Victorian Sappho. - Review - book review

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Julia F. Saville

Victorian Sappho by Yopie Prins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xiii 279. $18.95 paper.

Over the past five years there has been a resurgence of interest in the Greek lyricist, Sappho, evident in a cluster of intriguing publications, some of the most notable being Sappho Is Burning by Page duBois (1995); Sappho's Immortal Daughters by Margaret Williamson (1995); Sappho and the Virgin Mary by Ruth Vanita (1996); and Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho by Jane Snyder (1997). Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho is not only the latest intervention in this debate, but also the self-reflective critical voice that asks what it is about the fragmentary corpus of Sappho that inspires such sporadic returns to what was also a late-Victorian obsession. Prins's answer, subtle and compelling, will fascinate any scholar invested in lyric theory, Victorian Hellenism, gender studies, or better still, an intersection of all these fields.

One of Prins's prime interests is to bring to the study of Sappho both a theoretical and historical consideration of the way we read lyric and how this might account for the recurrent turns and returns to Sappho as "an exemplary, engendering figure" (7) for that reading process. In the course of her introduction, Prins reminds us of the premise developed in the 1980s by theorists such as Jonathan Culler and Paul de Man that lyric voice is a rhetorical figure--a cause--that brings a persona into being while creating the illusion that it is an effect, a spontaneous utterance from that persona as a preexisting individual subject (19-20). According to this model, Sappho becomes the name for an emptiness that is declined over the centuries, both in the grammatical sense of shifting its rhetorical position within accounts of lyric, and in the material sense of a poetic corpus that has been lost. Prins then gives another turn to the screw of interpretation by refusing the effacement of historical inflections (such as the issue of gender) that de Man's theory of lyric performs. Instead, she accepts the greater challenge of reading Victorian renderings (or declensions) of Sappho as they are inflected both historically by gender and formally by the treatment of rhetoric.

What follows is not a chronological account of Sappho's reception in Victorian England, but a simultaneous performance and description of the metaleptic logic at work in numerous lyrical appropriations of the name of Sappho. "Metalepsis" is a form of metonymy in which causes and effects are interchanged and sometimes doubled. It prevails in the dynamic that characterizes Victorian rewritings of Sappho, specifically as she is represented in Ovid's Heroides, leaping from the Leucadian Cliff after her putative betrayal by the young ferryman, Phaon. In this context, to turn back to Sappho is not simply to return to the origin of the Western lyric tradition as a feminized mode and counterpart to the manly Homeric epic, but to repeat a rhetorical position in which the lyric voice at the moment of utterance is both silenced in death and also leaps into an afterlife, a future echo or rewriting. In other words, the Sapphic lyric refuses the chronological unfolding of time and instead endlessly repeats the activity of looking back to the past even as it predicts its own future rewriting.

The discursive structure of Victorian Sappho itself consciously repeats this temporal oscillation, refusing to be a simple chronicle of Sappho's reception from the early to late Victorian period. After setting the rhetorical framework in place with a playful introductory meditation on the process of declension ("Declining a Name"), Prins begins Chapter 1 ("Sappho's Broken Tongue") with a detailed study of the much-translated fragment 31 ("He seems to me equal to the gods ...") reproduced in its many English versions by Dr. Henry Thornton Wharton in his 1885 publication, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation. Prins shows how Wharton's presentation of Sappho as "the pure and unmediated voice of a woman poet who is the perfection of lyric song" (16) is predicated on a Victorian view of lyric as solitary, feelingful speech, fortuitously overheard (75). Erasing the nuances of same-sex eros that surround the Sapphic myth, Wharton views Sappho "according to the Victorian cult of ideal womanhood, and in accordance with nineteenth-century Classical scholars who sought to purify Sappho's reputation by construing her as a schoolmistress for young women" (59). In this chapter in particular, Prins's training in the Classics and her reproduction of the Sapphic fragments with her own parallel English translations give her discussion a vivacity and attention to detail that makes for deeply satisfying reading.

The second chapter ("Sappho Doubled: Michael Field") explores the Sapphic imitations collected in the anthology Long Ago (1889) and published under the pseudonym "Michael Field" used by Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. This aunt and niece, who regarded themselves as a married couple, collaborated to produce lyrics that are less the representation of the unmediated single voice Victorian poetics anticipated in lyric than a poetic field mediating between the two lovers. Instead of reading Field's Sappho as the paradigm of a new language of dissident desire originating from a lesbian identity, Prins argues that Bradley and Cooper "use Sappho's fragmentary text to turn writing into a homoerotic topography: a graphic field rather than a sublimated figure" (99). In so doing, Prins foregoes the force of an overtly political argument--for instance, that Bradley and Cooper write lyrics identifying Lesbian Sappho as lesbian Sappho--and argues more subtly that they pursue the exploration of a discursive field and enjoy the mutual pleasure to be had from collaborative lyric play