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Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho

Eva Stehle

Sappho is, as Judith Hallett observes, a difficult poet to write about. Sappho seems straightforward, personal, honest—"confessional," in Hallett's term. But any lyric poet writing in the first person requires a special critical attitude. One must keep in mind that the "I" of a poem is not necessary the "I" of the poet at all. The poet may put into another's mouth words he or she would not speak in propria persona . The "I" may be generalized, as in folksong,^[1] or a poet may be writing with a specifically personal voice, as Sappho does when she uses her own name in a poem, but describing events that did not necessarily ever take place. The description of events is the poet's setting (like a stage set) for the play of emotions which he or she wishes to expose. The original emotions themselves must have their stimulus in the poet's experience, but the process of clarifying them requires the poet to refine, transform, extrapolate experience imaginatively, perhaps beyond recognition.

This tantalizing paradox—what looks most like a window into the life of the poet may be least true to the events of that life—is enormously complicated in Sappho's case by the fact that she seems to espouse lesbianism. Many react first to this, which they feel compelled to deny, denounce, celebrate, or somehow judge. They then read the poetry accordingly: On the other hand, those who do try first to distinguish poet from persona seem faced with a confused choice of explaining away the eroticism or discussing Sappho's putative "psychopathology." Hallett is absolutely right that the issue of homosexuality intrudes on, if it does not dominate, almost every discussion of Sappho in a way that does not happen with male poets. Hallett's

[1] See Tsagarakis, Self-Expression in Early Greek Lyric , for discussion of the problem.

article suggests an approach that, trying to avoid all of these traps, has some good claims to consideration. Her idea of using Greek male treatment of young men and Alcman's two maiden songs as converging context for Sappho is very suggestive. I do have disagreements with her over both her method of argument and her conclusions.

First, I think Hallett underestimates the real complexity of the question of Sappho's poetic persona. If Sappho's purpose was sexual affirmation of young women preparatory to marriage, questions of the interaction of the persona with the public arise. Was Sappho's stance of lover designed to fit with a ritual role played by the actual woman? Or could erotic admiration via poetry be effective if the author dissociated herself from it? If the poetry was treated as coming not from Sappho but from the community, would the strong personal focus and introspective quality not be subversive to the communal solidarity of praise? Would Sappho's reiterated wish to die not appear ill-omened in a public celebratory setting, a rite of passage? In short, Hallett's discussion of the Greek social structure makes the possibility of institutionalized affirmation of girls appear most plausible, but she still must show that Sappho's poetry fits the bill, appearances to the contrary: Detaching the persona from the poet does not make it automatically an impersonal or communal voice, as Hallett seems to assume. Nor does this view of Sappho illuminate the artistry of the poems at all, throw light on, for example, the interconnected themes of beauty and absence, or the tendency to displace the sensuality of the desired woman onto the surroundings.

With respect to evidence for lesbian practice in Sappho's poetry, Hallett argues that Sappho never pictures the speaker as engaging in acts of homosexual love or mentions physiological details, and that "many of Sappho's lyrics written in the first person imply an involvement in acts of heterosexual love" (131). The last line of 94 Lobel-Page (L.-P.) she dismisses as "too vague" to be definite evidence. The point Hallett is making is that the text of Sappho's poems will not support any great insistence that Sappho was a practicing homosexual lover, which is true. Yet Hallett falls into the biographical trap herself with the remark that many lyrics imply heterosexual love. She seems to assume that indications of sexual activity (or lack of them) will be biographical, even if nothing else is, an assumption which leads Hallett to write as though all the fragments were equally good indicators of Sappho's personal sexuality. In fact, the "many" fragments must be mainly the scraps of wedding hymns and bits of "folksong" (e.g,, 102 L.-P.), in which the persona, the "I" of the poem, is communal or generalized, as well as the references to Cleis, Sappho's daughter. None of the major fragments, in which the persona is some manifestation of the poet, breathes a hint of sexual interest in a man. The points to be made, it seems to me, are two. First, Sappho's

sexual activity, whatever it was, was integrated with the institution of marriage (which may not have been sexually very demanding).^[2] Second, we must pay attention to the direction of erotic intensity of Sappho's persona, that is, consider the emotional reality of the poems, without trying to deduce anything about the restriction or range of her enjoyment of sexual activity—and without attributing psychological abnormality or social maladjustment to her.

I think one implicit purpose of Hallett's whole paper is to combat the general supposition that Sappho was emotionally abnormal. Certainly the standard picture of Sappho is of a woman falling unreservedly in love with a girl, being crushed at the girl's departure, falling unreservedly for the next girl, who will also depart, becoming ever more exhausted but never more intelligent in her loving.^[3] Hallett's answer is to say that Sappho's poetry has an institutional erotic function but not private emotional reality. The idea should, rather, be met head on. Sappho was "abnormal," perhaps, in being unusually open to romantic impulse, unusually aware of the human urge for union and the inevitable separateness. When she wished to explore and clarify these impulses through poetry she chose female homosexual love as the vehicle because lesbian love offered the most receptive setting for romantic eros. Escape to a realm of beauty, illusion of perfect union, inevitability of parting: these could be expressed through union with another woman because such love was separate from daily domestic life with a husband; because the other woman could seem to match, reflect, make the emotional connection far more easily than a man; and because separation, if only by virtue of the inevitability of marriage, was inevitable. The poems of absence and longing need not record—each and every one—a parting or failure in love.^[4] By placing her persona in such settings Sappho could explore the interacting realities of psychological openness to and distance from a lover. Sappho must have known enough of both the romantic yearning for transcendent union and the different quality of lesbian intimacy from heterosexual intimacy to create a romantic, alternate female world.

Before looking at 94 L.-P. in this light, let me say that I disagree with Hallett over the way in which the Greek disposition to praise young men should be taken. I think she is right in seeing that the admiration is an

[2] Plutarch (Sol . 20.3) over 700 years later suggests that a man should make love to his wife three times a month because it eases marital tensions. The passage is cited and discussed by Pomeroy, Goddesses 87.

[3] Detailed exposition of this view is given in Schadewaldt, Sappho . See also Bagg, "Love, Ceremony, and Daydream," who suggests that Sappho suffered from guilt.

[4] The same reasoning as is typically applied to Sappho would, if applied to Family Dickinson, conclude that she had died frequently.

important validation of a youth at puberty and is directed at the whole personality, not just the young man's looks. It makes a good analogy with what Sappho's effect on young women around her may have been. But the praise of young men was undeniably based on sexual attraction.^[5] That does not mean that everyone who admired a youth felt the immediate urge to possess him sexually. But it is misleading in emphasis to say; as Hallett does (135), that "sensual appreciation of handsome youth might mean no more than approbation of his calisthenic or cognitive talents" (italics mine). For the reason why other qualities could be expressed through language of sexual appreciation is that sexual attractiveness in a young man was highly valued. Desire to possess a young man was socially acceptable. Therefore even those who had no designs on a young man could praise, for example, intellectual capacities via the powerful medium of sexual evaluation.

Likewise, validation of one woman by another in sexual terms must have relied on the social acceptability of one woman as object of sexual interest on the part of another. People in general are, if anything, too little inclined to distinguish between a person's statement of sexual attraction to a forbidden group and that person's likelihood of acting on it. So Sappho's poetic expressions of desire and love would have aroused hostiliy, not affirmation, if they were directed at a group with whom physical expression of desire was ruled out by the society.

Let us now look at 94 L.-P., the poem which may refer to actual homosexual activity.^[6] The poem opens (after a missing line), "Really, I wish to die; weeping she left me." The next three stanzas record a conversation in which Sappho comforts the distraught girl. The comfort turns into a reminiscence of the good things they shared, of which four stanzas are occupied by one occasion: "you adorned yourself with flowers at my side, you put round yourself garlands of flowers, you anointed yourself with oil, on a soft bed you expelled desire" (to paraphrase). The atmosphere is one of segregation in sensuous surroundings. With each stanza the focus is more directly on the body of the other woman. The first contains no mention of it (unless in a lacuna in the text). In the second stanza Sappho refers to her "tender neck." In the third the woman anoints herself (typically done while nude after a bath).^[7] And in the fourth she expels longing (someone else's longing,

[5] Dover, Greek Homosexuality , makes this clear, though, as he also points out (53-54), strict decorum seems to have inhibited public discussion of actual lovemaking: The same would likely be true for Sappho.

[6] See Hallett 131 n. 26. For an excellent discussion of the poem see McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94."

[7] See Il . 14.170-72; Od . 6.224-28; h. Hom. Ven . 61-63. In the first and third passages lovemaking follows. In the second Nausicaa becomes interested in Odysseus as a potential husband.

according to the verb form). The whole movement of the recollection is toward erotic culmination.

In these four stanzas Sappho's only reference to herself is the "at my side" of line 14, though the detail implies that Sappho pictures herself as present throughout. The concentration is entirely on the sensuousness of the other woman. Its effect could be sexual affirmation of the addressee, and Sappho may have intended, among other things, to create that effect. But there is an artistic reason for focus on the other woman through the four stanzas. Sappho is dramatizing her (or rather her persona's) complete openness to the other woman, her loss of self-consciousness in absorption with the other. Yet this is now memory, and the other woman does not share it. The unity previously so complete is now suddenly, irretrievably dissolved. The persona's (not the poet's) wish to die is a wish to halt the flux, preserve the perfect moment of emotional fusing with another.

Keeping the romantic quality of 94 L.-P. in mind, we can consider Sappho in comparison with Alcman's two maiden songs (1 and 3 Page [P.]). Alcman's tone is similar to Sappho's in some ways, but Hallett's discussion skirted the essential difference that Alcman's poems refer to their own context, a celebration and an appeal to the gods. And the method of praise is different. Alcman draws on the standard imagery of praise found in Homer and applied to both men and women. His picture of human, including erotic, interactions is male. Sappho avoids both. Her imagery and description of personal dynamics differentiate the female from the male.

The most prevalent image in Alcman's first maiden song is of the horse. Four times a girl is compared with a horse, a particular breed of horses, or a trace-horse (Il. 47, 50, 59, 92). In one instance our lack of information about breeds means that we do not catch the point of a comparison: a girl compared in beauty with Agido is a Colaxaean horse running against an Ibenian. There may be a ritual reason for the emphasis on horses; they seem to have figured in the worship of Ortheia.^[8] But the references to breeds dearly come from the area of male interest in breeding and racing horses. The image has a tradition in literature also. Paris is compared with a horse in Iliad 6.506-11. Ibycus compares himself with a prizewinning racehorse in a love poem (287 P.). Anacreon uses the image for a girl whom he threatens to ride (417 P.). Sappho, in the extant fragments, never uses any such comparison for a woman. When horses do appear in her poetry they are associated with men, implicitly dissociated from women. In the priamel 16 L.-P., for instance, Sappho chooses "what one loves" as most beautiful rather

[8] See Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 203, ad 1. 48.

than an army of horsemen. In 2 L.-P. a "horse-pasturing meadow" is located within the bounds of a shrine where it will not be open to pasturing animals.^[9] A late reference to Sappho's wedding hymns says she compared the grooms to prizewinning horses, the brides to the delicacy of roses (117a L.-P.).

In Alcman's second maiden song Astymeloisa is compared with a "golden shoot" (1. 68). The image of a shoot or sapling is found in the Iliad (18.56) of Achilles and in the Odyssey (6.163) of Nausicaa. The term is similar to one Sappho herself uses in a wedding hymn to describe the groom (115 L.-P.). But Sappho does not use it of a woman. Instead we find comparisons of women to fruit or flowers. In a wedding hymn a woman is an apple high on a tree (105a L.-P.). Sappho's daughter has an appearance like golden flowers (132 L.-P.).^[10]

Again, Alcman compares Agido to the light of the sun in the first maiden song (l. 41). Connection with the ceremony is possible; it took place before sunrise. But there are Homeric parallels: Hera's seductive veil is white like the sun (Il . 14-185); Achilles in armor is like the shining sun (Il . 19.398). And in both Alcman's songs girls are compared with stars. The image in 3 P. is the more elaborate: Astymeloisa is "like some shining star in flight through the heavens" (ll.66-67). The star image is used in the Iliad of men; Athena is compared with a shooting star (Il . 4.75-77).^[11] Both sun and star have the masculine gender in Greek. Sappho uses neither image, but twice compares a woman with the moon eclipsing the surrounding stars (34, 96 L.-P.). The moon is female in gender and a goddess in mythology. Sappho, I think, consciously wished to connect women with the mysterious rhythms of the moon as separate from the sharp, bright male world of sun and stars. We owe the preservation of one of these fragments to the commentator who noted the contrast with a passage of the Iliad .^[12]

But Sappho's images for women's appearance are few, despite her emphasis on vision. Similes are noticeably more frequent in the wedding-hymn fragments, particularly for men. A groom is like Ares or Achilles (105b, 111 L.-P.), or has a honeyed face (112 L.-P.). The disproportion may be accidental, but perhaps Sappho is less concerned to provide praise of the woman

[9] See my article, "Retreat from the Male" 92.

[10] The comparison of men with flowers was traditional but often as an indication of youth or pathos: see Il . 8.306-8; Theog. 1348 West (W.).

[11] Il . 22.26-31, Achilles; Il . 11.62-64, Hector. The point of the comparison is usually visual. But Astyanax is said to be "like a lovely star" (Il . 6.40) in a simile called unique. See Scott, The Oral Nature of the Homeric Simile 68.

[12] Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry 273, ad 34 L-P. The image of moon eclipsing stars is thought to be traditional but does not show up earlier than Sappho. The moon is never used in a comparison with a person in the Iliad or Odyssey . In h. Hom. Ven . 88-90 the effect of a necklace on Aphrodite's breasts is compared with the moon.

on whom she turns her attention than to explore the effect of that woman's presence or absence. Description implies separation between observer and observed. For Sappho another woman's presence rather generates a sensuous environment, figured as flowers, fabric, perfume, sacred precinct, which encloses them both, erasing the separation.

Alcman has the chorus in 1 P. talk of fighting, probably because they are competing with another chorus. Alcman's chorus thinks of it as a battle, one in which they denigrate their own ability to prevail without the aid of the leader, who commands their obedience (ll. 92-95). In 3 P. the chorus describes Astymeloisa, perhaps the leader, in passionate terms but describes her as not answering. Later, as the fragment tails off, the chorus says, "I would become a suppliant of hers" (1. 81). Male assumptions about competition and about dominance and submission have determined the form of erotic expression: love and beauty are contests. Sappho does not picture love relations as domination by one partner over the other. In 94 and 96 L.-P. desire is mutual. In 1 L.-P., the only combative love poem, either Sappho or the other woman is free to initiate the relationship. Dover notices the difference from the style of male homosexual relations but does not pursue the subject.^[13]

Finally, Astymeloisa in Alcman 3 P. is known to the army and is a darling of the people (ll. 73-74), while Sappho's encounter with or fantasy of a desired woman is always in an environment isolated from men (except in 31 L.-P.).

Detailed comparison of Alcman with Sappho illuminates Sappho's special romantic quality. Alcman's girls are imagistically and ceremonially integrated with the whole Spartan culture, participating in its values. Sappho used the special conditions of lesbian love to create an alternative world in which male values, those same values which denied Greek women an outlet for erotic fantasy, are not dominant, and within which mutual desire, rapture, and separateness can be explored as female experience.

[13] Dover, Greek Homosexuality 177. On male competitiveness, see the works cited in Hallett 135 nn. 40, 42.