[In the following essay, DeJean concentrates on Sappho's resistance to the objectifying male erotic gaze in favor of a poetic vision that reflects feminine desire.]

«Within [the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks], the gaze is particularly foreign to female eroticism […]. [Womans] entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies […] her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation» (25-6). In This Sex Which is Not One, Luce Irigaray offers this categorical denunciation of an erotic economy dominated by the gaze. It could be objected that she follows too closely the logic that, from the time of the Greeks, has decreed that, since desire operates through the eyes, Woman should not be allowed to look directly on the male. However, Irigaray offers a challenge to this axiom dictating acceptable female behavior. She argues that «Woman's desire [does not] speak the same language as man's», that «Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking» (25-6). According to her theory, there is no need to forbid the gaze to women, for women do not speak their desire through the eyes.

And why would they want to? The gaze, Irigaray argues, is the instrument of a pleasure that is as restricted as it is restricting. «Can pleasure be measured, bounded, triangulated, or not?» (10), she queries. Behind her question is a never explicitly formulated attack on the concept articulated by René Girard, the triangulation of desire. In Girard's theory, male desire—in Girard's model, the desiring subject is always a man or a woman, like Emma Bovary, created by a man—is never original, but is inspired by the desire of a male rival. Both the functioning of the gaze as Irigaray presents it and the triangulation of desire act to objectif Woman, to deny her an active role in the economy of desire.

It seems logical to assume as Irigaray does that «Woman's desire does not speak the same language as a man's». However, what seems missing from Irigaray's reformulation of the language of desire is a reading of representations by women writers of the creation of a female erotic language. The gaze has been forbidden to women, but that does not mean that they have not used it. It may be that readers have not been sensitive to Woman's invasion of «the dominant scopic economy» because the female erotic gaze does not function according to the model that male representations have schooled us to expect. I would like to examine texts that contradict both Irigaray's description of Woman's relation to the gaze and her implicit critique of Woman's role in triangular desire. These are two of the founding texts of an erotic literature in which women authors portray a female desiring subject in the process of expressing her desire. These texts run counter to the logic Irigaray develops, according to which Woman situates herself outside the erotic geometry constructed with the gaze, for they depict Woman openly speaking her desire through the eyes. Furthermore, they suggest that there may also be a female variant or variants of the triangulation of desire: in both these texts, female desire expresses itself voyeuristically, through a gaze that is mediated, although in ways that are not recognizable on the basis of male-oriented discussions of the triangulation of desire.

The women's texts I have in mind also refute the rare portrayals by male authors of women who take an active role in «the dominant scopic economy». Let us begin to measure the originality of female representations by briefly considering Woman's fate in male texts. Without exception, male depictions of a female desiring subject who looks openly upon the object of her desire reveal that Woman adopts what is assumed to be a male language at her own risk.

Let me inaugurate the precarious historical balance I will maintain throughout this discussion by illustrating the male presentation of the female desiring subject with two examples, one classic (Greek) and one French neo-classic. In Greek tragedy, Woman is a dangerous speaking subject because she comes to language in order to speak about sexual desire. Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than in the work of Euripides, frequent inspiration for the French poet of Woman's passion, Racine. Recently, critics have begun to speak of Euripidean feminism to refer to his staging, especially in the character of Phaedra but also with his Medea and his other women wronged, of the discourse of female desire. However, that characterization is perhaps hasty, as is evident from the example of Euripedes' heir, Racine. No one expresses with more complexity the power of Woman's prise de parole and its threat to the social order than Racine. Racine establishes female desire as a dangerous force that must be annihilated when he portrays the desiring woman as active subject controlling the gaze, and when he allows her to propose a novel triangulation of desire, in which the object of desire is doubled, rather than the desiring subject.

Such early commentators on French neo-classical tragedy as Germaine de Staël's protégé Schlegel considered Euripides' rendering of Phaedra's tragedy superior to Racine's because of its more restrained portrayal of the heroine's expression of her desire. The most striking illustrations of what Schlegel terms the «shameful degradation» of Racine's Phèdre are the famous double scenes of Phèdre's avowal of her forbidden love for Hippolyte (I, 3, II, 5). In both instances, Racine pointedly inscribes the functioning of desire through the eyes—«je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue»; «tel que je vous voi» (lines 273, 640). Phèdre is «shameful» because she refuses the founding classical dictate of female modesty which forbids her to look directly at a man. However, her degradation is even more complete in the second scene because, when she turns her desiring gaze on Hippolyte, she enriches the erotic present by conflating it with the erotic past. In addition, Phèdre triangulates her desire incestuously when she fractures the functioning of genealogy to see not the son's resemblance to his father but the father's resemblance to the son. She objectifies Hippolyte as the beautiful object of her contemplation, then endows him with her memories of his father's past: «[Thésée] avait votre port, vos yeux, votre langage, / […] Lorsque de notre Crète il traversa les flots» (lines 641, 643). It is this memorialization through and of the gaze, this use of the gaze to create an erotic scene in which past and present function simultaneously, that constitutes Racine's greatest insight into the gaze of the female desiring subject and into Woman's invasion of the «dominant scopic economy».

During the scene in which Phèdre uses her memorializing gaze to combine the seductive traits of father and son, displacing thereby both the legendary womanizer Thésée and the aspiring warrior Hippolyte from the male's customary place as organizer of love's geometry, she is still unaware of Hippolyte's love for Aricie. She therefore does not yet know that she has been assigned a place in a traditional love triangle, in which she plays the conventional role of older woman abandoned for younger woman. While Phèdre still believes that she has the power to rearrange the geometry of desire, Racine has her give voice to that desire on several occasions by borrowing from the original voice of women's erotic literature, Sappho. Most notably, for the moment at which Phèdre, brought low by her passion, memorializes her initiation into the transgressive role of desiring/gazing female—«je le vis», etc.—Racine's heroine speaks not with her own Racinian voice but with a virtual citation from what has been since Racine's day Sappho's most famous ode, the ode traditionally referred to by the French tradition as «A l'aimée». Racine's one major transformation of Sappho's original, his translation of Sappho's present tense into a past tense, may signal his recognition of memory's central place in Sappho's poetry of desire. The punishment Racine reserves for Phèdre, her suicide under the spectator's gaze, a flagrant violation of 17th-century theatrical practice, may also be an act of authorial revenge against Sappho, the female poet indecent enough to have dared both to appropriate the gaze for a desiring woman and to invent a female triangulation of desire.

Sappho's commentators through the ages have responded in particular to two characteristics of her work, her presentation of the context of poetic creation and her configuration of the plot of female passion. Sappho portrays both the composition and the performance of her verse as an exchange among women, as the product of a female community whose members are united by bonds both personal and professional. Her oeuvre is most famous and most notorious because of its celebration of a type of female friendship that commentators try to understand through reference to the biographical scenario they promote for Sappho. Commentators thus most often consider Sapphic friendship solely in terms of what they believe to be its sexual content and react to the subject with moral condemnation, or sympathetic defense, or even attempts to deny the sexual content of her poetry. Yet this female bond can also be considered in purely literary terms as an attempt to bypass male literary authority and to deny men any primary role in the process of poetic creation. Sappho presents poetic creation as literature written by women for other women and about other women. In this poetic universe, males are relegated to a peripheral, if not an intrusive, role. Most strikingly—and this, I contend, constitutes the central threat of Sappho's creation for male writers—the Sapphic narrator, a woman, assumes what is generally a male prerogative. She is the desiring subject. Because the object of her desire is also a woman, she is in control of the gaze that objectifies the beloved woman, thereby giving the poem its visual focus and creating its geometry of desire.

Let us consider the transgressive qualities of Sappho's use of the gaze in the poem cited by Racine, the ode «A l'aimée». Here is that scandalous ode in a recent, fairly literal French translation by Edith Mora. (I provide only a French translation because the feminine forms are retained in French).

Il égale les dieux je crois
l'homme qui devant toi vient s'asseoir
et qui tout près de toi entend
ta voix tendre
et ton rire enchanteur qui a, je le jure,
affolé mon coeur dans ma poitrine
Car si je te vois un instant je ne peux
plus rien dire
ma langue est brisée, sous ma peau
un feu subtil soudain se glisse
mes yeux ne voient plus, mes oreilles sont
bourdonnantes
une sueur glacée me couvre et un tremblement
me prend toute et je suis plus verte
que l'herbe, tout près de mourir
il me semble …
Mais il faut tout oser car même abandonnée …

The poem recounts what appears at first to be a conventional tale of the triangulation of desire: the narrator is a voyeur, observing from a distance the woman who is the object of desire while this woman is demonstrating her love for a man. However, for today's reader and for readers at least as early as the time of the first translator to remodel Sappho's erotic geometry, Catullus, there is something «wrong» with the scene of love reciprocal and frustrated that is staged in the poem. The triangle of desire inscribed there is unlike either of those formations that literary portrayals of love have schooled the reader to expect. The narrator's femininity is not immediately stressed so that the appearance of a feminine adjective («je suis plus verte») in the poem's second half can come as a shock, an invasion. The reader suddenly realizes that the poem is not what it first appears to be. The narrator is a usurper, for she has displaced the male from his role as viewer in the most common literary love triangle in which a man sees the woman he loves in the arms of another man. However, the triangle configured after this displacement can in no way be confused with what has become the stereotypical literary love triangle composed by two women and one man, in which one woman laments her abandonment for the other woman.

To judge from responses to her poetry over the centuries, Sappho's (re)configuration of the plot of love, the triangle of desire that she proposes, was the source of the threat she has so often constituted for male writers. Sappho usurps for her female narrator the control over the gaze that is normally a male domain. I realize that it is impossible to reconstitute the original «horizon of expectations» for erotic poety and that her poetry may well predate the stereotypes I have in mind, yet the axiom Irigaray posits, «the prevalence of the gaze» has always been «particularly foreign to female eroticism» in all likelihood predates those stereotypes as well. When Sappho put a woman in the place usually occupied by the male poet-lover, she initiated a pattern in the economy of desire that many «strong» male writers have tried to overturn. Poets like Catullus (in his ode 51) and Ronsard (in his «Je suis un demi-dieu») propose a masculine reconfiguration of Sappho's erotic geometry in which a male narrator controls the gaze and has regained control over the beloved woman.

For their so-called «translations» of «A l'aimée», both Catullus and Ronsard revise Sappho's geometry of desire. In «Ille mi par esse deo videtur», Catullus puts a man in the place of Sappho's female narrator. As a result of this substitution, he sets up triangular desire zero degree: a man desires a woman when he sees her in the arms of another man. Ronsard is more radical than his Latin precursor: he eliminates both the transgressive desiring woman and her scandalously innovative triangulation. In «Je suis un demy-dieu, quand, assis vis-à-vis / de Toy», the male poet («je») has assumed the double control over the gaze Sappho and Catullus divided between the narrator and the man seated next to the beloved woman. While in Catullus all attention is focused on the exchange between men from which both desire and poetry are born, Ronsard's poem is constructed around a single gaze, through which the male objectifies the beloved woman.

Critics and commentators are unable to erase Sappho's transgression as easily as her poet-translators. Since they are obliged to accept the erotic triangle she proposes, they attempt instead to account for the Sapphic gaze in a manner that alleviates the threat of its uncanny functioning in the poem. Witness the efforts of the man who is arguably the most influential Sappho commentator of our century, Denys Page. In his still authoritative Sappho and Alcaeus Page devotes a disproportionately long section of his extensive commentary on Sappho “31” to an attempt to reposition the reader's vision of Sappho's vision. Page views the poem as an interpretive option: «We have to choose … whether the emphasis falls on love of the girl or on jealousy of the man» (22). Page turns this choice between «love» and «jealousy» into a decision between two types of triangulation. He seeks above all to persuade us of the absolute centrality of the first member of the triangle to be introduced, the anonymous man presented only as «he», a pronominal interloper in the intimacy shared by «I» and «you». «The greatest obstacle to our understanding of the whole is indeed our ignorance of the relation of this man to the girl and to Sappho … : But we must not forget that the man was the principal subject of the whole of the first stanza; and we shall not be content with any explanation of this poem which gives no satisfactory account of his presence and his prominence in it» (28).

By centering his account on the man and on Sappho's jealousy of him, Page makes the poem function according to a standard masculine triangular scenario. Echoing Freud's conclusion about female homosexuality (in «The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman»), Page thereby also makes Sappho's female narrator desire a woman as a man. The commentator who promotes jealousy as the narrator's primary emotional response to the scene and reinforces the man's «prominence» argues by implication that the narrator is involved with greatest intensity in the process by which the gaze is used to objectify the girl who is the object of masculine desire. To see the process of objectification as the primary function of the gaze in Sappho “31” is to imply that this poem inscribes the origin of Sapphic desire, to view that desire as existing primarily in the present, and finally to suggest that the narrator's silent interlocutor, the girl she addresses as «you», plays only an incidental role in the generation of her desire.

This triple implication of Page's reading denies the specificity of Sappho's vision of the erotic moment. Like Racine, Sappho stages the gaze as an act of memorialization. Unlike the male vision of female desire, however, Sappho's female desiring subject immortalizes the memory of an erotic gaze in order to comment on the creation of female desire, rather than, as in Phèdre's case, in order to build a monument to the young male's physical beauty and heroic prowess. Sappho's use of the present tense is her canniest poetic strategy. She appears to be grounding her gaze in the moment of its generation—«si je te vois un instant»—as if to invite comparison with the focus on the moment of sexual desire that is a commonplace of male erotic poetry. But to read Sappho “31” as a standard use of the present tense is to fall into the oldest misreading of the poem's erotic situation in which the poem becomes both the archetypal vision of Woman, transported by the frenzy of untamed physical desire, writing in the heat of the moment, and the archetypal model of women's writing as the spontaneous, uncontrolled outpouring of personal passion. It is against this traditional vision of the poem, prominent for centuries and dominant in Racine's day, when Sappho was rediscovered for modern literature, that Page and other recent commentators insist, with an overbearing sense of superiority, that Sappho “31” must above all be seen as a tribute to Sappho's artistic control: Page stresses «the uncommon objectivity» of her attitude toward her emotions, the «accurate definition» of symptoms, the «precision» of expression, the «exactitude» of portrayal, all the while leading up to what was surely in its original formulation a bold conclusion: «There is certainly no lack of control in the expression, whatever there may have been in the experience» (27).

However, this recent refocusing of the critical viewing angle from Sappho's spontaneity to Sappho's control simply reverses the coin, without attempting either to explain the specific nature of Sapphic poetic control or to account for the role played in the poem by the appearance of spontaneity. In Sappho's erotic vision, the gaze does not function as a unique occurrence, as the lightning-bolt vision of love/desire at first sight. The Sapphic gaze is doubly repetitive, both an action that takes place again and an original action that is recreated in memory. Catullus projects the multiple gaze onto the man who, sitting «opposite» the beloved, «gazes at her again and again [identidem]», and he uses this recurrence to spark the narrator's jealous desire. Sappho's repetition is both less predictable and more complex. The man does not look at the beloved girl; he is shown listening to «her voice and her laughter». The female poet alone turns the gaze on the object of desire, in a use of «see» that has troubled translators for centuries. Here are a few of the attempts to render its complexity: «while I gazed» (Ambrose Philips, Sappho's first English translator, 1711), «should I but see thee a little moment» (Symonds, 1883), «when I see thee but a little» (Wharton 1885), «si je te vois un instant» (Mora, 1966). By adding temporal constraints to the present, or by making it conditional («if», «should»), Sappho's translators attempt to render the evocative plenitude of the present tense in which the female erotic gaze is displayed. Sappho's use of the present stretches the boundaries of that tense: she packs into «I see» both a present of repetition—«each time that I see you»—and a present of memorialization—«the minute I catch a glimpse of you my desire comes back to me in full force». Sappho uses the gaze to evoke not the instant of desire but both the recreation of an erotic association that no longer exists, and the duration, the past stability of that relationship. This duration, this endurance, returns in the fragment that sounds what must remain for us the poem's end: «I must dare all, for even abandoned … ».

Instead of a standard scenario of the birth of desire, in Sappho “31” we find a model for the regeneration of desire. The gaze acts to keep desire alive, to give the poet the potential for a renewed and ongoing erotic experience, even in the face of abandonment. Sappho's controlled recreation of the function of the gaze displays her female narrator desiring a woman not as a man, as Freud would have it, but as a woman. In the model for the operation of the gaze in female eroticism that she establishes, Woman gazes in a present that renews the past and reaffirms the bond that is at the origin of the renewable erotic trance, the controlled and spontaneous outpouring of female desire.