Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho Lefkowitz, Mary R Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1973; 14, 2; ProQuest pg. 113 Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho Mary R. Lefkowitz CRITICISM OF CREATIVE ART seems curiously dependent on biog­ raphy.I It appears difficult to separate an artist's life from his work, or to regard literature or music or paintings primarily as public statements. Since the act of creation is assumed fundamen­ tally to be an emotional response, the artist is viewed as an active participant in the world he has created. In the case of male writers, the assumption seems always to be that the artist, whether Catullus, Brahms or Goya, uses the full range of his intellectual powers to come to terms with his problems. It is understood that the methods and the problems vary considerably from artist to artist. But in the case of female artists, the assumptions on which criticism is based tend to be more narrowly defined: (1) Any creative woman is a 'deviant', that is, women who have a satisfactory emotional life (home, family and husband) do not need additional creative outlets. The assumption behind this assump­ tion is that 'deviance' in the case of women results from being de­ prived of men-in other words, women artists tend to be (a) old maids or (b) lesbians, either overt female homosexuals or somehow 'mas­ culine'. (2) Because women poets are emotionally disturbed, their poems are psychological outpourings, i.e. not intellectual but ingenuous, artless, con­ cerned with their inner emotional lives. As a result, criticism of two such different poets as Sappho and Emily Dickinson can sound remarkably alike. Dr John Cody's recent analysis of Emily Dickinson's poem "I had been hungry all the Years" provides a vivid illustration of the special criticism applied to female artists. I prefer to begin with Emily Dickinson rather than with Sappho, because Dickinson wrote in English (which I understand better than I do Greek), and because the facts of her life are relatively well documented: she was a recluse, un­ married, wore white, wrote in the bedroom of her house in Amherst 1 See esp. Harold F. Cherniss, "The Biographical Fashion in Literary Criticism," CPCP 12.15 (1943) 279-92. 113 114 CRITICAL STEREOTYPES AND THE POETRY OF SAPPHO poems on little pieces of paper, some of which were published in her lifetime. . I had been hungry, all the Years­ My Noon had Come-to dine- I trembling drew the Table near­ And touched the Curious Wine- 'Twas this on Tables I had seen­ When turning, hungry, Home I looked in Windows, for the Wealth I could not hope-for Mine- I did not know the ample Bread­ 'Twas so unlike the Crumb The Birds and I, had often shared In Nature's-Dining Room- The Plenty hurt me-'twas so new­ Myself felt ill-and odd- As Berry-of a Mountain Bush­ Transplanted-to the Road- Nor was I hungry-so I found That Hunger-was a way Of Persons outside Windows­ The Entering-takes away- (579 JOHNSON, ca. 1862) My own impression of this poem is that its primary concern is disap­ pointment: something long-awaited comes; once you have it, it disap­ pears; thus in retrospect the anticipation seems more rewarding than the thing itself. The central thought is expressed in the terminology of food: the narrator of the poem is 'hungry'; then 'noon' (the dinner hour) has come like a guest, to dinner; there is a table with 'Curious Wine' (the narrator doesn't know what it is). The narrator had been like the birds, eating what was left; now he/she leaves the wilds, and his/her exclusion ... , and enters the house. The hunger then goes away and there is nothing. The bread and wine in the poem may take on additional significance if we think of them as elements in the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist: Dickinson was raised by devout MARY R. LEFKOWITZ 115 churchgoers, and drew much of her subject matter and metrical structure from the hymns she heard as a child.2 Then the poem might also say: after receiving Communion, what does one have? To our impressions we can compare what Dr Cody says in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. He reads the poem as an analyst would interpret dreams, along canonical Freudian lines: hunger con­ notes sexual experience, and Emily Dickinson's3 imbibing of physical affection quickly becomes a glut and over­ whelms her painfully. The experience is novel in an uncongenial way and causes her to sicken and feel strange. She feels that sexuality is too common a territory for her (a "Road") because she is accli­ mated to an unfrequented and lofty habitat. (She comes of a "Mountain Bush" and feels out of place, perhaps degraded, in the "Road"; one senses in this word unpleasant connotations of too easy accessibility, prosaic purposes, dustiness, and commercial trans­ actions.) Once we accept the premise that the poelu primarily concerns sex, it is possible to interpret its imagery more specifically: It is a commonplace that a woman's introduction to sexual inti­ macies may be frightening and disappointing. The bruising of deli­ cate membranes may draw blood. Thus, the line "The Plenty hurt me-'twas so new" may refer not only to the overpowering emotion generated by her own and another's passion but also to the over­ whelming and painful effects of physical force. The transplanted berry may be the hymeneal blood (the first color commonly asso­ ciated with berries is red); the "Mountain Bush," the mons veneris; and the "Road," the vagina. We cannot imagine that Emily Dickinson was unaware of these anatomical facts. Whether or not she was more than" dimly aware" of these "uncon­ scious sexual preoccupations" is not the issue: Cody's analysis enables us to see that Emily Dickinson, who "has for so long been thought of as an ethereal other world creature" was in fact "a living flesh-and­ blood woman who, Victorian Age notwithstanding, was well aware that whether she liked it or not she had no choice but to share in the physiological reactions of the rest of humanity."4 2 On Dickinson's use of hymn meters and form see Thomas H. Johnson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (Cambridge [Mass.] 1955) 84-86. 3 John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge [Mass.] 1971) 141. 4 Cody, op cit. (supra n.3) 142. 116 CRITICAL STEREOTYPES AND THE POETRY OF SAPPHO If we in turn analyse Dr Cody's analysis, we find that it rests on several questionable assumptions: (1) That poems are like dreams, that is, are individual expressions of emotional problems, rather than public statements meant to be understood by and communicated to a large audience who had not read Freud on roads, berries, etc. But Emily Dickinson, as her correspondence shows, was most interested in getting into print and being recognized. (2) That Dickinson's problem is sexual deprivation, specifically, inability to accept or to enjoy men, an interpretation read in from her biography. The same basic assumptions tend to be made about Sappho's famous poem, cpalveral J1-ot (31 L.-P.), though in less vividly stated forms. Compared to Emily Dickinson's, we know virtually nothing about Sappho's life. We can glean from biographies and passing references written long after her death the names of her family, that she lived in Mytilene at the end of the seventh century, that she wrote nine books of lyric poetry, that she was a female homosexual, short, dark and ugly, and that she died by throwing herself off the White Rock in West Greece because of her unrequited love for a ferryman named phaon (shining'). Much of this information seems to have been derived from interpretations by ancient scholars (all male) of her poetry, some also from caricatures of her in comedy; the story of her death is obviously based on myth.s Again a portrait emerges of an emotional deviant: deprived because of her ugliness of male attention (like the ferryman's) which she craves. Thus biography, itself derived from interpretation of the poems, is in turn reapplied to the poems and affects our interpretation of them. In the case of cpalV€Tal J1-0t, especially, much influential criticism has tended to center on the 'facts' of Sappho's life: ,/..' , ~"f)' opaLV€Tat J1-0t KTJVOC tCOC €OtCW " ,,, " '" €J1-IL€V WVTjp, OTnc €VaVTtDC TOt , \:' ' ',\ , 1'\:',/.. , tcoav€t Kat '11' acwv aov opWV€t- ',\'" ,,"', Kat y£ atcac tlL£po£V, TO J1- T] lLav \:' , , 'f) " KapotaV £v CTT] £CtV £'11'TOaLC€V' 6 On the evidence for Sappho's life see especially Thomas McEvilley. "Imagination and Reality in Sappho" (diss. Univ. Cincinnati, 1968; University Microfilms #68-15, 166) 259-63. On the significance of the myth of Sappho's death, see Gregory Nagy, "Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas," forthcoming in HSCP (1973). MARY R. LEFKOWITZ , \" '''~ Q' ,,, ,/.. , wc yap EC C toW /-,POXE , WC !-,E .,.,wva£- 8 c' ovo' €V ET' ELK€£, '\ \' " \ \ ~ t" t \ I alV\ aKav /LEV y"wcca EayE , "E7rTOV 0' aVT£Ka Xpw£ 7rVP V7raOEopofL7JKEV, 07r7raTECC£ 0' OVO' €V 0P7JPP:, bnppofL- 12 {3E£C£ 0' aKova£, tEKaOE /L' LOpWC t/JvXpoc KaKXEE"TaLt, TP0!-'OC OE: ~" \ ,~\, 7raLCaV aypEt, x"wpOTEpa OE 7rOLaC " e I ~,'\ ' , ~ , E!-'f-L£, TE vaKTJV 0 O"LyW 7rLvEVTJC 16 ,./.. I ",, " .,.,aLvo!-' Ef-L CWTaL' , \ \ \ \ 1\ ' \ t \, t alV\a 7rav TO"f-LaTov E7rEL KaL 7rEV'T)Ta (ed. PAGE, OCT 1968) 117 ·Wilamowitz saw 'that man' in the poem's first stanza as the husband of the girl. The girl is one of Sappho' s students, and the poem concerns the man and schoolmistress Sappho's jealousy of him.6 This inter­ pretation transposes the poem to the realm of sexual normality: there is no evidence at all in the text that 'that man' is a husband, or the girl Sappho's pupil, or that Sappho ran a girl's schooP Page, in what is recognized as the authoritative English commentary on Sappho, is aware of the limitations of Wilamowitz' criticism, but still retains the same basic assumptions about the poem. In his analysis, he realizes that the man only appears in the first stanza, but at the same time he is reluctant to take his attention off of him:8 But we must not forget that the man was the principal subject of the whole first stanza; and we shall not be content with any explanation of the poem which gives no satisfactory account of his presence and 8 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Sappho und Simonides (Berlin 1913) 58. Wila­ mowitz, in his interpretation, was attempting to restore objectivity to the criticism of Sappho's poetry: "when the name Sappho is mentioned today, more people will think of sexual perversion than of a great poetess" (p.17). 7 The authority ofWilamowitz continues to make scholars uneasy about abandoning the girls' school hypothesis; see, e.g. R. Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis," Philologus 101 (1957) 1-29. Two recent school texts treat it as a live possibility: David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry (New York 1967) 261, and Douglas E. Gerber, Euterpe (Amsterdam 1970) 161; see my review of Campbell, AJP 91 (1970) 467-68. 8 D. L. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford 1955) 28. 118 CRITICAL STEREOTYPES AND THE POETRY OF SAPPHO his prominence in it. If Sappho wishes to describe nothing more than the symptoms of her passion for the girl, what motive could she have for connecting that description thus closely with an occasion when the girl is engaged in merry conversation with a man? Surely that occasion is not devoid of all significance: and then it appears impos­ sible to exclude the element of jealousy from Sappho's emotional response to the scene. Sappho loves the girl: and it is clearly sug­ gested that the girl is not, at least at this moment, particularly interested in Sappho. Sappho is present in the company: but it is the man, not Sappho, who is sitting close by the girl, rejoicing in her laughter and converse. To maintain that Sappho feels no jealousy of the man would be to ignore the certain response of human nature to a situation of the type described, and to deprive the introduction of the man, and his relation to the girl, of all significance. On this point, at least, there is little room for doubt. The girl is talking to him, and not to Sappho; the physical symptoms that Sappho describes in such detail result specifically from jealousy. In addition, Page tends to see the poem as a direct outpouring of emotion, in much the same way that Dr Cody read Dickinson. Sappho's language9 is realistic, severely plain and candid, unadorned by literary artifice. First, very quietly,