Constellations of Sappho: Texts, Translation and Sexuality

Abstract“Constellations of Sappho: Texts, Translations and Sexuality,” is centered on a group of writers based in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century who comprised the literary and erotic movement, “Sapho 1900.” The group took the Greek poet Sappho as their literary and personal exemplar, producing unconventional translations of Sappho’s poetry in French, as well as memoirs, novels, and manifestos variously dedicated to Sappho’s perceived homosexuality and freedom of literary expression. While much of their work remains unpublished, unknown, and understudied, my research forwards that their experimental literary contributions prefigure contemporary conversations and debates about queerness, sexuality and the body by linking together social, scientific and spiritual concerns resonant in the present.Chapter I of my dissertation, “(Un)veiling Sappho: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien’s Radical Translation Projects,” argues that Barney’s and Vivien’s unconventional translations and literary representations of Sappho are part of a feminist intervention that aligns with theorist Luce Irigaray’s rewriting of the ancient Greek canon to destabilize phallocentrism. Indeed, the Sapho 1900 writers enlist Sappho in the forging of a spiritual practice that could transcend patriarchal fantasies by fashioning of a “third-sex.”In Chapter II, “Sappho l’androgyne: Queerness and Spirituality,” I examine the way Vivien and Barney harken back to Aristotelian conceptions of the French androgyne to offer emancipatory renderings of queer bodies as a response to nineteenth-century French medico-legal debates about adding the hermaphrodite as a legal “third-sex” category. I argue that these renderings anticipate contemporary conversations about queerness advanced by scholars like Amber Musser. Yet not all radical nineteenth-century female writers viewed Sappho as a liberatory figure. Rachilde rebukes the Sapphic movement in her censored, “anti-feminist” novel Monsieur Vénus (1884), and articulates other radical sexuality and gender alternatives that have found resonance in the twenty-first century. The final chapter of my dissertation, “‘Être Sapho, ce serait être tout le monde !’: Rachilde and Textual Afterlives,” analyzes how the female characters in Monsieur Vénus and the lesser-known La Marquise de Sade (1887) assume the roles of sadist and masochist to offer an alternative fin-de-siècle feminism. Monsieur Vénus’s recent popularity, and the persistent interest in the biographies of Rachilde, Barney, Vivien and Sappho, reveal the complex relationship between feminist politics and female authorship – both in the late nineteenth-century and in the present