Fifteen
Sappho and the Other Woman

Margaret Williamson

Reading Sappho is a seductive project for a feminist. Although not the only woman poet known from antiquity, she is certainly the most significant.^[1] Her poetic achievement was so legendary that a poem attributed to Plato calls her the tenth Muse^[2] —an indication also of how transgressive was the role of woman poet. Another aspect of her fascination is her position in history—around the turn of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E ., in a world still dominated by aristocratic power, contested though that power already was: she thus escapes the radical exclusion of women from public life that was a by-product of fully developed democracy in city-states like Athens. She also precedes by two centuries the discourse of fourth-century philosophy, to which many recent theorists have allotted a privileged role in the genealogy of Western ideas of sexual difference.^[3]

[1] Other ancient women poets are now receiving increasing attention: for an overview, see Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre , with references.

[2] AP 9.506. Despite its traditional attribution this is probably among the many epigrams written in the Hellenistic period and passed off under the names of classical authors: see Page, Further Greek Epigrams 125-27. The "tenth Muse" label rapidly became a cliché in allusions to Sappho.

[3] Two particularly relevant to this essay are Foucault (see The History of Sexuality ), whose genealogy of modern sexuality goes back only to the fourth century B.C.E ., and Irigaray (especially Speculum ), on whom see further below, nn. 16, 27.

This essay attempts to address what must be the fundamental question about Sappho: in what ways, if any, can she be said to be writing as a woman, even though she shares many aspects of poetic tradition with male writers? I shall approach it through a comparison of some of her poems with those of a male author of love poetry, Anacreon, who wrote a few generations later than Sappho. It must be said at the outset, though, that the difficulties entailed in reading her are formidable. The tantalizing fragments of her poems reach us through over two and a half thousand years of neglect, random selection, and censorship, and through the reconstructions of scribes, textual critics, and papyrologists. And some of the accidents that have befallen her text seem simply too bad to be true. What accident was it, for example, that garbled the one word in the ode to Aphrodite, Sappho's only complete surviving poem, that tells us whether the singer is in love with a man or a woman—and that in a poem where Sappho herself is, unusually, named as the singer?^[4] At this point, as at many others, the would-be critic of Sappho cannot avoid the sense of peering through a series of fragmented and distorting prisms at a fragile and ever-receding text.

Two further factors adding to this sensation are, at one end of the process, our ignorance of the social circumstances in which Sappho wrote and sang and, at the other, the iconic status she has acquired for many twentieth-century readers. If the weight of previous centuries bears heavily on her texts so, in the twentieth century, do the desires of many of their women readers today: to discover the originary voice of female poetic consciousness and, perhaps, of lesbian sexuality.

Even if many of them must now be put on one side,^[5] these questions are worth mentioning for positive as well as negative reasons. One of the effects of the last twenty years or so of critical theory is liberation from some versions of empiricism: an acceptance of the desires motivating all reading. I make no apology, therefore, for subjecting the iconic figure of Sappho to an explicitly motivated reading that takes up one of the central questions of feminist theory: the relationship between language and gender.

[4] Only one word in poem I indicates the gender of the beloved. The manuscripts on which modern texts are based give three variant readings of the text at this point, none of which can be correct because none both makes sense and fits the meter and dialect. The currently accepted reading, which makes the beloved female, depends on an emendation that was proposed only in the nineteenth century. It is defended in his edition by the German philologist Bergk (Poetae Lyrici ad loc.) with the simple statement that "we are dealing with the love of a girl (de puellae amore agitur)": he reaches this conclusion mainly on the basis of Sappho's other poems.

[5] I address the textual transmission of Sappho's poems and the question of whether she can be described as lesbian in the modern sense in chaps. 2 and 4 of Sappho's Immortal Daughters .

Within classical studies Sappho has increasingly been identified as a crucial (though not the only) figure in debates about gender in the ancient world. I single out three treatments in particular. For Jack Winkler, Sappho's exclusion from mainstream, masculine culture gives her a privileged, and paradoxically more inclusive, perspective on its dominant paradigms.^[6] Thus, in the ode to Aphrodite, Sappho can write in counterpoint to Homer's epic epiphanies, embracing them from an ironic vantage point. Eva Stehle, on the other hand, following Simone de Beauvoit, seems to indicate female biology as the basis in Sappho of an erotic reciprocity which evades the structures of phallic domination that elsewhere pervade archaic poetry. In a more recent piece, she draws on film theory to analyze the gaze in Sappho as a means of dissolving hierarchy.^[7]

My reading of Sappho, though in some measure influenced by both these writers, attempts to consider the question from a slightly different, and explicitly linguistic, angle. It involves looking at a feature of her writing that, though touched on by both Winkler and Stehle,^[8] merits further exploration: the subject positions mapped out in her poetry. I shall be considering the different voices in her poetry, and the way in which they seem to construct the positions of subject and object, self and other, the "I," "you," sometimes "she," and occasionally "he" positions. My concentration will be mainly on love poetry and the configurations of individual desire: this is, therefore, a partial sampling of her corpus.

The background to my discussion is provided through a challenge issued by Plutarch. In the introduction to his essay on the virtues of women, Plutarch both opens and forecloses the question under consideration when he puts forward the proposition that "the art of poetry or of prophecy is not one art when practiced by men and another when practiced by women, but one and the same" (De mul. vir . 243b). The truth of this statement can, he suggests, be tested by setting alongside each other the poems of Sappho and of Anacreon. Although Anacreon was not an exact contemporary of Sappho, the accidents of survival mean that we have more of his love poetry than of any other archaic lyric writer, making him an especially rewarding subject for comparison with Sappho. Following Plutarch's suggestion I begin, therefore, with an analysis of self-other relationships in Anacreon, even though many of the

[6] Winkler, "Double Consciousness."

[7] Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World"; Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze."

[8] See, e.g., Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 167: "Sappho's poem ... contains several personal perspectives, whose multiple relations to each other set up a field of voices [my emphasis] and evaluations."

erotic structures identifiable in his work are paralleled in other male love poets.^[9]

Self and Other in Anacreon

The relationship between self and other where desire is concerned in Anacreon can often be seen to follow one of two distinct patterns. In the first, Love is personified as an adversary who either subdues the speaker or seeks to do so. One boxes with Love, as in 396, flees him (400), or gives thanks for having escaped his bonds (346). The mildest version of his effect seems to be his summons to the speaker in 358 to daily with a girl from Lesbos ("golden-haired Love strikes me with his purple ball and summons me to play with the girl in the fancy sandals"): other accounts of his impact represent it as violent, as in the image of Eros as a smith (413) who strikes the speaker with a bronze hammer and dips him in freezing water. Occasionally, as in the poem about the girl from Lesbos, the object of the speaker's passion is alluded to (see also 378), but the primary relationship is one between Eros and the lover, who experiences himself as either the victim or the adversary of a powerful external force.

In another equally common pattern, the speaker addresses the object of his passion: the relationship is between the speaker and an addressee, an "I" and a "you." What is noticeable here too is the tendency for the imagery to reflect an adversarial relationship; but this time it is the speaker who takes the dominant role. A good example is a well-known poem addressed to a sexually inexperienced girl, in which, by a common erotic metaphor, she is compared to an untamed foal whom the speaker imagines himself bridling and riding (417). This scenario of erotic domination is clearly also present in 346, which is again addressed to a youthful love object, a beautiful but fearful boy (or possibly girl); the poem goes on to allude to the hyacinth meadows in which Aphrodite tied her horses. It reappears, in wittily inverted form, in 360, in which the boy with girlish looks holds, says Anacreon, the reins of his soul. Here, therefore, Love's domination of the speaker has been replaced by the speaker's wished-for mastery of the addressee: even when, as in 360, the relationship is humorously inverted, the basic pattern is one in which one side or the other must end up in control, and the integrity of the "I" position is either completely secure or completely at risk.

[9] See Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World," who gives examples also from Archilochus and Ibycus and comments, "The man is helpless, stricken by the power of Eros or Aphrodite, but toward the particular boy or girl who attracts him the man is confident and prepared to seduce" (46). She attributes these patterns to "male sexual psychology" (50).

We have, therefore, two main patterns, one involving Eros and the speaker, the other the speaker and a beloved. Both, however, are structured in essentially the same way: the self-other relationship is essentially one of domination. The frequent repetition of this pattern suggests an overriding concern with establishing the boundaries between subject and object, and then with establishing the subject's control, in a kind of zero-sum competition of the erotic.^[10] A few brief observations about this structure are called for. First, this concern with maintaining the boundaries and the supremacy of the "I" makes particular sense when related to the likely context of performance of these poems. The symposia, drinking parties attended by aristocratic males for which this poetry was almost certainly destined, had a markedly political function: that of consolidating bonds between members of the group and of asserting their political dominance over those outside it. Recent work, inspired by Foucault, on male homosexual roles in classical Athens has demonstrated that the articulation of sexual roles in a public context has a political dimension: a male citizen's assumption of an active, dominant role in his sexual life is an index of his capacity as a citizen.^[11]

The situation of aristocratic symposiasts in the archaic period resembles in some ways that of citizens in classical Athens. They too were members of an elite whose privileges distinguished them sharply from other members of the community and were jealously guarded. Studies of symposiastic groupings have emphasized their importance as a defensive formation against the threat to aristocratic power and privilege posed by hoplite warfare and the wider distribution of wealth.^[12]

It has long been accepted by critics of archaic lyric that at least some symposiastic poetry is directly related to the political aspirations of its audiences: that exhortations to military virtue and patriotism, for example, express a collective ideal. Love poetry, though, has traditionally been interpreted as belonging to a more individual, confessional mode.^[13] The patterns sketched above, however, suggest that its rhetoric of exclusivity and supremacy is employed in the interests of a collective, rather than an individual, identity. It is the aristocratic group as a whole whose identity in relation

[10] There is another group of poems suggesting a more equal, negotiated relationship between erastes and eromenos . see, e.g, 359, 378, 402c, 467 I discuss the relationship between this and the other two groups in "Eros the Blacksmith."

[11] See in particular Halperin, One Hundred Years , and Winkler, "Double Consciousness." Both draw on Foucault's work on sexuality, especially on The History of Sexuality . See also Dover, Greek Homosexuality .

[12] On symposia, see Murray, "The Greek Symposium," "The Symposium as Social Organisation," Early Greece, and Sympotica , Rossi, "Il simposio"; Vetta, ed., Poesia e simposio .

[13] For an overview of current critical positions, see Slings, "The 'I' in Personal Archaic Lyric," with references.

to an other is figured in the structures of love poetry. The performer of a song ostensibly addressed to his beloved sings about his erotic mastery of another, but necessarily to that other; and sometimes the youthful object of his passion appears to be fictional. In these cases in particular, it is clear that his audience consists of those occupying the same subject position as himself, and his gesture of mastery is one in which all of this audience are implicated.

Second, this analysis of the ways in which social context informs love poetry also helps make sense of the other pattern of subject-object relations in Anacreon: that between the speaker and Eros. The shattering effect of Eros on the "I" is tolerable only if the agent, rather than being an individual other, is a personification or deity. To regard this threat as the effect of another human individual would be unacceptable for the community of aristocratic subjects to which singer and audience both belong. We shall return to this question of singer and audience in relation to Sappho.

The last point to note before embarking on a comparison with Sappho is that in the pattern involving two human individuals, subject and object positions are gendered, but their relation to biological sex is a mediated one. Thus, though the "I" is always an adult male, the other is always younger but can be either male or female. The subject-object polarity is articulated both with gender and with relations of power, so that to occupy the position of love object is also to occupy the weaker, feminine position, regardless of one's sex.

Sapphic Voices and the Other

To turn to Sappho at this point is to enter a completely different world, in which the range of voices, positions, and self-other relationships in the expression of desire is far wider and far more subtly modulated. To illustrate this I shall look first at a very damaged poem, fragment 22. The parts of this text that are legible, including editorial supplements, are, in translation, as follows:^[14]

... task ... lovely face ... unpleasant ... otherwise winter ... pain(less?) ... I bid you, Abanthis, take (your lyre?) and sing of Gongyla, while desire once again flies around you, the lovely one—for her dress excited you when you saw it; and I rejoice: for the holy Cyprian herself once blamed me for praying ... this (word?) ... Iwish ...

At the point at which these fragments begin to be intelligible, the speaker commands a second woman, Abanthis, to celebrate in song her desire for

[14] This poem survives only in a badly damaged version on papyrus, and some of the readings translated here depend on editorial supplements which are controversial. The main trend of my argument can, however, be defended even without conjectural supplements.

a third. This is evidently not the first time Abanthis has felt such desire, as the adverb "once again," traditionally used of the renewed onset of love, suggests: this is confirmed in the next strophe by the description of Gongyla as "the lovely one," and an account of the way in which her appearance excited Abanthis's longing. The speaker then, with the explicit statement "and I rejoice," takes up for the first time her own stance in relation to this scenario.

But is it really the first time? A closer look at the poem suggests that "once again" haunts this entire scene in a way that has from the beginning drawn in the speaker too, and that begins to open up some of the differences between this and the erotics of Anacreon. In this poem there is a subtle process of association between different subject positions in operation throughout, which has the effect of eliding them, blurring without removing their boundaries. The person I have so far called a speaker is in fact, of course, a singer (this is, after all, literally lyric poetry): it is in song that she bids Abanthis sing. The process of elision between the "I" and "you" positions is compounded further when the speaker proceeds herself to name Abanthis's desire: she is doing, in that second strophe, what she has commanded Abanthis to do in the preceding one. It is significant too that, just as desire is distributed among different speakers, so too it is distributed through different moments in time: the desire which was excited (repeatedly, apparently) in the past is to be spoken in the future as well as the present. The positions from which desire is articulated and the moments of its articulation, therefore, constantly shift and merge into one another: what is constant is the movement of desire itself through the poem.

In fragment 96, of which we have much more, a similar process can be traced. The least damaged part of the text translates as follows:

... Sardis ... often turning her thoughts in this direction ... (she honoured) you as being like a goddess for all to see and took most delight in your song. Now she stands out among the 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. Often as she goes to and fro she remembers gentle Atthis and doubtless her tender heart is consumed because of your fate ...

Once again the singer, the "I" of the poem, speaks to "you" and "she," both female, of their desire. A distant "she," a woman now (probably) in Sardis, the capital of Lydia, is described as turning her thoughts in this direction. Then the poem modulates into the past in order to describe her desire for the speaker's interlocutor, the "you" of the second strophe. The focus now shifts back through both tune and space to the woman in Lydia, who in her present surroundings is likened, in an extended simile, to the rosy-fingered

moon; and finally her desire for Atthis (who I am assuming to be the "you" of strophe 2) is recapitulated through her memory.

Here we can see an even more subtle and elusive play of desire at work, which once again works partly through an elision of the speaking positions. The singer is again associated through her song with the "you" of the second strophe: the woman now in Lydia, she says (or rather sings), "took most delight in your song." This time, though, the effect of the speaker's implication in the other woman's desire is even more complex than in fragment 22. The singer sings of a song that aroused desire, thereby performing through her poem an act designated within it as erotic, and thus constructing herself as a potential object of desire. She also, though, enacts desire from the subject, speaking point of view when she turns to the lengthy simile that names in song the woman's beauty. As in fragment 22, this effect simultaneously represents the gaps between subjects and bridges, without erasing, them. It is this effect that I am trying to capture by the term "elision," with the distances between the three speaking positions of the poem figured through, on this occasion, space as well as time. When finally she returns to the Lydian woman's desire for Atthis, in the sixth strophe, it is in a way marked by distances of both space and time: her longing for Atthis is possible only through the memory that bridges those distances.

It is evident from these two poems, and others besides, that there is a constant process of subtle and multifarious shifts going on between the speaking voices, and the subject positions, in Sappho's poetry. "I," "you," and "she" (and in fr. 9⁶ we should also add "we") are never clearly differentiated, securely demarcated positions, but are constantly linked in a polyphonic, shifting erotic discourse, a kind of circulation of desire in which the gaps between subjects, figured through time and space, are at the same time constantly bridged by the operations of love and memory.^[15] How different from the monologic erotic discourse of Anacreon, in which the only form self-other relationships seem to take is that of struggle that will end in the mastery of one over the other.

There are several major points of contrast here with Anacreon. The fact that this is a female voice speaking, astonishing though that is when one thinks of the silences that surround it, is only the beginning. Much more important is the way in which this female voice has been able to avoid

[15] I prefer to speak of the elision of subject positions, and of a circulation of desire, rather than, with Stigers [Stehle], "Sappho's Private World" (followed now by Skinner, "Woman and Language"), of reciprocity and mutuality: the latter description seems to me to take insufficient account of the transaction's embeddedness in social and linguistic practice. Another way of putting this, on a linguistic level, would be to say that it overlooks the effects of différance (Derrida, Speech and Phenomena ).

speaking from the feminine position occupied by the addressees of Anacreon and of other male love poets. Instead we have a polyphony of voices whose neither-one-nor-two,^[16] neither-subject-nor-object, relationship successfully both evades and contests the polarities found in Anacreon, and inscribed in the tradition in which he writes.

It is important to note, though, that although the boundaries between subjects are elided, they are not dissolved: there is a constant spacing effect between speaking positions. The most obvious way of achieving this is through the gaps of space and time found throughout Sappho's poetry. A second way, which we may note in passing, in which this spacing effect is achieved in Sappho is through the use of reported speech. This too is highly characteristic of her, and the ode to Aphrodite (fr. 1), combining reported speech with a set of complex temporal shifts, is an obvious example. Both resources are lacking in Anacreon, whose much sharper subject-object division does not require them: his poetry takes place for the most part in an undifferentiated present and makes little use of reported speech.

One of the most important contrasts with Anacreon, however, takes us back to the relationship between singer and audience. I suggested for Anacreon an isomorphism between the self-other relationship within the poetry and that of its sympotic audience with the world outside the symposium. For Sappho we are, of course, lacking historical information about who listened to her songs. But the analysis offered so far of her poetry offers a way of reading relationships with and between the members of her audiences within the poems themselves.

In the two fragments of Sappho considered so far, 22 and 9⁶ , the singing voice itself is an important way of achieving the effect of elision between speaking positions. In this circulation of desire, the singing voice plays a crucial role in that it both arouses and expresses desire, linking all the female figures who speak and are spoken of in the poem and making them both subjects and objects of desire. Not only this: the self-referential allusions to song also, I have suggested, return upon the subject of enunciation, the poet, and draw her in too. There is thus a second kind of elision: between the enunciating and enunciated subjects.^[17] Conversely, the addressee, the desired and desiring other, is not limited to the ostensible addressee of each poem, but ultimately includes the entire circle of women. If song itself both arouses and expresses desire, then to sing at all is to enter into an

[16] As the terminology shows, this analysis is influenced by the work of Luce Irigaray: see particularly This Sex . On the use of Irigaray by classicists, see now Skinner, "Woman and Language," and below, n. 27.

[17] Calame, Le récit , applies this distinction to the analysis of Greek poetry, though he has very little to say about Sappho.

open-ended, unbounded erotic dialogue with the entire group: the erotics of Sappho's poetry implies, therefore, a community of singing, desiring women. The contrast with poems of Anacreon in which a beloved other is addressed lies in the fact that in them the speaking positions within and outside the poem are often insulated from each other by the gap between ostensible and actual addressee.

My analysis has so far depended, however, on poems that evoke an all-female world. But there are others. If, in the poems so far considered, Sappho successfully evades the gendered polarities found in Anacreon and other male love poets, what of those poems in which the masculine intrudes upon this secluded world? Can her implication with a community of singing, desiring female subjects always provide a position from which to contest the position of feminine, object, other?

I shall address this question by looking at two more poems, each of which involves explicit opposition to the masculine. Perhaps Sappho's best-known poem is fragment 31, which famously charts the speaker's distress as she looks at a beloved woman in the company of a man:

He seems as fortunate as the gods to me, the man who sits opposite you and listens nearby to your sweet voice and lovely laughter. Truly that sets my heart trembling in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, then it is no longer possible for me to speak; my tongue has snapped, at once a subtle fire has stolen beneath my flesh, I see nothing with my eyes, my ears hum, sweat pours from me, a trembling seizes me all over, I am greener than grass, and it seems to me that I am little short of dying. But all can be endured, since ... even a poor man ...

What the poem says on a surface level is obvious enough, even if it has given rise to a good deal of discussion as to the man's identity: what is important for present purposes is only that he is male.^[18] As the speaker looks at him, he in turn, like the female lovers in the poems discussed before, is listening to a beloved woman's desire-arousing voice. The spectacle of her rival's relation to this woman then, on the level of surface meaning, causes the speaker such pain that she has the sensation of bodily disintegration. The final, damaged fragments suggest some kind of recovery, but cannot be interpreted with confidence.

What is of interest here is the way in which the poet's disintegration is represented in terms of speaking positions. As in previous poems, the addressee of this poem is herself speaking: but to her male companion, not to the singer of the poem. One of the consequences is, within the poem, the

[18] Many scenarios have been proposed: see Page, Sappho and Alcaeus . The tendency in more recent criticism is to read the opening as a rhetorical trope ("whoever sits opposite you ...") rather than a real figure: see Winkler, "Double Consciousness" 74.

cessation of the singer's own voice. But the breaking of the erotic dialogue between female speakers is not the only cause of the disintegration. The other, I suggest, within the rhetoric of the poem, is the introduction of an objectifying gaze, whose direction is represented grammatically The quoted section of the poem is framed by a very significant verb: "to seem." At the opening, the single (in Greek) word translated as "he seems" constructs the male lover as the object of the speaker's gaze. But the direction of that gaze is reversed within the poem, when the speaker herself becomes the object of a gaze: the last phrase reads literally "I seem to myself."

There are two ways of interpreting this reversal, both of which can be taken to be in play simultaneously. The repetition of the verb has, to begin with, the effect of suggesting a simple reversal of the gaze with which the poem opened: as she looked then at her male rival, he now looks at her. The physical disintegration of the speaker can be understood therefore as the consequence of her becoming the object of male gaze. But more important than the gender of the gazer is the way in which the gaze itself reintroduces what was absent from the previous two poems, namely a polarized division between subject and object positions.^[19]

Linked with the introduction of this division is the fact that the fragmenting of the female speaker's self, and body, occurs not only on the literal level of description but also linguistically, as can be seen first from the description of herself as "greener than grass," and then from her use of the word "I seem." With this verb the subject's position itself becomes a divided one, since it involves the speaker in representing herself to herself from another's perspective, and therefore in splitting.^[20] One can, then, read this disintegration of the female subject as the consequence of her move from being the subject of the gaze to being its object: a move that itself depends on the fact that the gaze demarcates these positions far more sharply than Sappho's more customary mode of engagement with others, the voice. Subject and object positions, in the phrase "I seem to myself," then collide or conflict rather than, as in the previous poems, being elided.^[21] It is worth

[19] For a fuller treatment of the gaze in Sappho, see Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze," whose subtle and powerful analysis attributes to it some of the blurring and de-hierarchizing effects linked in this essay with the voice.

[20] It is significant that the use of the verb "appeared" is identified by Barthes as a sure indication of the move from personal to impersonal narration: a move that also, according to his categories, occurs in this poem. See Barthes, "Structural Analysis of Narratives" 112; see also, on nondialectical self-other relations, Jefferson, "Bodymatters."

[21] The context of this poem in Longinus's account provides a fascinating sideline on this discussion. Longinus, to whom we owe the survival of most of this poem, famously celebrates it as an example of poetic unity: he marvels at Sappho's "selection of the most important details and her combination of them into a single poem" (Subl . 10.3). This in itself seems surprising, given the poem's stress on dis -unity. And yet one detail of the text he quotes raises at least the possibility that he was more alive to the text's disintegration than his argument allows. The phrase "to myself," occurring immediately after "I seem," can be construed as an attempt to heal the division between subject and object, even though in so doing it also serves to highlight it. Longinus, however, in the text transmitted to us, omits it altogether, though he continues his quotation with a few words that apparently come after it. The missing words have been restored only through the insertion of a further papyrus scrap (fr. 213): Longinus's version of the line reads simply "I seem," omitting the telltale recuperative phrase. On the context of this omission in Longinus, see Hertz, "A Reading of Longinus."

noting too that the spacing effects which made that elision possible in the earlier poems are missing here: the tense of this poem, unlike many others of Sappho's, is a continuous present. It seems, therefore, that engagement with a masculine world is reflected in the range of techniques used as well as in terms of content.

It is of course possible to align the movement of this poem with the scenario of domination envisaged in Anacreon and to see this as, so to speak, the beloved's-eye view of things: a brief attempt by the object to speak. No doubt there is no accident in the fact that we have a female speaker describing the disintegration brought about by a male gaze. But it is important to separate the idea of gendered subject positions from that of gender in a simple sense, even if, as here, they happen to coincide. What has changed between this and the earlier poems is not just the introduction of a male figure: it is, more importantly, the introduction of a gendered subject-object polarity, in which the speaker appears momentarily to be in the subject position (subject of the gaze) but is then forced also into that of its object. It is the resulting contradiction that causes her disintegration into a mute, fragmented body. The example of this poem suggests, then, that it is not the mere assumption of a speaking position by a woman that counts, but the negotiation of the subject-object polarity: in other words the successful negotiation of the feminine, rather than the female, position.

In my final example, the speaker once again engages with the masculine. Fragment 16, the Anactoria poem, with its apparently self-conscious allusion to both dominant cultural values and poetic tradition, presents us quite explicitly with a woman challenging her marginal position in the culture. This time the speaker emerges from her encounter on a very different note; and once again the key to understanding why is the way in which the speaker is positioned within the poem:

Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. It is perfectly easy to make this understood by everyone: for she who far surpassed mankind in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and went sailing off to Troy with no thought at all for her child or dear parents, but (love) led her astray ...

lightly ... (and she?) has reminded me now of Anactoria who is not here; I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians' chariots and armed infantry.

The categories with which the poem plays arc easily identified. The culturally prestigious, and masculine, values of militarism and heroism arc evident at the beginning and (what I take to be)^[22] the end of the poem, as well as in the allusion to Troy and the account of Helen's abandoned husband as "her most noble husband"—a description with strong connotations of military prowess. However, there are also reminders of the ways in which women are valued within the culture—in terms of their beauty, and of their role within marriage and the family It is not difficult to see how, even on first reading, the poem challenges these values. In the first strophe the emphatic "but I say" announces a strong and explicit challenge to a society that, collectively, values militarism above anything else, and claims the right to substitute an individual's desire—"whatsoever a person loves"—for that collectively sanctioned one. The markedly general phrasing of the opening then gives way to an example that defines the substituted desire as sexual, and a woman's: that of Helen, who left "her most noble husband" and went to Troy. A comparison with the treatment of Helen by Alcaeus, a male contemporary of Sappho's, also from Lesbos, exposes the rehabilitation that is going on here: far from suppressing the consequences of her action, one of Alcaeus's two treatments of Helen (42) singles her out as the cause of Troy's destruction and contrasts her with the virtuous and fertile Thetis; the other (283) stresses her limited responsibility for her actions. She was, according to Alcaeus, "crazed" by Paris when she followed him over the sea, and it is his transgression, not hers, against the laws of hospitality and exchange that is stressed. In Sappho's version, as Page duBois has pointed out, Helen is not the object of exchange (or theft) between men, but celebrated as "an 'actant' in her own life, the subject of a choice, exemplary in her desiring."^[23] The poem suggests, therefore, a double reversal of established values: love is to be valued above war, and women arc to take on an active, desiring subjectivity.

But this concentration on the strategy of substitution expressed in the opening strophe is vulnerable. Deconstructive criticism has taught us to read utterances as threatened by the repression on which they are founded, and the poem's attempt at mastering the values and paradigms of Greek culture seems to lay itself open to being read in this way. From such a

[22] The papyrus on which this poem was found continues with damaged sections of three more lines. Most editors think they are the beginning of another poem: some think they continue this one. I should make clear my assumption that the speaker is, as in almost all Sappho's poems, female.

[23] DuBois, "Sappho and Helen" 86-87.

perspective, the insistent repetitions ("perfectly;" "everyone," expressed in Greek by variants of the same word: panchu, panti ), like the emphatic "but I say;" suggest the fragility of the opening proposition rather than its strength. The claim to revalue militarism by means of language, to set in motion and then to control a process of linguistic substitution, sets up a structure that is open to reversal—and that is, within the poem, reversed. The presentation of Helen's desire makes the substitution she performs an ambiguous and unstable one: its object, Paris, is indicated only metonymically by a phrase—"to Troy"—which also connotes war and the destruction catalogued by Alcaeus. The values repressed by the speaker in the first strophe seem to return here, then, as well as in the final strophe, where the Lydian army is the measure of Anactoria's value to the speaker. According to this account, Sappho's revaluation is only the obverse of Alcaeus's in his poem 42, which was also announced as structured within language by the opening phrase "as the story goes"; and the movement of the poem as a whole is that of a desire for linguistic mastery that is threatened and dispersed by the otherness it seeks to control.

I began my argument with an attempt to examine Plutarch's assertion that the art of poetry was undifferentiated by gender. If my earlier analyses of Sappho have tended to prove him wrong, fragment 16 seems thus far to bring us up against an uncomfortable relativism vis-à-vis Sappho and Alcaeus. Once again, however, it is the relationship between the subject positions in fragment 16 that is the key to Sappho's distinctiveness. In this poem they are linked with another crucial element: the quintessentially female figure of Helen.

The dualities that Helen embodies have been persuasively outlined by Ann Bergren.^[24] In Herodotuss account of the origins of the long-standing hostility between Greeks and Persians—which includes the Trojan War—the women who move from one side to another, as marriage or love partners, have an ambiguous status: they are both subjects and objects of the exchange (or theft). Helen, who is also part of this self-renewing sequence of exchange, theft, and reparation, partakes of this ambiguity in a way we can glean from the poems of Sappho and Alcaeus just considered. That is, she both chooses Paris and is chosen by him, both abandons and is stolen from her husband, exchanges and is exchanged. This pattern conforms, of course, to Lévi-Strauss's analysis of the position of women in both kinship and linguistic structures as that of both signs and generators of signs.^[25] The duality can be found on a linguistic level too in the Iliad , where Helen is first encountered weaving in a tapestry the narrative of the war (3.125-28). She is, thus, both

[24] Bergten, "Language and the Female."

[25] Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 60-62.

subject and author of the narrative, its weaver and herself woven into it by the rhapsode, the "song stitcher." Like the Sapphic singing voice, therefore, she elides the positions of enunciating and enunciated subject.

This duality is, no doubt, part of what motivates Sappho's interception of Helen in her long wandering through Greek literature. But the way in which she is drawn into the chain connecting the three female figures of the poem—the speaker, Helen, and Anactoria—is also important, and it draws on the fluidity of subject positions that we have traced elsewhere. The link between the three female figures of this poem, once again formed partly by verbal repetition, is one that has eluded some of the poem's critics. The author of a standard commentary on Sappho, for example, says apropos of Helen's first appearance: "It seems inelegant ... to begin this parable, the point of which is that Helen found [the most beautiful thing] in her lover, by stating that she herself surpassed all mortals in this quality."^[26] But what he is objecting to is the poem's most crucial move, and it is signaled precisely by the way in which the description of Helen, "who far surpassed mankind in beauty" echoes the opening reference to "the most beautiful thing," once again using variants of the same Greek word (kalliston, kallos ). The effect of this repetition is to hint that Helen is the object of the speaker's desire, announced in the first strophe. Helen then, in the next strophe, becomes herself a desiring subject, who goes away to Troy. But her oscillation does not end there. Another verbal echo links her with the absent Anactoria: the word translated as "walk," bama , is formed from the same verb as that for "went" in the account of Helen's journey to Troy, eba . The speaker, thus, is a desiring subject; Anactoria, at the end, is a desired object: but Helen, in between, by means of the now familiar elision, is both.

It is this elision that slides out from under the tyranny of the opening propositions, implicating both the speaker and Helen in an endless chain of substitution in which each is both subject and object, speaker and spoken. This, more than the opening challenge, is the move by which the poem really subverts the discourse in which it is framed, and we can see this in the resulting disruption and instability of gender categories. In sailing to Troy, leaving behind her family, for example, she imitates the action of the Homeric heroes; but this assumption of a male role at the same time enacts the female speaker's erotic impulse. In leaving "her most noble husband," to go to Troy; she rejects but also embraces each of the competing values in the first strophe—the object of individual desire and the values of heroism and militarism. We could multiply these antitheses indefinitely; and yet they could hardly mimic the text's resistance to them. The elision of subject and

[26] Page, Sappho and Alcaeus 53.

object results, then, in the confounding of mythical categories of gender: and it is here that the elision in Sappho of what is elsewhere a gendered polarity has its most radical effect.

Conclusions

The rejoinder to Plutarch that emerges from this reading of Sappho is, therefore, a fundamentally and fruitfully ambiguous one. Sappho writes, we can say, as a woman precisely to the extent that she writes as not-a-woman: from a position, that is to say, that undercuts and contests the "hommosexual" structures defining femininity. We may wish to ask further what defines this position: is it to be located in linguistic or psychic structures or, indeed, the female body?

This study hints at a further possibility. For Sappho's time and place we can hardly talk of her social situation as the background to her poetry: the sparsity of our information renders the distinction between fore- and background untenable. What I have done is, faute de mieux , to read a social context within, rather than behind, the poetry. The exercise suggests that the gendering of Sappho's poetic discourse takes place through that of her audience; and, furthermore, that gender is a matter of relations of power at least as much as of biological sex. It is the fact that she addresses an audience of equals, of singing, desiring women whose song and desire endlessly refract her own, that makes possible her characteristic mode of address: to the other woman of my title.^[27]

Since this is explicitly a motivated reading, I may perhaps be allowed to end by introducing another woman into my account of the Anactoria poem. You may think she is already there: the reader. The disruption of gendered positions that I have traced in relation to the figures of the poem has as its correlate that of the reader's position. The opening "some say" of the poem bears ambivalently on the gender of the reader. Gendered in Greek to the extent that, say, the word "mankind" is in English, it apparently contains

[27] As implied in Irigaray's pun parler-femme/par lea femmes . This is an important qualifier of her other famous punning term, hommosexualité : taken together, they suggest that women can escape the constraints of patriarchal discourse, but that this is possible only on the basis of social practice. Analyses of ancient culture in terms only of hommosexualité lead to the distortions that are contested, rightly, by Skinner, "Woman and Language." On the complexities of parler-femme , see especially Whifford, Lute Irigaray chap. 2. Irigaray's later work, such as her essay "Divine Women" (in Sexes and Genealogies 57-72), suggests that divine paradigms may also be a basis for it: the importance in Sappho of Aphrodite offers some confirmation of this. See also Cantarella, Bisexuality , on the different relationship to power structures for women, which (she argues) meant that homosexual love did not symbolize the transmission of power as it did for men.

the male reader only to assimilate his desire to that of the female speaker and of Helen: but a female reader is from the beginning both uneasily contained and excluded by it. It is from this fragmented position that reader and poem conduct their negotiation with gender, a negotiation that when it pauses in the last strophe has at least won a place for Anactoria alongside those massed and glorious armies. The place and the moment that Anactoria inhabits may be distant, conditional, and fleeting: but I think we can claim this as a kind of victory.