanied by a huge degree of fragmentation — only a handful of nearly complete poems and a couple hundred scraps remain from an original corpus of nine full books. Fragmentation comes as no surprise to anyone who studies antiquity, and the loss of most of Sappho’s poems is hardly exceptional. (The greater miracle is that we have anything from this period at all.) But the relationship between her poems’ influence and their yawning crevasses is particularly striking: it is in these very ruptures that many female poets of the last two centuries (H.D., Renée Vivien, Anne Carson, eg.) have been able to locate continuity.

The fragmentation itself allows Sappho’s posterity to participate in a queer, non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal relationship with the poems. Instead of a monumental authority who makes absolute proclamations, in these fragments we find a helpmeet who offers suggestive provocations. One can imagine oneself into the blank space on the page, participating in what Susan Gubar called a “fantastic collaboration,” as opposed to the Bloomian anxiety of influence that results from the absolute authority of a father-like foundational figure. Luscious but tantalizingly distant,

as a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the apple pickers forgot —
well, no they didn’t forget — were not able to reach

Rather than identification with an imagined biography, I find in Sappho an ethical, aesthetic, and affective complex that is meaningfully familiar. Softness and abundance, beautiful textiles, blossoms, overripe sweetapples, the flash image of a woman’s ankle — Sappho’s fragments show us eros and pleasure for their own sake, not as an exchange of property, the exploitation of one for the sake of the other, or in order to achieve virtue in the eyes of a moralizing philosopher like Plato or Aristotle. In her poems, the descriptions of womens’ looks are in fact descriptions of the feelings they evoke. Consider our Anactoria (who is gone): “I would rather see her lovely step and the motion of light on her face.” Or consider the woman in Fragment 96:

Now she stands out among Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon after sunset, surpassing all the stars, and its light spreads alike over the salt sea and the flowery fields; the dew is shed in beauty and roses bloom and tender chervil and flowery melilot.

She is beautiful not because of the way she attains a certain physical standard; she is beautiful because she is beheld, because of the way her physical embodiment holds space in the world.

When I first read Sappho (and as I read her even now) the thrill of recognition was not that of encountering the writing of someone who claims the same identity markers as I do. Instead, it is in the expression of an embodied desire that is free from the gendered hierarchies that saturate both of our societies. After being steeped in Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles — all authors whom I love, and in all of whose work the personal labored to be expressed under the heavy burdens of patriarchal convention — Sappho’s fragmented musings about the pleasures of female homosexuality were a revelation, one not dissimilar to my own after being raised in a conservative small town, exposed only to the romantic narratives of novels, television, and popular movies.

In a generally sensitive overview of Ancient Greek erotics, Tim Whitmarsh writes that “to understand Sappho’s construction of desire, we need to consider the specific historical context of ancient Greek gender roles… with their emphasis upon female confinement to private space. For this reason, it is preferable to find terms other than ‘lesbian’ to describe Lesbian Sappho.” (Whitmarsh p. 206) But is that in fact a point of disconnect, or of continuity? The style of confinement is different, but there are many ways in which contemporary women have been and still are confined, particularly when it comes to sexual expression.

Aphrodite assures a lovesick Sappho regarding the object of her affection in Fragment 1,“If she runs away, soon enough she will pursue” (I.21–22). In Greek male homosexual behavior (at least the elite version of which we have some record), the role of the pursuer and the pursued were strictly defined, and a power differential was balanced by an age difference. A beautiful young man was pursued by an older one, and if the older successfully courted the younger, the younger was repaid with the older’s mentorship. The eschewal of this convention did happen, but was considered vulgar. And Ancient Greek heterosexual relationships were negotiated as business transactions by the male parties involved — the father and the suitor.

In Sappho’s lesbianism, by contrast, it would appear that the pursuer could become the pursued at any moment. Both of the women involved are liberated from the scripts that predetermined those roles. Queerness (to offer one of many possible interpretations of the loaded term) is not necessarily the freedom from an eroticized power imbalance, but the freedom from its gendered predetermination. This freedom is miraculous for a society like archaic Greece — and it is miraculous, still, today.

It is so miraculous that for many centuries scholars could not abide by it, and insisted that in fact, Sappho must have been a school teacher who mentored her pupils in the ways of love in order to prepare them for marriage to men. This fabrication upheld the supposedly stable power differentials, employing Sappho to serve as a proxy for the younger women’s eventual rightful owner, her husband. The poems themselves provide absolutely no evidence for this model, which has been thoroughly debunked in Holt Parker’s 1993 article “Sappho Schoolmistress,” but its impact is still felt today — a version of it was espoused in the introduction to a brand new edition of English translations of her poems by Diane Rayor and André Lardinois.

A related caution against identifying too closely with Sappho’s writing is the curious assertion that, essentially, there was no such thing as the expression of personal feeling in Greek literature. As Mendelsohn summarizes:

Pointing to the relentlessly public and communitarian character of ancient-Greek society, with its clan allegiances, its endless rounds of athletic games and artistic competitions, its jammed calendar of civic and religious festivals, they wonder whether “personal” poetry, as we understand the term, even existed. As Lardinois, the co-author of the new English edition, has written, “Can we be sure that these are really her own feelings? . . . What is ‘personality’ in such a group-oriented society as archaic Greece?

Consider the mental gymnastics and willful misreading it takes to assert (as Charles Segal has) that Sappho’s Fragment 31 was written solely in the service of reinforcing civic ideology:

… oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings / for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking / is left in me / no: tongue breaks, and thin / fire is racing under skin / and in eyes no sight and drumming / fills ears / and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am and dead — or almost / I seem to me…

What has always felt incredible to me about this poem is that, unlike any other literature from this period that I can think of, it is a first person expression of a series of feelings moving through an individual’s body. They are not externalized, attributed to the agency of a god (as such extremities of personal experience are in Homer), nor are they loudly proclaimed to interlocutors and used to motivate a dramatic plot (as they would be in tragedy). A woman sits quietly, and is ravaged by love, lust, jealousy, or some heady combination of the three. Whether these feelings are the poet’s “own” is ultimately irrelevant — anyone who has felt longing will know that this poem emerged from self-reflection, either that of the poet or of an influence. How can we classify the project of the study of antiquity under the umbrella of the humanities if we deny any possible expression of personhood by its residents? In an effort to greater respect the uniqueness of Ancient Greek civic identity, we have eradicated any possibility of respecting or relating to Ancient Greek people.

I mentioned that in later antiquity, Sappho was thought to have been man-crazy, and it’s true. Starting in the Classical period (probably one or two hundred years after our poetess), Sappho had a documented reputation of being short, with a dark complexion (in ancient Greek terms this means “ugly,” evidence of a colorism that is racist and sexist but which I don’t have time to address fully here), and an insatiable sexual predator of men. She was, apparently, a stock figure in Attic comedy, the plays themselves now lost. Mendelsohn writes:

However exalted her reputation among the ancient literati, in Greek popular culture of the Classical period and afterward Sappho was known primarily as an oversexed predator — of men. This, in fact, was the ancient cliché about “Lesbians”: when we hear the word today we think of love between women, but when the ancient Greeks heard the word they thought of blow jobs. In classical Greek, the verb lesbiazein — “to act like someone from Lesbos” — meant performing fellatio, an activity for which inhabitants of the island were thought to have a particular penchant.

And indeed, there was a time when scholars who devoted themselves to “rescuing” Sappho’s reputation from same-sex depravity pointed to the Suda, an ancient encyclopedia that asserted that the poetess had had a husband: a man name Kerkylos from the island Andros. Later scholars noted that her husband’s name was curiously similar to the Greek word kerkos, or “tail” — Greek slang for penis. And Andros means ‘man,’ more or less. That is to say, Sappho was married to someone named Rod Johnson from Dudesville.

In response to this reception history, Glenn Most, a critic we heard from earlier, has opined: “Even the Sappho of Attic comedy is probably not a groundless invention… but rather a response, mistaken and exaggerated to be sure, but a response nonetheless to perceivable features in her poetry.” Most wonders: but why would there be this persistent reputation of an ugly Sappho, crazed by lust for the countless men who spurn her, if there weren’t some element of truth to the characterization, within at least her poems if not her biography? Where would one of the more extreme manifestations of this characterization, that she was a prostitute, have come from? The question, as he, frames it, is rhetorical — there must be, or have been, something in the poems that those of us who identify the poetess as a “lesbian” are missing. He would argue that the only reasonable answer is that the many poems that have been lost were packed with expressions of heterosexual longing for men who spurned her.

But it is my hunch that to most women, especially but not exclusively non-heterosexual women, the answer to this question will be obvious, and does not require the invention of a corpus of boy-crazy Sappho poems. That is, there is something deeply threatening to a sadly common iteration of the male ego about women finding their pleasure in a context devoid of men. And a common response to this common threat is to aggressively insert oneself into that context, whether simply in fantasy (as even the most cursory unfiltered search for lesbian porn will confirm to any in doubt) or by, say, offering ones’ services to gay women minding their own damn business at a bar, and acting wounded or angry when they are declined.

This manifestation of fragile masculinity is relevant to straight women as well. There is a long history, from the archaic Greek iambic tradition to Tinder, of men responding to female sexual indifference by characterizing the woman in question as simultaneously unfuckable and a whore. So much can be unrecognizable when we span hemispheres and millennia, but the mechanisms of misogyny appear to be strikingly resilient, and this particular form provides a perfect template for the poor Sappho of Attic comedy.

I’m not saying that it’s impossible that some day a paleographer x-raying scraps from Herculaneum will stumble across a codex with the title “Poor Ugly Sappho’s Foiled Attempts to Fellate all of Lesbos.” What I am saying is that an approach to Sappho’s reception in antiquity that ignores the misogyny woven deeply into the fabric of that society has a major blind spot.

Misogyny is pernicious, even among those of us who would seem most inclined to resist it. I want to return to a citation of Luce Irigaray’s ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ which was appended to Most’s aside: “(and have forgotten, or did not know, that the impulse towards this classification derived entirely from considerations of male sexuality).” The citation, clearly deployed to assure us that the author has done his due diligence with the feminists, does not give any specific page number in the book-long treatise. But I believe he was gesturing towards the following sentiment, in which Irigaray warns of a conceptualization of female desire that is a mirror image of male desire:

if their aim were simply to reverse the order of things, even supposing this to be possible, history would repeat itself in the long run, would revert to sameness: to phallocentrism. It would leave room neither for women’s sexuality, nor for women’s imaginary, nor for women’s language to take (their) place.

This is always a risk for those of us trying to work against deeply ingrained power structures — see for example recent “Lean In” style feminism, which encourages women to adopt traditionally masculine modes of expression, (see even that NYT op-ed criticizing people for starting sentences with “I feel like”), but it can also manifest in ways that are more subtle. What can be an opportunity for liberation from old paradigms and an instantiation of the new can just as easily be squandered in returning to old patterns.

And the queer community is by no means exempt from this pitfall. There is a tendency today, even in self-described radical queer circles to revert to misogynist oppression in ways that both marginalize and objectify femme-presenting people — among queer women and other gender minorities as well as among cis gay men. In the freedom to eschew traditionally feminine modes of expression and presentation (a freedom which I myself have greatly enjoyed), there has been a tendency to excessively celebrate and defer to queers who present in a more masculine mode.

It is my opinion that there is a similar impulse behind the abandonment, by many, of the lesbian identity. Indeed, to some of my peers, it might be considered a strange time to fight for the legitimacy of lesbianism. As Sappho’s lower-case lesbianism has been challenged by male academics, “lesbian” as an identity has also fallen out of fashion in many radical queer circles. There are valid reasons: with fewer queers identifying absolutely as women, the term feels gender-essentializing and exclusionary. And there is in fact a nasty history of that sort of attitude. Starting in the 1970’s, some radical lesbian groups excluded trans women from the sisterhood, arguing that those who were not identified as women at birth were dangerous colonizing interlopers. It is a sad excuse for an anti-patriarchal movement that excludes those who are the patriarchy’s most vulnerable victims.

But in my opinion, the queer rejection of lesbianism is not just a reaction to exclusionary iterations of the identity, but also an expression of a latent misogyny. A lesbian identity is considered embarrassing and apolitical, out of date and out of touch, and certainly not properly queer. It’s Birkenstocks and the Indigo Girls, not tattoos, sharp haircuts and bowties. These aesthetic judgments are gendered in a way that suggests a recycling of tired, anti-women tropes. Lesbianism isn’t sexy — consider the still circulated myth of “lesbian bed death.” It is my hope that in re-queering Sappho, we might simultaneously make some headway into rehabilitating lesbianism as a radical and queer contemporary identity.

While the exclusion from dominant cultural power structures and paradigms can cause great suffering and disenfranchisement, it can also be golden ticket to a life and a world free from arbitrary restrictions. By celebrating rather than dismissing an identification with Sappho’s lesbianism and the queer potential of the fragmentary Sapphic corpus, we can honor the humanity of the past while finding pathways forward, opportunities to free ourselves from oppressive models, to thrive in the margins and the lacunae.

Ella Haselswerdt is a PhD candidate in Classics at Princeton and a pronounced sapphist.