[In the following essay, DeJean probes Ovid's fictionalization of Sappho in his Heroides as an abandoned woman who kills herself because of unrequited love.]

… [In] the Heroides, … Ovid recounts tale after tale of women abandoned by unfaithful lovers. Ovid's fiction is a prime example of the complicity between female humiliation and canonical positioning … for the Heroides concludes with a vignette that makes plain the bond between physical abandonment and critical appropriation. Ovid transfigures the original woman writer, Sappho, into the archetypal abandoned woman. He portrays Sappho's physical humiliation as both a necessary prelude to her acceptance into the canon of great writers and as the action that empowers him to speak in her name. I would like to suggest the possibility that Ovid fabricated a legend of Sappho in response to what were for him the threatening aspects of the vision of poetic creation she presented, in the hope of making her poetry work, as it were, against its author, to discredit both her person and her poetic authority. Before I discuss the process through which Ovid transformed literary mother into abandoned woman, I would like to review briefly the aspects of Sappho's biography and of her literary production that could have set this transfiguration in motion.

Sappho's commentators have responded in particular to her presentation of the context of poetic creation. Sappho consistently portrays both the composition and the performance of her verse as an exchange among women, as the product of a female community whose members were 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 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 a gift handed down from woman to woman, as literature written by women for 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 canonic critics such as Ovid—the Sapphic narrator, a woman, assumes what is generally a male prerogative. She is the desiring subject and controls the gaze that objectifies the beloved woman, thereby giving the poem its visual focus and creating its geometry of desire.

Let us consider briefly what is perhaps Sappho's most celebrated poem, the ode widely known in English by the apocryphal title “To a Beloved Girl” (and in French as “A l'aimée”). Here is the poem in a recent French translation by Edith Mora. (I will provide only French translations of Sappho because the feminine forms essential to my argument 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 …(1)

The poem recounts what appears at first to be a rather banal story: the narrator is a voyeur, observing from a distance the woman who is the object of desire while this woman demonstrates her love for a man. For today's reader and for readers at least as early as Ovid's day, however, 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 presence of a feminine adjective (“je suis plus verte”) in the poem's second half can come as a shock, an invasion. This woman 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 canonic critics. 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 poetry and that her poetry may well predate the stereotypes I have in mind, yet the axiom Luce Irigaray posits, that “the prevalance of the gaze” has always been “particularly foreign to female eroticism,” in all likelihood predates those stereotypes as well.² When Sappho put a woman in the place reserved for 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 demy-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. Poets like Ovid … elect instead the fictionalization of Sappho, a process by which they make Sappho's poetry of desire a tool in the displacement of the desiring female subject from a position of control.

The complicated process by which Sappho became an exemplar of rejected female passion was initiated in antiquity. The legends about Sappho's life that were then formulated time and again took a recurrent form: biographers imagined that a series of mythical (or in some cases dubiously historical) figures could be seen as doubles for Sappho. The least troubling of these doubling fictions are those in which the Sappho character is something like a line-by-line copy of the original. Thus Philostratus cites the example of a “clever woman” Damophyla who “was said to have had girl companions like Sappho, and to have composed love-poems just as she did.” More intriguing are the doubles who bear Sappho's name generally without sharing either her poetic gift or her sexual preferences. The doubles in this category are either courtesans or, in Lipking's terms, abandoned women, in this case, women betrayed by their male lovers. Aelian, for example, alleges the presence in Lesbos in Sappho's day of another woman named Sappho, a courtesan. To these legends of the courtesan double should be linked the sources from antiquity accusing Sappho herself of having been a prostitute.³ Those who do not make Sappho a lover of many men rather than of many women describe her double as wild with love for one man, a male lover whose betrayal drives her to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff. Witness the account in the ancient lexicon, the Suda, of this other Sappho: “a Lesbian of Mytilene, a lyre player. She threw herself from the Leucadian Cliff for love of Phaon the Mytilenaean. Some authorities say that she, too, was a lyric poetess.”

All early attempts to forge a biography for Sappho are troubling because of the recurrent tendency to replace the original woman writer with a pair of Sapphos. This doubling makes it possible to distinguish, for example, between a female sexuality judged unorthodox, even disreputable, and a respectable female sexuality, or even between female sexuality and poetic genius. This splitting, though it may originally have been inspired by a desire to separate a sexually disreputable Sappho from the poet and thereby protect the poet from criticism, provided nevertheless the basis for subsequent fictions of Sappho in which the desire to domesticate both woman and writer is evident. The repeated disjuncture between the female desiring subject and the female poetic subject can always therefore be seen as a more or less articulate response to the dual threat of sapphism and of Sappho's subversive poetic genius.

Let us examine just one example of the fictionalization of Sappho in order to reconfigure the triangle of desire created by her poetry, a process Mora has referred to as “remodeling the erotic face” of Sappho's poetry.⁴ Many scholars today believe that, in some poem or poems now lost to us, Sappho must have evoked a certain Phaon. They believe that she was naming not an actual individual but perhaps a mythical figure, the ferryman Phaon who was said to have transported an old woman without remuneration. The old woman revealed herself to be Aphrodite and, to thank Phaon for his generosity, transformed him into a perfectly handsome young man. The goddess then proceeded to fall so madly in love with Phaon that she tried to hide him to keep him from other women. It is probable, however, that Sappho used the name Phaon simply as a symbol, to designate the name's root meaning, the light. Phaon, as Gregory Nagy has demonstrated, is another name, a doublet, for Phaethon.⁵ In this context, let me reiterate part of Lipking's argument: he contrasts the female fear of abandonment with “masculine fantasies and myths [that] compulsively reenact the rise and fall of Phaethon, his premature ambition and precipitate plunge.” You will remember that, anxious to be recognized as a legitimate son of Phoebus, Phaethon begs his father to let him drive the chariot of the sun for a day. But he is unable to dominate the horses, and they veer wildly out of control. In order to protect the earth from conflagration, Zeus is obliged to hit Phaethon with a thunderbolt, and he plummets to his death. Lipking does not specify the “masculine fantasies” he has in mind, but the desire of the son to put himself in Phoebus' place and his failure to carry out his father's role could figure a male fear of sexual inadequacy—a fear that the young man's sexual rite of passage will not be successfully accomplished, that the son will not live up to his father's example.

We can only guess at the explanation of Sappho's invocation of Phaon/Phaethon. Howard Jacobson sums up the prudent stance on this issue: “It is generally believed that Sappho alluded to the mythical Phaon in some such way that later readers were able to misinterpret it (willfully?) as a personal relationship.”⁶ I will break with critical prudence and allow myself a moment of speculation in an attempt to account for the violence prominent in subsequent fictions of the archetypal woman writer that center on her involvement with Phaon. Given all surviving examples of Sappho's poetry, it seems unlikely that Phaon figured as part of one scenario of female abandonment consistently stressed by canonic critics, the plot in which, as in the ferryman-Aphrodite legend that supports Lipking's theory, the young man deserts the older woman. It is possible that Sappho's biographers from antiquity (willfully?) read a more personal reference to Phaon/Phaethon into a reference to the luminosity at the root of these names. They could have decided that Sappho had introduced Phaon/Phaethon to suggest the limits of male hubris. The persistent attempt to humiliate Sappho could therefore have been a response to the specter of male (literary) inadequacy her poetry was thought to represent. The Sapphic narrator, after all, displaces male desire by dominating the erotic gaze. Furthermore, Sappho herself was viewed as a primal voice of personal passion, a literary force that deprived male writers of preeminence in a domain crucial to erotic poetry and later to prose fiction. The male author who makes the actual Sappho rather than her double, the lyre player from Mytilene, commit suicide for love of a man named Phaon triply reassures his male audience: the desiring woman rejects her love for women; the woman writer loses her poetic gift; and Phaon/Phaethon is triumphant and completes his sexual rite of passage, while the older woman is hurled into the sea in his place. I would like now to examine several fictions of Sappho, notably Ovid's canonical fiction, to present the way in which male writers take revenge on Sappho in the name of Phaon/Phaethon. I imitate the focus of these canonic critics and will therefore limit my consideration of Sappho's poetry to the triangle of desire central to her poem “A l'aimée” and my consideration of Sappho's biography to what has been alleged to be its final scene, her leap from the White Rock of Leukas.⁷

.....

Ovid's Heroides is a collection of fictive epistles addressed by women to men, for the most part to men who have betrayed their love and abandoned them for other women. With this collection, Ovid, like his heirs Richardson and Rousseau, established both a model for epistolarity and a model for women's writing. The mark of his craft is his apparent lack of control. The female style as he defines it is instinctive. In the Heroides, Ovid maintains a complicated stance with respect to the heroines whose voices he re-creates. He reverses the narrative focus of traditional accounts, where attention is centered on the male as a nexus of continued adventures, to allow women previously condemned to silence to present their sides of well-known tales. Yet they are given a voice only to try to win back unfaithful lovers and to complain of their solitary pain. Ovid establishes a model for canonic critics by standardizing and simplifying the plot of female passion. Women write, in Ovid's model, only in abandonment, only spontaneous cries from the heart, uncontrolled outpourings of unrequited passion. Thus the shepherdess Oenone blames Paris because he has deserted her for Helen, and Ariadne condemns Theseus for having left her alone in her “abandoned bed.”⁸

Ovid brings together the most famous abandoned women of classical literature and legend. To this collection, he introduces a single historical figure, Sappho, whose epistle to Phaon brings the work to a close.⁹ For his portrait of the archetypal woman writer, Ovid consolidates biographical information from a variety of sources and creates a “Sappho” whose life conforms to the plots of the mythical heroines whose epistles precede hers. Yet nowhere in Sappho's passionate cry from the heart as Ovid imagines it does he draw the line between fact and fiction; nowhere does he indicate that, in her case alone of all the characters in the Heroides, is he dealing with a historical rather than a legendary figure. In short, Ovid never discloses that he is presenting a fiction of Sappho, enshrining the original woman writer as a male myth.¹⁰

“My name is already sung abroad in all the earth. … I am slight in stature, yet I have a name that fills every land; the measure of my name is my real height” (H 15.28, 33-34). When Ovid has Sappho thus proclaim the rewards of genius, his canonization of the woman writer is only granted in exchange for the debasement of Sappho first as woman and then as writer. Ovid's “Sappho” is a fiction remarkable above all for its taming of deviant female sexuality and its erasure of the female bond that was the inspiration for Sapphic poetic creation. Ovid has Sappho renounce what he presents as a youthful transgression—“my eyes joy not in Atthis as once they did, nor in the hundred other maids I have loved to my reproach” (“non sine crimine,” “not without blame or wrongdoing”) (H 15.18-20, my emphasis). His heroine has realized that one man is preferable to a multitude of women, to the female community celebrated by Sappho in her poetry: “the love that belonged to many maids you alone possess.” Furthermore, her acceptance of the superiority of an ars amatoria that resembles Ovid's own over that which she herself formerly preached has brought about her public humiliation. Ovid's Sappho is a madwoman (see H 15.139), consumed with a desire for a man who has betrayed her, a desire so strong that it “embarrasses” her, a desire that, like her lover, constantly betrays her: “Modesty and love are not at one. There was no one who did not see me; yet I rent my robe and laid bare my breast” (H 15.121-22).

For his allegedly “heroic” presentation of Sappho, Ovid portrays her not in full possession of her literary powers but at a time when her genius has been interrupted and her towering stature diminished: “My former power in song will not respond to the call; … mute for grief is my lyre” (H 15.197-98). Because she realizes that her writing is no longer recognizably hers, Sappho has recourse to what Foucault terms a nom d'auteur to authenticate this outpouring: “unless you had read their author's name, Sappho, would you have known whence these brief words come?” (H 15.1-4). In his vision of Sappho, Ovid poses her on top of the White Rock of Leukas, poised for the suicidal leap that she hopes will bring her much desired oblivion, the ability to forget the beautiful young man, Phaon, for whom she had abandoned her sapphism, and whose subsequent betrayal had silenced her poetic gift. Sappho's flagrant debasement is a form of expiation: Ovid uses Phaon to make her atone for the interrelated sins of having preferred many women to one man and of having achieved formidable literary status for her celebration of a feminocentric world. He grants her a signature, an author's name (“auctoris nomina Sapphus”), but only once she has lost control over herself and her passion.

In the final image of this inaugural fiction of the woman poet, Sappho declares that, unless her letter provokes a quick response from her unfaithful lover, she will “seek [her] fate in the Leucadian wave” (H 15.220). In the Amores, Ovid alludes to a possible reply from Phaon, but such a letter, like the responses invented in the seventeenth century to the letters of the Portuguese nun, is an impossible fiction: Sappho can win no stay of execution. In his account of the White Rock of Leukas, Ovid's contemporary, Strabo, mentions both Sappho's alleged suicide and an ancient cult practice associated with the cliff: “Every year, … some criminal was cast down from the white rock into the sea below for the sake of averting evil.”¹¹ This ritual sacrifice followed a model, as René Girard has analyzed, frequently chosen in antiquity for scapegoats.¹² Sappho's leap into water is the crucial moment in Ovid's rewriting of her biography, for it completes the exorcism of her inadmissible sexuality. His fictional Sappho functions as a scapegoat since her suicidal leap guarantees the continuing orderly functioning of life inside the literary city. This gesture purifies her and serves as a necessary prelude to her acceptance as a canonical author. By lending his authority to the fiction of Sappho's suicide, Ovid completed her baptism as “mascula Sappho,” a phrase coined by his contemporary Horace in his first epistle (composed during the same period as one of the most influential canon-forming texts of antiquity, his Ars poetica). The adjective has been seen as a commentary on Sappho's authoritative prosody,¹³ but it can also signify the discrediting of her sexuality and the severing of her ties to a female tradition. “Masculine” or “manlike” Sappho: Sappho domesticated (made to follow a “normal” sexual scenario); Sappho naturalized (portrayed as a great author according to a male literary model).

Furthermore, Ovid's fiction of Sappho illustrates perfectly the process to which I alluded earlier by which Sappho's poetry of desire is used to displace the female subject from a position of control. Both Jacobson and Mora uncover numerous Sapphic echoes and actual citations from Sappho's poems in Ovid's fictive epistle.¹⁴ Most notable is the passage (H 15.110-13) based on the celebrated images from “To a Beloved Girl” that evoke the physical power of the narrator's desire for another woman: here they are used to convey the extent of the humiliation suffered by the woman when the man who had at last taught her the full force of desire abandons her. When Ovid makes the object of Sappho's passion a man, he simultaneously recovers for men the right to make women suffer in love, and recovers for the male writer the right to portray the force and torments of female desire. Ovid's vision proved so attractive—so useful, I am tempted to say—that it successfully dominated public opinion of Sappho for nearly nineteen centuries, to such an extent that only recently have scholars attempted to set the record straight.¹⁵

Notes

1. Edith Mora, Sappho: Histoire d'un poete et traduction integrale de l'oeuvre (Paris, 1966), p. 371.

2. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” trans. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York, 1980), p. 101.

3. On classical references to Sappho, see Mora's informative study Sappho, esp. pp. 16, 129. The Philostratus quotation is from his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Aelian reference from his Historical Miscellanies.

4. Mora, Sappho, p. 137; my translation.

5. See Gregory Nagy, “Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 77 (1973).

6. Howard Jacobson, Ovid's “Heroides” (Princeton, N.J., 1974), p. 281 n. 22. Marguerite Yourcenar offers a reconstruction of the process by which Phaon could have been identified with Sappho in La Couronne et la lyre (Paris, 1979), p. 72.

7. On the basis of the surviving examples of the Greek literary motif of falling from a white rock, Nagy concludes that “falling from the white rock is parallel to falling into a swoon—be it from intoxication or from making love” (“Phaethon,” p. 142). Even the place chosen for Sappho's suicide could therefore be viewed as an attempt to use her poetry against her: her leap from the White Rock of Leukas would be a fitting revenge against the poet who inaugurated the evocation of the physical power of love, the poet who made the swoon of love the central image of “A l'aimée.”

8. Ovid Heroides (Loeb Classical Library, trans. Grant Showerman), 10.14; all further references to this work, abbreviated H, will be included in the text. On occasion, I modify Showerman's translation.

9. I follow Jacobson's practice of considering the first fifteen epistles independently from the six “double letters” usually printed with them. The authenticity of the Sappho herois was for a long time the subject of dispute. Jacobson, who like most recent commentators considers the poem genuine, rehearses the arguments made by both sides in the debate over its authenticity (see Ovid's “Heroides,” p. 277).

10. The critical economy of this essay forces me to set aside discussion of two questions that merit continued debate, the alleged feminism of Ovid's position in the Heroides and what I see as a related issue, his wit in this work. On the latter point, see especially Florence Verducci, Ovid's Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Herodium (Princeton, N.J., 1985). In general I feel that criticism focused on Ovid's wit distracts from the complexity of Ovid's involvement with Sappho. I do not intend my reading as confirmation of Ovid's hostility to women or to unconventional sexuality. Critics have long been sensitive to the exceptional quality of the voice Ovid adopts in the Sappho herois (see Jacobson, Ovid's “Heroides,” p. 286). I would argue—although to do so adequately would necessitate an extensive excursion into Ovid's work—that Ovid lent his authority to the most extreme fiction of Sappho because of his own alarming proximity to his female precursor. Ovid becomes Sappho for the space of the fifteenth herois—and he uses Sappho's leap to exorcise the transvested ventriloquism that threatens to usurp his own literary authority.

11. Nagy, “Phaethon,” p. 141.

12. See René Girard, “Generative Violence and the Extinction of Social Order,” Salmagundi 63-64 (Spring/Summer 1984): 216.

13. See Marie-Jo Bonnet, Un Choix sans équivoque: recherches historiques sur les relations amoreuses entre les femmes, XVIe-XXe siècle (Paris, 1981), p. 28.

14. See Jacobson, Ovid's “Heroides,” pp. 280-85; Mora, Sappho, p. 83.

15. In addition to Marguerite Yourcenar's and Edith Mora's studies, see also Bonnet, Un Choix sans équivoque, and Mary R. Lefkowitz, The Lives of the Ancient Poets (Baltimore, 1981).