Eleven
Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman?

Marilyn B. Skinner

The challenge posed by French theory to received ideas of female consciousness and self-representation has emerged during the past decade as the most urgent intellectual problem confronting feminist literary critics on this side of the Atlantic. Historically, American feminist criticism has been based on an empirical notion of authorship and a concomitant view of literary texts as repositories of gender ideology. During its earliest phases, then, practitioners sought to expose the misogyny of male-authored literature and to posit an alternative female poetics, as contained in a new canon of recovered women writers. Emanating from the Continent, radical attacks on the liberal humanist creed now seem to call that "fundamental feminist gesture" into question.^[1] The threat is all the more insidious for being incorporated

[1] Jardine, Gynesis 50-64. On the French challenge, see Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; Draine, "Refusing the Wisdom"; on traditional American feminist criticism, see Todd, Feminist Literary History .

in critiques of patriarchal discourse undertaken by Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—thinkers who, insofar as they themselves are reckoned as "feminists," might be presumed sympathetic to an engaged feminist enterprise.^[2]

Although Cixous, Irigaray; and Kristeva differ considerably with respect to other issues, they jointly insist that woman is excluded from dominant structures of representation.^[3] Taking Lacanian psychoanalysis as their methodological point of departure, all three contend that sexual difference is inscribed into Western symbolic systems at the most rudimentary level. Language in a patriarchal culture originates with man, who locates himself as discursive subject and positive reference point of thought; woman is relegated simultaneously to the negative pole of any conceptual antithesis and to a subordinate object position. She can be defined only in terms of her alterity, named in a way that inevitably reduces itself to "not-man." Linguistic transgression, then, must necessarily precede and facilitate her political resistance.

What shape female linguistic transgression might take is, however, a contested matter. Kristeva's formulation is the least oppositional. Rejecting the possibility of a biologically based female identity, she argues instead that subversion of the rational symbolic process occurs only through irruption of a repressed linguistic core, the "semiotic"—affiliated, though not explicitly identified, with the cultural category of the feminine.^[4] Cixous, for her part, advocates the active production of écriture féminine , a mode of writing informed by sexual difference yet not absolutely restricted to women. Characterized by a lyric openness and a lack of conventional, logical organization—qualities also imputed to the tender utterances of the lost pre-Oedipal mother— the texts of écriture féminine are intended to challenge the "phallogocentric" symbolic order directly.^[5] Lastly, Irigaray postulates an exclusively female

[2] Key passages from the writings of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva were conveniently selected and translated by Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms . The difficulties French feminist theory poses for an Anglo-American feminist criticism that regards the text as the representation of an author's personal subjectivity and experience are explored in the classic debate between Kamuf, "Replacing Feminist Criticism," and Miller, "The Text's Heroine." For subsequent elaborations, see, among others, Weedon, Feminist Practice 165-66; J. Butler, Gender Trouble 1-34; Flax, Thinking Fragments 168-78; and Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 144-51. Strategies for transcending the ensuing dilemma are put forward by Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory"; Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism"; and de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't , "The Essence of the Triangle," and "Eccentric Subjects." For further insight into the relevance of French feminist theory to feminist criticism of classical texts, the reader is directed to Gold, '"But Ariadne Was Never There."'

[3] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics .

[4] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 163-67; cf. Hekman, Gender and Knowledge 87-90.

[5] A. Jones, "Writing the Body."

discourse (parler femme ) grounded in women's specific libidinal economy. Only by speaking (as) woman, in a language that, like female sexual pleasure itself, is "plural, autoerotic, diffuse, undefinable within the familiar rules of (masculine) logic"^[6] can women affirm a bodily desire e?F?luded from standard patriarchal speech.

Of the three positions summarized above, Irigaray's is obviously the most immediately vulnerable to charges of "essentialism," that is, the questionable presupposition of an ontological essence or nature in which all women participate by virtue of their sex.^[7] Leading exponents of feminist theory are consequently more and more inclined to treat her assertions nonreferentially, not as factual pronouncements but as rhetorical ploys for displacement of fixed conceptual schemes.^[8] Due, however, to her polemic interrogation of Platonic epistemology, which we will examine below, Irigaray has won an unexpected following among feminist students of Greco-Roman culture. With classicists her declarations tend to take on literal force. Adopted as investigative premises, they in turn give rise to tediously homogeneous readings of the Greco-Roman literary tradition, readings whose consequences for the study of women in antiquity are potentially disastrous. In this essay, I attempt both to alert my colleagues to the danger of arriving, via Irigaray, at such a theoretical impasse and to outline a more positive way of conceptualizing the ancient literary record, using Sappho as my exemplary text.

Alone among Continental feminists, Irigaray glances back to the temporal origins of patriarchal discourse, seeking to expose its roots as well as its controlling principles. In Speculum of the Other Woman , she grapples with the foundation legend of male linguistic hegemony.^[9] Western cultural erasure of woman as speaking subject commences, according to her, in fourth-century B.C.E . Greece, receiving primary metaphysical expression in Plato's "Myth of the Cave" (Resp . 7.514a-517a). In that authoritative text the cave is a "metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera , sometimes of the earth" (243) and thus linked, by extension, to infancy and prelogical symbiosis with the mother. In Socrates' eyes, it is the prison from which one escapes in order to ascend to the full light of masculine Being and Truth, the abode of the Father. That initiatory pilgrimage once accomplished, return to the dark female abyss is unthinkable: in future, the sole licit relationships will be those between father and son, or philosopher and pupil. "But what becomes of the mother from now on?" asks Irigaray (315). She vanishes

[6] Burke, "Irigaray" 289.

[7] Fuss, Essentially Spearing 56-58; Butler, Gender Trouble 9-13.

[8] Gallop, Thinking through the Body 92-99; Fuss, Essentially Speaking 71-72; Schor, "This Essentialism."

[9] Irigaray, Speculum 243-364. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text.

from sight, for "man has become blind by dint of projecting (himself) into the brilliance of that Good, into the purity of that Being, into that mirage of the Absolute" (362). Obsession with the abstract ideal banishes woman's specificity to the void of the unintelligible.

What results from male abolition of female presence is an underlying "sexual indifference" in the putative representation of gender relations.^[10] In a second treatise, This Sex Which Is Not One , Irigaray elucidates that notion. Statements purporting to describe an encounter between male and female subjects in fact record the mere interaction of a male subject with externalized and objectified aspects of himself projected onto "woman," a counterfeit token of dissimilarity. Woman's actual subjectivity is ineffable, since in the male "sexual imaginary" she can be no more than "a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies."^[11] Later it is stated categorically that "the feminine occurs only within models and laws devised by male subjects . Which implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one. A single practice and representation of the sexual" (86; Irigaray's italics). Irigaray's perception of an intrinsic uniformity underlying representations of pseudo-heterosexual congress between man and his manufactured "opposite" is encapsulated in her well-known pun hom(m)osexualité . As Gallop concludes: "Irigaray has discovered that phallic sexual theory; male sexual science, is homosexual, a sexuality of sames, of identities, excluding otherness."^[12]

Irigaray's portrayal of Platonic idealism, and post-Platonic Greek discourse in general, as a unitary thought system from which the female is summarily excluded resonates powerfully with the misgivings of feminist classical scholars, long accustomed to apologize for the "male-centeredness" of surviving primary sources.^[13] It should come as no surprise, then, that recent important work on Greco-Roman gender ideology betrays a deep indebtedness to her ideas. Page duBois, although undertaking what she herself labels "a critique of psychoanalytic theory and its ahistorical, universal claims about gendering," finally revamps Irigaray's contentions into a quasi-historical scenario in which Plato's texts become the instrument whereby woman's distinct metaphorical role in pre-Socratic discourse is usurped by masculinity.^[14] Similarly, Georgia Nugent discovers beneath Ovid's facile play with the titillating figure of the hermaphrodite a hom(m)o-sexual "reflection

[10] Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 58; de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference."

[11] Irigaray, This Sex 25. Further citations will be given in parentheses in the text.

[12] Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction 84.

[13] Culham, "Ten Years after Pomeroy" 15-17; cf. Culham, "Decentering the Text," and responses.

[14] DuBois, Sowing the Body 3, 169-83.

of the (masculine) Same."^[15] As the most conspicuous application of Irigaray's ideas by a trained classicist, though, David Halperin's essay "Why Is Diotima a Woman?" merits lengthier consideration.^[16]

The Diotima of Plato's Symposium is, Halperin argues, a rhetorical trope. Plato puts the Socratic model of philosophical intercourse into the mouth of a prophetess in order to call attention to this model's novel qualities of reciprocity and procreativity. Within the male-structured Greek gender system, those elements had formerly been excluded from masculine eroticism and subsumed wholly under female sexuality. In the Symposium , that culturally prescribed feminine "difference" is reappropriated, in an intellectualized and sanitized form, for males. What is true for Diotima, Halperin concludes, also obtains for any other Greek inscription of "woman": in the ancient representational economy the female serves as "an alternate male identity whose constant accessibility to men lends men a fullness and a totality that enables them to dispense (supposedly) with otherness altogether."^[17] For Halperin, then, as for anyone else who takes Irigaray's account of Plato's myth literally, it is impossible to find any hint of authentic female reality in the Greek signifier "woman." When an Athenian man speaks to his fellow symposiasts, Woman , the universal, does not exist—as Irigaray's mentor Lacan disquietingly asserted.^[18]

One dubious effect of this line of reasoning about language is that studies of female literary production are rendered otiose. Gynocritics , defined by Elaine Showalter as the investigation of the "history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women,"^[19] was, as I have previously stated, a driving preoccupation of Anglo-American feminist criticism in its earlier developmental stage, during the middle to late 1970s. What energized and justified that sociohistorically based method of inquiry was the assumption that texts composed by women reflect the peculiar conditions of women's lived experience within given cultures, ordinarily the shared experience of a "subculture" marginal to the male public world.^[20] According to this hypothesis, female subcultures, especially in preindustrial societies, are wholly occupied with the vital activities customarily assigned to women by a cultural division of labor—the tasks of domesticity, including sexuality, reproduction, and nurturing, and the ceremonies surrounding the human life cycle. On an emotional level, the energies of participants are meanwhile channeled

[15] Nugent, "This Sex" 176.

[16] Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality . 13-51.

[17] Ibid., 151.

[18] Lacan, "God and the Jouissance " 144.

[19] Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics" 128.

[20] Ibid., 131-32

into female bonding networks, primarily ties among blood and marriage kin, and into attachments, sometimes passionate, between friends.^[21] Discourses originating in the female subculture address such concerns, which are separate and distinct from those of males in the same society. Real-life female experience therefore engenders a "female perspective" encapsulated in women's texts. This entire set of commonsense propositions has now been called into question by apostles of French theory.^[22] If the Western symbolic system is a male-ordered construct, as they believe, the feminine specificity putatively contained in women's writing must be an illusion.

Let us consider a practical application of that skeptical postulate. Despite its patriarchal bent, Greek society nurtured a lively and continuous tradition of female authorship, extending from the archaic age well into the Hellenistic period.^[23] A canonical roster of major women poets, arguably compiled by the learned scholars of Alexandria, was in circulation by Augustan times.^[24] Sappho of Lesbos, who flourished approximately 600 B.C.E ., headed the list as Homer's counterpart, a complementary model of excellence for her sex (AP 7.15). Hellenistic women writers like Erinna and Nossis expressly looked back to Sappho as their exemplar.^[25] Applying gynocritic methods to these texts readily illustrates how books by women "continue each other."^[26]

Feminist classical scholars have just begun to direct intense critical attention toward Sappho's neglected followers. Continuing that scholarly project would help to validate the creative ventures of contemporary women. It is no secret that texts signed by females are habitually targeted for ideologically motivated suppression. To contemplate the numbers of women thus far silenced is utterly disheartening^[27] But if ancient female poets did sustain a distinct creative tradition, no matter how minor, within such a male-dominated society as that of ancient Greece, patriarchal discourses evidently do not always succeed in drowning women out. Conversely, if the Greek conceptual system is construed as inherently masculine, one must necessarily concede that no Greek woman, not even Sappho, was ever able to transcend androcentric cultural categories.^[28] The "female voice" in antiquity would turn out to be a male voice with a slight foreign inflection. Under such circumstances, work on the female literary tradition might well be abandoned as useless, insofar as women's texts could no longer claim

[21] Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World."

[22] Jardine, Gynesis 40-41; Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 75-80.

[23] Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre .

[24] Antipater of Thessalonica AP 9.26; cf. Baale, Studia in Anytes 7-9.

[25] Rauk, "Erinna's Distaff "; Skinner, "Sapphic Nossis."

[26] Woolf, A Room of One's Own 84.

[27] See Ross, How to Suppress Women's Writing ; Olsen, Silences .

[28] DuBois, Sowing the Body , 29.

to reflect a separate, gender-specific sensibility. This would surely be a discouraging outcome for a feminist scholar seeking to uncover scanty traces of ancient women's subjectivity. For the aspiring woman writer, its corollary implications are even more disturbing.

Before acquiescing in such methodological injunctions, however, we ought to scrutinize French feminist theory more intently. First of all, readers otherwise favorably disposed to a psychoanalytic approach are increasingly troubled by its resolute ahistoricism. Despite her ostensible recourse to origins in setting up Plato as the ktistes of Western metaphysics, Irigaray elsewhere repudiates history as just another hom(m)o-sexual construct (This Sex 126, 171-72), a move harshly criticized by Moi.^[29] In more sweeping terms, Wee-don protests that an investigation of gender confined to the level of textual analysis, "irrespective of the discursive context and the power/knowledge relations of the discursive field within which textual relations are located," is simply inadequate as feminist practice. Similarly, Todd charges that French theory's abstraction of sexual difference from historical flux and change entails a de facto "erasing of the history of women which we have only just begun to glimpse." The argument is taken one step further by Jane Flax, who contends that women's obvious exclusion from public discourse is actually the pragmatic result of a political inequality shaped by material conditions: "culture is masculine, not as the effect of language but as the consequence of actual power relations to which men have far more access than women."^[30]

Under pressure of these critiques, the denial of history implicit in French feminist theory emerges as both reductionist and perverse. We classical scholars ought to ask ourselves, then, whether adoption of such a timeless model of linguistic gender asymmetry is not so much at odds with our own disciplinary mission as to involve us in embarrassing self-contradiction. For we are students of Greco-Roman civilization, that is, of a given sociotemporal milieu; and we are consequently bound to address the issue of language and gender (or any other issue, for that matter) with proper attention to the conditions of life in particular ancient environments, as far as we are able to ascertain them. History is, by definition, what we are mandated to do.

Second, even within that psychoanalytic model, language itself is not entirely monolithic. Though they place control of logic and normative discourse on the side of the male, Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigaray all make some provision for a disruptive impulse stemming from the female—or from whatever passes for "female" within their respective systems. We have seen that for Kristeva "woman" can be reintroduced into language as that which

[29] Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics 147-49.

[30] Weedon, Feminist Practice 166; Todd, Feminist Literary History 84; Flax, Thinking Fragments 103.

escapes signification, while for Cixous she resurfaces as the pre-Oedipal mother making fond inarticulate noises. For Irigaray; at least in one chapter of This Sex Which Is Not One , she materializes in a surprisingly familiar form: as embodied women speaking among themselves.^[31] Responding to an interviewer's question about the possibility of evolution within the masculine cultural and political realm, Irigaray cites the new discourses—marginal, to be sure—created by women's liberation movements: "Something is being elaborated there that has to do with the 'feminine,' with what women-among-themselves might be, what a 'women's society' might mean" (This Sex 127). At a slightly later point in the interview (135), she expands on that suggestion:

There may be a speaking-among-women that is still a speaking (as) man but that may also be the place where a speaking (as) woman may dare to express itself. It is certain that with women-among-themselves ... in these places of women-among-themselves, something of a speaking (as) woman is heard. This accounts for the desire or the necessity of sexual nonintegration: the dominant language is so powerful that women do not dare to speak (as) woman outside the context of nonintegration.

Tentative as this formulation may be, Irigaray in my opinion has cleared a space within her own Lacanian cosmos for real-life women interacting as speaking subjects. And though she has contemporary liberation movements in mind, her notion of "places of women-among-themselves" can surely be extended to other communities of women, especially those sheltered to some degree, as a result of unusual cultural circumstances, from patriarchal modes of thought.

I therefore propose to negotiate the restoration of "woman" into the Greek literary tradition as the historical consequence of "women-among-themselves speaking (as) woman," that is, producing woman-specific discourses. In the poetry of Sappho, semiotic analysis has uncovered an elaborate complex of coding strategics differing perceptibly from those of the dominant symbolic order.^[32] Open, fluid, and polysemous—and hence conspicuously nonphallic—those strategies are employed to convey the passionate sexual longing felt by a woman—the first-person speaker designated as "Sappho"—for a female companion, who is often but not always physically absent.^[33] To me they supply fragmentary but nevertheless arresting evidence

[31] For an excellent analysis of the scheme of practical politics outlined in this passage, see Fuss, Essentially Speaking 66-70.

[32] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Burnett, Three Archaic Poets ', Rissman, Love as War , Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze"; Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 162-87.

[33] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" 47-48; Snyder, "Public Occasion and Private Passion."

that on archaic Lesbos a socially segregated group of girls and women devised its own symbolic system and set of discursive conventions, formally adapted to the expression of female homoerotic desire and exercised in the composition and delivery of oral poetry.

That repertory of poetic discourses has been assumed throughout antiquity and down to the present day to be wholly Sappho's own invention, designed to articulate private feelings; for convenience's sake, it may even yet be termed a "Sapphic" voice.^[34] One need not deny the poetic genius of the flesh-and-blood singer capable of handling her material with such artistic economy that it rapidly passed from mouth to mouth throughout the Greek world and survived intact for many centuries. Yet, given the normal function of the archaic Greek poet as appointed spokesperson for his or her community, it is far more likely that Sappho's self-stylization as desiring ego , along with her extensive stock of themes, verse forms and melodies, tropes and imagery, was largely traditional, a product of many generations of local creative endeavor. Thus Sappho would have inherited both her social role and her craft from a long line of female predecessors.^[33]

By approaching these songs as social discourses, we avoid the sticky problems of representation involved in treating a text as the faithful mirror of an author's unique subjectivity. To redeploy Showalter's concept, then, Sappho's poetry will here be presumed to distill the shared impressions of a historically contextualized "subculture," refracting to some degree women's lived realities, their confrontations with experience, albeit only in synthetic and highly idealized form. Yet in affording us insights into patterns of social ideology promulgated among a group of elite Greek women on

[34] For an important reading of Sappho as spokesperson for a group, rather than an individual, consciousness, see Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context." In a new study (Hallett, in progress), subsequent Roman appropriations of Sappho's mode of homoerotic discourse are surveyed and comprehensively identified as a "Sapphic tradition." While I am deeply indebted to Hallerr for the concept of an ancient gender-specific style of literary expression capable of articulating female desire, my purpose here is not primarily to defend her revisionist approach to Sappho nor to trace out the poet's impact on later literature, but rather to urge my colleagues to forgo constructions of ancient literary history that eradicate Sappho's achievement and its continuing influence.

[35] Plausible arguments for a continuous Greek lyric tradition extending as far back as the eighth century B.C.E . are supplied by R.L. Fowler, The Nature of Early Greek Lyric 9-13. It is worth recalling Virginia Woolf's observation that "if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally" (A Room of One's Own 113). Though I would question the use of the term "writing" in Sappho's case, I believe Woolf's intuitive perception of her as heir to a female poetic tradition is probably accurate.

sixth-century B.C.E . Lesbos, this body of texts may still prove immeasurably valuable for feminist historical inquiry.^[36]

Sappho's friends were able to "speak (as) woman among themselves" precisely because they were not readers. In contemporary postindustrial societies, where males are educationally advantaged, control of electronically based information systems is guarded, and writing is still the primary mode of communication, the ordination of "man" as unmarked subject of discourse is probably inevitable. In predominantly oral societies, on the other hand, women do have readier access to the cultural tradition insofar as it is conveyed by word of mouth. The nucleus of a cultural heritage is, according to Goody and Watt, "the particular range of meanings and attitudes which members of any society attach to their verbal symbols."^[37] But that collection of meanings is always open to modification. Within tightly integrated nonliterate societies, then, women can verbally intervene in dominant symbolic systems and append additional "feminine" values to signifiers, provided they have first had occasion to invent their own ways of encoding those values. Given a culture endowed with the custom of female musical performance before same-sex audiences, such occasions do arise: having positioned herself as speaking subject, the singer will tailor her presentation to her listeners' interests, imbuing it, as Showalter has argued, with "women's experience," as that is commonly understood by her society.^[38]

Now if, within the oral tradition, a female perspective has thus secured a claim to validity, that perspective could well assume a legitimate, albeit subordinate, place in a subsequent written tradition, so as ultimately to provide readers with an alternative subject position available to either sex. By "subject position" I mean an organized way of seeing the world, constituted through language, that permits the individual to impose a coherent meaning on the circumstances and events of his or her life, simultaneously enjoining practices based on that meaning.^[39] Once incorporated into a discursive system, a subject position may be adapted to various ends, long-term or immediate, serious or playful—utilized as a set of practical strategies for

[36] Here I follow the lead of Homans, "Feminist Criticism and Theory" 173, who holds out to feminist critics a possible route of escape from the liberal humanist/poststructuralist quarrel over individual subjectivity: turning one's attention to collective female discourses.

[37] Goody and Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy" 28.

[38] In contemporary sex-segregated Middle Eastern cultures, women still create oral poetry and employ it for precisely this purpose: see Joseph, "Poetry as a Strategy of Power"; Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments 171-271. The overall effectiveness of female poetic discourse as a power tool depends on its acceptance by men: when memorized and quoted by males, women's songs indirectly provide their composers with a strong voice in the larger community (Joseph 427). As we will see, this modern parallel illuminates the reception of Sappho's songs in antiquity.

[39] Weedon, Feminist Practice 21-27.

living in the world or, in contrast, appropriated as a vehicle for escapist fantasy. In the ancient literary tradition, the "Sapphic voice" seems to have become just such an alternative subject position.

From the archaic period to the early Hellenistic era, the Greek world experienced a slow transition from orality to literacy.^[40] Available evidence, chiefly from Athens, indicates that the capacity to write, with a corollary dependence on written records, spread through the population only gradually, coexisting for a long time with the time-honored mnemonic skills of a nonliterate society.^[41] Though women are decoratively shown as readers on fifth-century B.C.E . Athenian vases, in practice they remained disproportionately illiterate, not only in Greece but in all parts of the ancient world and at all historical periods. On the other hand, women storytellers perhaps contributed a great deal to preserving and handing on oral traditions, even after the dissemination of literacy.^[42]

Though this societal transformation was already well advanced in his lifetime, Plato in his last treatise still singles out song and dance, rather than books, as the basic medium for transmitting an awareness of cultural values to the young (Leg . 2.653c-656c). From time immemorial, oral instruction in the knowledge necessary to survive in Greek society—including an understanding of theology, history, politics, law, and even agriculture, as well as practical training in poetry, music, and rhythmic movement—had been made available to all upper-class youth, girls as well as boys, through their attendance at public festivals and their own parts in cult and ritual. For girls in particular, socialization was achieved by membership in a chorus composed of age-mates, beginning in childhood and continuing until marriage. The anomalous phenomenon of women poets in a rigidly gender-stratified society is plausibly explained by their function as poet-educators for adolescent groups of female initiates.^[43] Sappho, it is widely believed, was just such an educator, composing cult songs for the young women enrolled in her sodality or thiasos and training them in oral performance.^[44]

Responsibility for instructing Greek girls in music and dance was not, however, confined to women. The genre of partheneia , or "maiden songs," was extremely popular, and a number of famous male poets—Alcman, Pindar, Simonides, Bacchylides—are credited with producing such works ([Plut.]

[40] Havelock, Preface to Plato , and "The Preliteracy of the Greeks"; Harris, Ancient Literacy .

[41] Thomas, Oral Tradition .

[42] On women's illiteracy, see Cole, "Gould Greek Women Read and Write?" and Harris, Ancient Literacy 106-8; on women storytellers, see Thomas, Oral Tradition 109.

[43] Dowden, Death and the Maiden 103. On the girls' chorus, see Calame, Les chœurs .

[44] Merkelbach, "Sappho und ihr Kreis"; Calame, Les chœurs 1:385-420; Gentili, Poetry and Its Public 72-89.

De mus. 17.1136 f.). Lengthy fragments of two partheneia by Alcman, active in Sparta in the mid-seventh century B.C.E ., are frequently compared to Sappho's verses because his speakers, like hers, express a strong homoerotic attraction to the beauty of their companions.^[45] This generic resemblance has prompted the suggestion that Sappho was herself a follower of Alcman.^[46] At the very least, it proves that her function as socializer of young female initiates could elsewhere be undertaken by men, and thus leads us to wonder about the authenticity of her female perspective. Could Sappho be imposing upon her young charges a cognitive structure derived from, and intended to reinforce, patriarchy? If so, this would be but one more instance of women choosing "to inhabit the space to which they are already assigned" by a male "logic of domination."^[47]

I do not believe, though, that that is the case. While Sappho's manipulation of verbal devices like diction, figures of speech, and imagery is clearly indebted to the mainstream tradition,^[48] her modes of subjectivity differentiate her to an extraordinary degree from her male counterparts—particularly those working within the same genre, whether partheneion or erotic monody. Specifically, her model of homoerotic relations is bilateral and egalitarian, in marked contrast to the rigid patterns of pursuit and physical mastery inscribed into the role of the adult male erastes , whatever the sex of his love object.^[49] The distinction between these two ways of constituting homoerotic passion can be illustrated by juxtaposing Alcman's representations of girls in love with the desiring speakers portrayed in numerous Sapphic texts, most notably her fragment 31.^[50] The chorus's admiration of their leaders Hagesichora and Agido in Alcman fragment 1 is permeated with a spirit of eager rivalry, since they are competing with another chorus.^[51] Such agonistic tensions emulate the mindset of a male warrior society. Meanwhile, the yearning for Astymeloisa expressed in Alcman fragment 3 betrays an abject dependency quite foreign to Sappho herself.^[52] In contrast, Sappho's declarations of passions are a subtle means of awakening the beloved to the

[45] Calame, Les chœurs 1:420-39; Dover, Greek Homosexuality 179-82; Rissman, Love as War 119-21.

[46] Hallett, "Sappho and Her Social Context" 139-42.

[47] DuBois, Sowing the Body 29.

[48] B. Fowler, "The Archaic Aesthetic."

[49] See Foucault, The History of Sexuality 2:38-93. On Sappho's model, see Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World."

[50] For the convenience of nonspecialists, the numeration of the fragments of both Sappho's and Alcman's poems is that found in the most recent Loeb editions (Campbell, Greek Lyric vols. 1 and 2, respectively).

[51] Page, Alcman 52-57.

[52] Stehle, "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense" 147-49.

mutual pleasures of sexuality. Thus fragment 31 is no anguished confession, but instead a virtuoso display of seductive poetic control: by making her vividly conscious of her own power to captivate others, the speaker draws the addressee into a dense web of sensual serf-awareness and so encourages in her a reciprocal erotic response.^[53]

There are corresponding differences, too, in each poet's stance toward members of the opposite sex and concomitant portrayal of gender relations. Though Alcman's singing girls are center stage, the gaze fixed upon them is unmistakably male, for in their sweet naïveté and emotional vulnerability they present themselves as unsuspecting objects of heterosexual desire. In Sappho's poetic universe, however, men are hardly a focus of female interest; as Joan DeJean deflatingly remarks, they are "relegated to a peripheral, if not an intrusive, role."^[54] Masculine ideology, on the other hand, is present as inescapable background noise, representing both the power of the cultural system to enforce its demands on women^[55] and a privileged conceptual framework to which Sappho counterposes her own antithetical outlook. For example, in rebuking the transgressions of her errant brother Charaxus and his mistress Doricha (frs. 5, 7, 15), she seems to be censuring a male economy of desire: erotic obsession, the impulse to possess the object undividedly, has brought public disgrace upon Charaxus himself and provoked unseemly arrogance in his paramour (fr. 15.9-12). Again, the first stanza of fragment 16 confirms the speaker's superior insight into what is "the most beautiful" (to kalliston ) by opposing her comprehensive and relativistic definition of beauty to a series of overtly male, and patently limited, foils. Lastly, the violence of Sappho's reaction to the sight of her beloved in fragment 3^[1] is enhanced by an indirect contrast with masculine impassivity. While the man sitting opposite the girl must be taken as a hypothetical rather than a concrete figure,^[56] his intrusion into this intimate conversation warns of the crass indifference of the great world outside the thiasos , less inclined to appreciate the addressee's singular loveliness.

In none of these texts does Sappho close her eyes to the ontological reality of the masculine order. She recognizes it, instead, as a prior and controlling presence, but still avows the ethical superiority of her nonnormative subject position, her radically woman-centered approach to existence. Whenever her texts trope difference by an appeal to gender, then, the female stance affords a posture of resistance to prevailing male attitudes and practices. But the resulting polarity is not inversely "hom(m)o-sexual," in Irigaray's

[53] O'Higgins, "Sappho's Splintered Tongue."

[54] DeJean, "Fictions of Sappho" 790.

[55] Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze" 224-25.

[56] Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 179.

sense: rather than conjuring up male alterity as the mere negative projection of itself, the speaker's perspective defiantly locates itself against patriarchy, the pre-extant condition. One might state, paradoxically, that Sappho's poetry is literally "heterosexual," for it affirms the availability of distinct, gender-specific modes of subjectivity and directs its audience to choose what is identified as the better, though less advantaged, of two real alternatives.

It appears, then, that the subject position extracted from Sappho's monodies and choral compositions does not replicate patriarchal modes of awareness but rather affords a substitute basis for organizing female experience. Through imaginative identification with the first-person speaker, a girl would have absorbed survival tricks for living within a patriarchal culture: formulas for resisting misogynistic assumptions and so protecting self-esteem, for expressing active female erotic desire, for bonding deeply with other women, and for accepting the underlying ambiguities and absences of full closure inherent in both human discourse and human life. Consequently, she would be, in her adult years, an energetic and wholly socialized participant in female communities—those into which she was born and those she would join upon her marriage. The ultimate purpose of Sapphic song, we may conclude, was to encode strategies for perpetuating women's culture.

But would it really have been possible for a girl who internalized a female subject position to preserve it after leaving the thiasos and reentering a patriarchal milieu? Again, let us observe the peculiar epistemic processes of oral cultures. In passing information from one generation to the next, nonliterate societies exhibit "structural amnesia": aspects of the past no longer relevant to present concerns are sloughed off from the record and forgotten.^[57] Susan Schibanoff suggests that illiterate women respond to directives from the dominant culture in similar fashion.^[58] With no concept of a fixed, unyielding written text to deter them, they can "mishear" utterances in conflict with their own values and thereby resist immasculation. If Schibanoff is right, it follows that adult women in archaic and early classical Greece, segregated from the larger public sphere except on ritual occasions and having little or no exposure to reading or writing, could easily have retained a woman-centered perspective—more easily, no doubt, than their literate great-granddaughters.^[59] At separate cult gatherings such as the Adonia and the Thesmophoria, to say nothing of daily private interaction in their own homes, these women had abundant opportunities to speak and joke

[57] Ong, Orality and Literacy 46-49.

[58] Schibanoff, "Taking the Gold" 87-91.

[59] On the increased availability of formal education for women from the fourth century B.C.E . onward, see Pomeroy, "Technikai Kai Mousikai."

among themselves, to chant and dance, to adapt a flexible mythic heritage to their purposes—in short, to propagate their own discourses in relative isolation.^[60] We know, for example, that women sang folk songs, because scraps of them have been preserved, including one (PMG 869) that may have originated on Lesbos in Sappho's own lifetime: its reference to Pittacus, a ruling tyrant, is suspiciously familiar and quite possibly obscene.^[61] It is reasonable to surmise, then, that compositions of Sappho and other women poets also formed part of a widespread female oral tradition handed down from mother to daughter, and that those compositions served, in effect, as a mechanism for opposing patriarchy.

Considered in such a way, Sappho's poetry offers an intriguing parallel to Luce Irigaray's own demonstration of parler femme , "speaking (as) woman," in "When Our Lips Speak Together," the essay that concludes This Sex Which Is Not One (205-18). There, troping speech as lesbian erotic play, Irigaray gives substance to her conception of a polysemous feminine language enacted through the female body. Communication between her lovers takes place on a timeless, almost wordless plane beyond patriarchal "compartments" and "schemas" (212), where only the body's truths are valid. "You," the addressee, and "I," the speaker, meld into one composite being through simultaneous jouissance , and this interchange of inexhaustible orgasmic pleasure constitutes a sharing of consciousness. Because Irigaray's model of female language depends upon corporeal contact, however, the subject is forced to seek a way of embracing across distances and can only appeal, in the end, to a vague notion of mystical somatic fusion (215-16). Yet it seems obvious that a connection with the absent partner cannot be sustained, in practice, without recourse to writing—which poses the danger of reinscription as object within a prefabricated patriarchal account.

Song, Sappho's medium of communication, avoids this pitfall because it is memory based. In oral societies, memory is the repository of all knowledge and the matrix of the collective as well as the individual consciousness. Thus an idealized experience captured in song and committed to memory can surmount the physical limitations of space and time. Meanwhile, song as performance art also provides scope for idiosyncratic self-expression by prescribing that every successive rendition will be unique, produced by one singer at a particular moment in time. The song text is both infinitely repeatable and infinitely varied.^[62] Patterns of intimacy forged by erotic

[60] Winkler, The Constraints of Desire 188-209.

[61] Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 448-49.

[62] For a theoretical analogy, compare de Lauretis's several arguments for redefining personal subjectivity as an ongoing "process of engagement" with externally formulated social discourses. According to de Lauretis, the agent exercises a considerable degree of self-determination in adapting those discourses to serve her private needs and even combining them into more complex vehicles of consciousness that escape conventional categories (de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't 182-86; cf. "Feminist Studies/Critical Studies" 8-10, and "Eccentric Subjects" 144-45).

encounters within the Sapphic thiasos would consequently have survived a patriarchally enforced separation by marriage, for the searing intensity of the love affair could be rekindled through verses associated with that affair and later performed over and over again during the singer's lifetime.^[63] By the same means, the moving lessons learned from her adolescent experience of desire might be imparted to outsiders—women of another community, or her own children and grandchildren.^[64] Long after the composer's death and long after the death of her last companion, then, this poetry would have continued to offer generations of women an authentic female subject position. That in turn explains the emergence, century after century, of yet other Greek women poets, for whom their archaic foremother served as enabling prototype and fount of inspiration.

But we should not forget that Sappho's songs would not have gained fame in the wider world, or eventually circulated as written texts, had they not offered something to men as well as to women. Divorced from their primary cultural context, artistic works produced by female communities are subject to marginalization or distortion precisely because they exhibit disturbing deviations from normal social ideology. Thus, to cite an already familiar example, Alcman in his maiden songs is most likely appropriating a Spartan femme initiatory discourse akin to the one Sappho herself inherited and making it conform to a masculine symbolic order. Sappho's poetry is, as we have seen, undeniably deviant; yet it was still preserved, transcribed, and ultimately enshrined within the androcentric literary tradition as a special category of discourse. Had men used it solely for voyeuristic gratification, converting its femme subjects into erotic objects, they would have drastically modified its content, as we have observed Alcman doing, and excised in the process its woman-oriented elements. Clearly, then, Greek male listeners must have found another, peculiar application for it, one that required its survival intact and unchanged.

Sappho's great poetic achievement, I believe, was to articulate a female desire so compellingly as to make it at once emotionally accessible to men as well as women—although men's responses to it were shaped by far different relations of gender and power. The diffused eroticism that taught female auditors in the sheltered atmosphere of the thiasos how to transcend linear symbolic systems was perceived within the masculine sphere

[63] Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277-313.

[64] Segal, "Eros and Incantation."

as delightfully idyllic and romantic. Consequently, as we learn from ancient critical pronouncements, anecdotal evidence, and visual representations of the poet as cultural icon, male listeners and readers cherished Sappho's work as a socially permissible escape from the strict constraints of masculinity.^[65] In the symposium, singing one of these compositions—songs charged with the comforting presence of benign divinity and flooded with aching but sweet reciprocal desire—would have allowed men momentarily to "play the other," in Zeitlin's phrase, and so to release themselves from the necessity of being at all times publicly competitive and self-controlled.^[66]

By logical extension, allusion to Sappho became an obvious tactic for projecting metaphoric "difference" upon one or two antithetical male-structured categories, particularly during the long process of conversion to a writing-based system of literary production. Yet the Sapphic texts still stayed in play as a locus of real differentiation, continually reinscribing into mainstream Greek discourse a set of gender assumptions radically free from male bias. Pace Irigaray, woman accordingly maintained a toehold in the Western symbolic order for as long as those texts remained intact. Pace Halperin, there is a dash of actual female subjectivity even in Diotima: when he argues persuasively that the Platonic image of reciprocal intellectual eroticism is derived from earlier ideas of female homoerotic relations,^[67] Halperin overlooks the fact that Plato's audience would have obtained its artistic impressions of female homoeroticism chiefly from the poetry of Sappho.

[65] The psychological spell Sappho exerted over a male listener's imagination is implied at [Longinus] Subl . 10.1-3, where the author marvels at her ability to select and combine "the most extreme and intense" (ta akra ... kai hypertetamena ) emotions in her descriptions of love. Praise of the charm (kharis ) and pleasure (hedone ) of her subject matter points to a general perception of her poetry as emotionally enthralling; see Demetr. Eloc . 132, and Hermog. Id . 2.4 (p. 331 Rabe). Portrayals of Sappho on red-figure pottery (for example, the kalathos by Brygos on which she appears with Alcaeus [Munich 2416, ARV^[2] 385/228] and the hydria [Athens 1260, ARV^[2] 1060/145] showing her reading in the presence of three female companions, one of whom crowns her with a wreath) hint at widespread use of her songs as entertainment at symposia in fifth-century B.C.E . Athens; cf. the apocryphal tale of Solon's reaction to one such performance (Ael. apud Stob. Flor . 3.29.58; Campbell, Greek Lyric 1:13, no. to), which, though admittedly late, nevertheless provides insight into how male listeners responded to Sappho and how her songs were transmitted orally. That cultural image of Sappho explains why the musical theorist Aristoxenus attributed to her the invention of the poignant and affecting mixolydian mode ([Plut.] De mus . 16. 1136d; for its character, see Plato Resp . 3.398e).

[66] On Greek mirnesis of the female as a theatrical device for affirming elements excluded from ordinary male experience, consult Zeitlin, "Playing the Other." For the pattern of "the Greek male's fascination with and gradual appropriation of the socially suppressed female other," see duBois, Sowing the Body 176-77; and, on the symposium as privileged space for the assumption of a "tempered alterity," see Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague, "From Ambiguity to Ambivalence."

[67] Halperin, One Hundred Years 126-37.

If metanarratives like Irigaray's are to serve as frameworks for profitable scholarly inquiry; they must be pliant enough to admit a blurring of polarities, to incorporate pronounced exceptions to their rules. Confronting a gargantuan heap of male-authored texts, feminist classical scholars have understandably perceived sexual/textual oppression everywhere and so have written off the Greco-Roman literary tradition as a blank page of canonical female silence. But, as Cicero informs us, silenced voices do cry out (Cat . 1.21) and, according to Susan Gubar, blank pages can tell tales.^[68] While we may accurately describe Western culture as masculine in orientation, we must refrain from subscribing to paradigms of cultural construction that obliterate women's historical contribution to art and learning, for to do so is to do patriarchy's work.

In conclusion, then, I submit that the female-specific discourse known as Sappho's poetry is not so marginal to the Greek, or to the western European, literary tradition as to be readily excluded from consideration as an influential cultural factor, no matter how absolute and totalitarian the grip of the patriarchal symbolic system might appear. As many honorific allusions by later women writers suggest, this discourse did provide generations of ancient women with a (m)other tongue and a basis for constructing a positive account of their own experiences. More important for its perpetuation (and, one might add, for the overall mental health of the culture), Greco-Roman males benefited from the opportunity afforded by Sappho's texts to enact a woman's part, if only in play; and so to enter imaginatively into states of awareness foreign to them. In the innovative Hellenistic period, literary representation itself gained new vitality from incorporating additional elements of the female perspective preserved in Sapphic poetry. Finally, we should not forget that, exactly like their predecessors in antiquity, women taking up the pen at the beginning of the modern era invoked Sappho as a heroic authorizing presence.^[69] Thus all contemporary women who write, within the Western tradition at least, may call themselves daughters of Sappho. As we reread her scanty fragments, we consequently do much more than rediscover the woman's voice in ancient literature. We are glimpsing the other shattered surface of what was once a two-sided glass. That no comparable glass has existed until recently for modern man has been his loss, no less than woman's.

[68] Gubar, "The Blank Page."

[69] Kolodny, "The Influence of Anxiety,"