III

If one reason for the popularity of the mythic pattern of goddess with young man is that it opened space for fantasies of uncodified erotic relationships, then Sappho's interest in the pattern may begin to appear more intriguing. The discussion so far also suggests that the way to approach Sappho's use of the myths is by examining the processes of gaze and identification in her poetry.

Sappho often describes a woman gazing. A notice tells us, "Sappho says she saw 'a child too tender picking flowers"' (122 V.). A line reads, "[When] I look at you [it seems to me] that you [are not] Hermione, but to compare you to light-haired Helen [is not out of place]" (23 V.).^[83] In the scrappy end of 96 V. we can read, "It isn't easy to look like a goddess. [but] you ..." Furthermore, Sappho describes the gaze as having a powerful, even physiological effect on the gazer. In 22 V. the narrator observes that the dress of another woman caused the addressee to "quail" when she saw it.^[84] In 31 V. the narrator describes the violent effects of the sight of another woman on her: "When I look at you briefly, then I can no longer speak, but my tongue is broken, at once light fire has run under my skin ..." (7-10).

In describing the effect of the gaze on the gazer as overwhelming, Sappho does not differ from other Greek writers.^[85] However, Sappho does part company from them in her articulation of the experience: she avoids or breaks down the opposition between viewer and viewed that is created by the gaze. At the end of 31 V. (partially quoted above), the narrator says:

[83] This translation is based on the supplements printed by Campbell, Creek Lyric vol. 1: Voigt's text, Sappho et Alcaeus , is more conservative, but the idea is dear enough.

[84] The narrator of Sappho's fragmentary poems is often not demonstrably female. I assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that it is a female voice.

[85] Examples are legion. See, e.g., Il . 14.294; Plato Chrm . 155d-e, Phdr . 251a-e. On seeing and being seen in the Hippolytus of Euripides, see Luschnig, Time Holds the Mirror 3-15; on tragedy generally Dump, "L'espressione tragica" 144-50.

"I am greener than grass and I seem to myself to be little short of death" (14-16). The narrator's gaze has shifted from the other woman to herself. With her new focus she observes herself both from within and from without. The audience too must shift from the simple position of "looking" at another to the ambiguous position of both sharing the narrator's experience and watching her. By contrast, the gaze that remains focused on the object is correlated with lack of erotic effect; the poem sharply distinguishes the narrator's unmoved gaze at the man in the opening two lines ("That man seems to me to be the equal of the gods") from the disruptive gaze at the woman.^[86] Similarly, in 1 V. "Sappho" describes Aphrodite's smile and repeats Aphrodite's speech from "Sappho's" own point of view, then takes on Aphrodite's voice. The switch is sudden, and the audience must simply shift perspective to suit. The narrator of 96 V. describes the beauty of the absent woman and the woman's desire for the addressee: the narrator's relationship to the absent woman is characterized by both gaze and identification. In 95 V. the narrator's desire to see the lotus-filled dewy banks of Acheron may be a displacement from her desire for a woman, but the poem is too fragmentary to tell for sure.

Sappho has other techniques for blurring gaze and identification. Description in her poetry is often both very sensuous and very unspecific.^[87] A woman's beauty is displaced onto the surroundings: song, scents, flowers, rich cloth, enclosed places all reflect the woman's erotic attractiveness. 94 V. is full of flowers and scent, and in 96 V. the woman's beauty is deflected onto the landscape.^[88] Dika is asked in 81 V. to weave garlands so that the graces will look on them. The very fragmentary 92 V. seems to be a list of different colored robes, plus garlands. Aphrodite is invited to come to a shrine in a seductive landscape in 2 V. Sappho often refers to singing and music. Replacing the "look" at a woman by atmosphere, hearing, smell means that the distinction of self and other inherent in gazing is dissolved. Sometimes Sappho offers the addressee/audience a mirror for self-reflection. In 94 V. the narrator describes to the addressee, who is leaving, the addressee's own sensuous ways of adorning herself. In 22 V. the narrator tells the addressee of her (the addressee's) own desire for

[86] Likewise, the man's gaze at the woman is unmoved. Race argues that "godlike" must mean "strong" (rather than, e.g;, "happy") and refer to his self-possession in looking on her: he compares Pind. fr. 123 (Snell-Mahler). Robbins, "'Every Time I Look at You,"' likewise contrasts the man's gaze with Sappho's. Hierarchy is operative between man and woman—his is a phallic gaze—and Sappho invokes the divine/human hierarchy to emphasize it. The two hierarchies are additive here.

[87] Cf. Winkler, "Gardens of Nymphs," on Sappho's metaphoric language for the body.

[88] Cf. McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94," who calls the scene in 94 V. a dream landscape, an idealized past.

another.^[89] The adjective "lovely," which opens the second stanza, could refer either to the addressee or to the woman she desires.^[90]

In all of these instances the audience's gaze is given no object of desire to focus on except a self-reflective one, an image of the addressee's own desirability. Both within the poetry and for the audience the two processes of visual fantasy, gaze and identification, are blurred. This practice means that the gaze cannot be aligned with the phallus. Sappho would have reinstated the operation of the male/female hierarchy by analogy had she used the gaze to objectify the one desired. Instead she constructs poetry in and through which the gaze opens the self to disintegration, shifting position, identification with the other, or mirroring of the viewer's desiring self.^[91] Through her use of the gaze to dissolve hierarchy, Sappho creates the same kind of open space for imagining unscripted sexual relations that the mythic pattern of goddess with young man makes possible. By this means Sappho can represent an alternative for women to the cultural norms.^[92]

The long fragment (or possibly a complete poem) 16 V. is important because it shows clearly the connection between Sappho's treatment of the gaze and her depiction of women's erotic life as separate from the dominant culture. A translation follows:

[89] See Di Benedetto, "Il tema della vecchiaia" 146, for a suggested thematic contrast between this fragment and 21 V.

[90] This statement is tentative since it is not clear where the poem began and the preserved part is too fragmentary to be sure that the reference of the adjective was not unambiguous.

[91] Doane, The Desire to Desire , points out that she analyzes the merger of identification and desire in the "woman's film" of the 1940s as problematic for women (esp. 22-33) and remarks that what is missing in the Greek period is commodification of the woman. I would add that Sappho's poetry presumes the possibility of sexual desire between women, so that blurring (it is not merger in the case of Sappho) of gaze and identification does not replace but rather permits a relationship with another.

[92] Cf. Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World," on Sappho's depiction of mutual (rather than dominant and subordinate) love relations among women.

(The tortuous translation of the second and third stanzas preserves approximately the original word order, for I wish to make a point about it.) The poem works out a contrast between conventional assessments, those supporting the social construction, or what one might call the public gaze, and the narrator's view of the location of women's emotional lives. Helen is by conventional agreement the "most beautiful." For Helen, to accept this social role would be to remain narcissistically focused on herself as the object of the gaze. Instead, as a subject, possessor of a desire that she has defined for herself, she finds the "most beautiful" elsewhere.^[94] Yet Paris, the object of her gaze, is not named or even mentioned in the poem. Helen's name is juxtaposed in the second stanza with the words, "the man/who was the best." The juxtaposition suggests Paris, but the very meaning of the words "man" (husband) and "best" depends on whether Paris or Menelaos is meant. The momentary ambiguity reveals the arbitrary character of the epithet "best." The man's identity is not revealed until the beginning of the following stanza: there the verb "abandoned" establishes that Menelaos is the man referred to. The adjective "best" is therefore another conventional epithet, but its public character eclipses Helen's individual choice of Paris. That is, the narrator can "see" Menelaos, who has a fixed public status, but not Paris, whose quality is conferred by Helen's love and is therefore invisible to others. On the other hand, Menelaos appears in the poem as a consequence of Helen's abandoning him: his only role is to be not "what one loves." Again in line 11, the audience will be reminded of Paris by the verb "led her astray," but again he is not named. The subject is lost in the

[93] There h a large bibliography on this poem. See the annotated bibliography through 1985 in Gerber, Studies in Greek Lyric Poetry .

[94] Some have been disturbed that Helen, who is introduced as a judge of beauty, is herself described as exceeding all humans in beauty. On Helen's significance for the logic of the primal, see esp. duBois, "Sappho and Helen"; Most, "Sappho Fr. 16"; Thorsen, "The Interpretation of Sappho's Fragment 16"; Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung.'" Wills notes the opposition between conventional and personal evaluations in the poem (440-41). DuBois, unlike the others, considers that Sappho meant to oppose male and female stories. Thorsen has a good discussion of the logic of the poem as a whole. Burnett, Three Archaic Poets 277-90, takes a different approach and focuses on memory.

lacuna of line 12 or 13: the most likely possibility is that it was an epithet of Aphrodite.^[95] The object of the woman's gaze is invisible, unnamed, not objectified. The result of eliding mention of Paris is that the relationship between Helen and Paris remains unspecified, the phallus unlocated, hierarchy suspended. Helen's gaze does not create a distinct object for the audience, nor does Helen slip back into her old role by becoming the object of Paris's gaze or guidance. The concretized male figure is left behind in the world of armies and conventional assessments.

If the subject of the verb "led astray" was Aphrodite, then she replaces Paris in desiring and conferring beauty on Helen. By virtue of naming Aphrodite, the poem transforms the relationship into one between women, one in which Helen is both the subject who desires and also responsive to Aphrodite. This complex paradigm (Helen/unnamed Paris, Helen/Aphrodite) allows the narrator to find loveliest—not Helen—but a woman unknown to epic, Anaktoria. Like Helen, who left her parents and daughter, the narrator rejects conventional expectations linked with epic on the one hand and marriage and family on the other for a love of her own choosing. The logic of the poem illustrates the relationship of female desire to the public world of prescribed social relations. Aphrodite both represents the woman who chooses her love and offers divine affirmation of love that contravenes the cultural norm.

But because Anaktoria is absent, the narrator's gaze must reconstruct her in fantasy. The separation of the narrator from Anaktoria produces the straightforward gaze that is not attributed to Helen. Helen sailed off to Troy rather than suffer separation, but the narrator must construct an imaginative image through the gaze of fantasy. Yet even in imagination the narrator does not offer simply an objectified Anaktoria to the audience. By referring to Anaktoria's way of walking and the sparkle of her face, she creates rather an image of light and movement.^[96]

Helen and Paris in 16 V. adumbrate the pattern of a goddess with a young man: the poem shows how Sappho could inflect the pattern to create open space for fantasy. Since Aphrodite doubles both Helen and Paris, the interplay of relations among them permits multiple configurations of gaze and desire. In a more complex way than on the Adonis vase discussed earlier,

[95] Scansion h against the possibility that "Paris" stood in the lacuna of either line. A god or quality is more likely to be the subject of the verb "lead astray" than a human: "love" is a possibility. See Voigt's critical apparatus ad loc.

[96] Both Rissman, Love as War chap. 2, and Wills, "The Sapphic 'Umwertung,'" think that Anaktoria's "light" and "movement" imply a comparison with the armies, that Sappho assimilates love and war rather than opposing them. Rissman argues that this poem is a recusatio of epic (48-54).

eroticism blurs gender identity. Sappho could have used the four myths in question to the same effect, treating the young man's gender as irrelevant (since he is not a dominating figure). In fact, in two of the myths the narrator is (apparently) associated or identified with the goddess. The maidens in 140 V. lament with or as Aphrodite for the loss of Adonis. The confusion over whether Sappho or Aphrodite loved Phaon implies that Sappho adopted Aphrodite's voice, singing of Aphrodite's love for Phaon, perhaps as an analogy to a love of her own. The story of Selene and Endymion may have been similarly used. The pattern also provided an image of a separate emotional space where female desire might express itself, for in the myths the young man is hidden in the wild or at the end of the earth.

However, what most forcibly strikes one about the fragments and notices is that the young man is portrayed at the point of impotence. Endymion is sleeping, Adonis dying.^[97] By portraying the man's "strengthlessness," Sappho reinstates hierarchy: the young man is demoted to passivity, and the goddess prevails. The goddess can gaze at the young man with a possessive look. Selene's gaze on Endymion must have been straightforward, the gaze that Sappho's poetry usually avoids constructing. The maidens perhaps watch Adonis as he fades. But the goddess and youth cannot be a couple because he is succumbing or has succumbed to the fate that destroys him in the canonical narrative. Sappho invokes narrative closure as it enervates the mortal, assimilates him to a non-man, in order to preserve the male/female hierarchy.

These figures are parallel to Paris in 16 V. Conversely, his absence from the text becomes even more significant when aligned with these stories. As argued above, not naming him means that the poem avoids reinstating hierarchy and conventional assessment, while indicating the invisibility of an object's loveliness to those who do not love it. But ultimately Paris becomes an absence for Helen herself. He was killed in battle toward the end of the Trojan War, and she returned to live with Menelaos. The hierarchy-scrambling relationship based on desire is lost, and the relationships prescribed by the social structure triumph. 16 V. can be seen as both imitating Helen's choice and pointing to its evanescence. In that case, the military forces that some find loveliest become more significant: they are the means by which the dominant

[97] In 58 V., the only case where the narrator seems to have compared herself to the human member of the mythic pair (Tithonos), she seems to be lamenting her age and feebleness. In this case the point may be rather the goddess's care for a human despite her mortality. It may also be the survival of song, for Tithonos's voice runs on unquenchably, and a reference to a lyre appears just above the lines on Tithonos in Sappho's text. Cf. Di Benedetto, "II tema della vecchiaia" 152-63, who conjectures, on the basis of the last two lines (quoted in connection with the Adonia), that Sappho is claiming love of life in spite of age, in contrast to Tithonos.

culture is enforced against individual desire, so are rightly aligned with the conventional assessments. The narrator's desire for the absent Anaktoria is perhaps also longing for one who has been reclaimed by her family and her role in the social structure.

Sappho seems to have used the mythic pattern of goddess and young man not to picture nonhierarchical sexual intimacy but rather to reflect the fragility of her ideal of mutual desire under the pressure of the dominant culture. We can guess that she chooses the moment of closure in order to represent the closure that social demands forced on women's love lives. Many of Sappho's poems are about departure and absence: the women she knew seem to have been obliged to marry and leave or follow families elsewhere. However, the resolution in these particular myths in favor of the divine/human hierarchy (over the male/female one), in favor of the goddess, means that Sappho could at least use them to support women's claim to subjectivity in the face of objectification by others. A woman's subjectivity, like the goddess's, is represented as surviving the destruction of her love life.^[98] The pattern of a goddess with a young man is thus a model for women's loves: it validates the location of love and desire apart from the established social structures, analogizes the woman to a goddess to support her claim to subjectivity and active desire, and acknowledges the impossibility of retaining the relationships formed there in the face of social demands on the woman. The young man of the myth, then, may have represented both the fantasy of escape from cultural definition and the power of cultural demands to reclaim the individual.

In these myths, in sum, Sappho perhaps saw a reflection of the working of the dominant ideology: through its own internal contradictions it opened space briefly for mutual erotic relationships, which it then closed down in its insistence that a woman's life follow the canonical narrative. Yet in Sappho's subversive logic, the straightforward gaze, the narrator's gaze in imagination at Anaktoria in 16 V., Selene's gaze at Endymion, is what is left to the woman when the desired other is lost. The absence of the other that transforms the gaze into projection also transforms the woman into a subject and possessor of the gaze.

[98] Compare 96 V., in which the woman who has departed now shines like the moon when it causes the stars to fade. Though separated from Lesbos and/or Atthis, the woman continues to stand out from her surroundings. Hague, "Sappho's Consolation for Atthis," thinks that the simile is left hanging because it is an art image of the woman's loneliness: this too is an aspect of it.