Lesbian Decadence

Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-Siècle France

Nicole Albert, Nancy Erber, William Peniston

• Publisher: Harrington Park Press, LLC
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781939594211
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria LGBT

In 1857 the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was fascinated by lesbianism, created a scandal with Les Fleurs du Mal [ The Flowers of Evil ]. This collection was originally entitled "The Lesbians" and described women as "femmes damnées," with "disordered souls" suffering in a hypocritical world. Then twenty years later, lesbians in Paris dared to flaunt themselves in that extraordinarily creative period at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries which became known as the Belle Époque.

Lesbian Decadence, now available in English for the first time, provides a new analysis and synthesis of the depiction of lesbianism as a social phenomenon and a symptom of social malaise as well as a fantasy in that most vibrant place and period in history. In this newly translated work, praised by leading critics as "authoritative," "stunning," and "a marvel of elegance and erudition," Nicole G. Albert analyzes and synthesizes an engagingly rich sweep of historical representations of the lesbian mystique in art and literature. Albert contrasts these visions to moralists' abrupt condemnations of "the lesbian vice," as well as the newly emerging psychiatric establishment's medical fury and their obsession on cataloging and classifying symptoms of "inversion" or "perversion" in order to cure these "unbalanced creatures of love."

Lesbian Decadence combines literary, artistic, and historical analysis of sources from the mainstream to the rare, from scholarly studies to popular culture. The English translation provides a core reference/text for those interested in the Decadent movement, in literary history, in French history and social history. It is well suited for courses in gender studies, women's studies, LGBT history, and lesbianism in literature, history, and art.

PART I

“At that time, Sappho was reborn in Paris”

—Arsène Houssaye, Les Confessions: Souvenirs d’un demi-siècle / Confessions: Memoirs of Half a Century, 1885

CHAPTER 1

Sappho: The Resurrection of a Myth

“I am the queen of Lesbians,” Swinburne’s Sappho proclaims in a poem by this other bard of femmes damnées (damned women).¹ The Greek poet Sappho, hailed as the queen of sapphism at the end of the nineteenth century, has often been reduced to little more than the representation of a sexuality, and this distortion has eventually overshadowed her historical reality. As a matter of fact, her history draws more on fictions than on facts.² Yet Sappho certainly did exist, even if the many variations on her name—Sapho, Sappho, Psappha, Psapho, even Sofa in La Fin de Babylone / The Final Days of Babylon by Guillaume Apollinaire (1914)—implied that the actual person remains inaccessible. Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig understood this point well, and in an attempt to forestall any appropriation of the Greek poet, the entry on Sappho in their Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976) / Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (1979) is simply a blank page.³

THE LEGEND OF A LIFE

We know that Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos in Greece around 620 BCE and lived there her entire life, except for some time during the dictatorship, when she went into exile in Syracuse. A daughter of wealthy aristocrats, she had three brothers. One of them, Charaxos, who was an affluent wine merchant, fell in love with a beautiful courtesan named Doricha, who was known as Rhodopis, while traveling in Egypt. He spent a great deal of his fortune on her and arranged for her freedom. Sappho refers to her in a fragment in which she criticizes her brother for this liaison. This shadowy figure would inspire a number of fin-de-siècle writers. In Lysistrata (1893), Maurice Donnay invented a Sappho who competes with her brother Charaxos for Rhodopis’s affections.⁴ Gabriel Faure in La Dernière journée de Sapphô / Sappho’s Final Day (1901) transforms the very same Rhodopis into a passionate lover of the poet, but the latter leaves her for Phaon eventually.

Did Sappho actually marry a rich merchant named Cercolas, as the Lexique de Suidas / Lexicon of Suidas (tenth–eleventh century) claimed? No other document corroborates it. No other texts prove the existence of a daughter named Cléïs (which may also be the name of the poet’s mother), who is referred to as “Cléïs my sweet” in a fragment. Renée Vivien, who translated Sappho’s work in 1903, argued against “the theory of a marriage…almost universally adopted to make her utterly ridiculous,” adding that Athenian comics also transformed “the loving slave girl Kléis into a legitimate daughter,” born of that marriage.⁵

It is said that as a young widow Sappho founded a school for poetry and song where the daughters of Greece’s leading families could pursue a sophisticated education. This is where she trained her disciples Andromeda and Gorgô, whose names she cited in several poems. She was said to have had fourteen pupils, among whom Telesippa, Megara, and Atthis (who later joined Andromeda’s school) are generally considered to be her favorites. According to the scholar Edith Mora, who reduced the number of pupils to eight, the most cherished ones were Atthis, Gongyla, and Anactoria, who left Sappho’s school, married, and lived far away.⁶ Anactoria is mentioned in only two poems, although traditionally it is believed that “The Ode to a Beloved” was addressed to her.

Sappho’s death, far more than her life, has given rise to the most fantastical speculation. Some claim that she died peacefully surrounded by her companions; others believe that after the torments of a tragic, unreciprocated love for a ferryman named Phaon, she committed suicide by throwing herself into the sea from the cliffs of the island of Leucas, where these events unfolded.⁷ Phaon, whose name means “luminous,” appears in one of Sappho’s odes; it is likely that he represented Apollo, whose love for Venus was the subject of this piece. Ovid was inspired by that legendary passion to imitate the poetess in his “Epistle to Phaon” (Heroides XV), thus ensuring his own renown.

The poet Sappho was well known throughout the classical era. Her personal morality was not disputed during her lifetime, but gradually it came to be seen as questionable, and the all-female community that she headed was transformed into a refuge for same-sex love. In the second century CE, Lucian of Samosata mocked her in one of his satirical dialogues: “I imagine you want to speak about those women who reject men and satisfy their desires with other women, as if they themselves were men? those women one sees on Lesbos? those women, of whom Sappho is an infamous example?”⁸

SAPPHO: DID SHE “INVENT” SAPPHISM?

Sappho’s poetry overflows with signs of the amorous relations that she may have had with her students. Because of these clues, defenders of her virtue needed to be ferociously determined to demolish, as they would put it, the conspiracy intended to sully her reputation. In 1875 one of her translators, Ernest Falconnet, weighed in by drawing a distinction between physical love and romantic friendship: Sappho loved her companions “with the passion of her elevated and sensitive soul. In her poetry she expressed her affection with all the tempestuousness of a most sincere love. This profound and elevated emotion was interpreted maliciously by her critics….None of her contemporaries, in fact, accused her of those misdeeds, which were considered serious and vulgar in ancient Greece, but writers after that time have not hesitated to make such damaging accusations.”⁹

Many Hellenists of the time rallied to her defense. To argue for her innocence, Alfred Croiset, in his Histoire de la littérature grecque / History of Greek Literature (1898) debunked myths that had been created over the centuries: she was neither a vestal virgin nor an immoral woman but, first and foremost, a poet. If she became a lesbian in his prose translation of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” he explained carefully, “One must take care not to attribute acts to words, or certain turns of phrases to certain behaviors.”¹⁰ Shortly afterward, in the United States, the linguist and missionary Mary Mills Patrick characterized Sappho’s love for her pupils as the expression of maternal feelings.¹¹

David M. Robinson, also an American, took up the defense of the poet’s morality, using a different argument: Sappho’s verses were so perfectly constructed that their author could not possibly have indulged in “unnatural and debauched actions” that “throw the soul into disorder.”¹² In France an amateur scholar named Joseph-Martin Bascoul tried to resurrect the image of a “chaste Sappho” by purging her biography as well as her work of all signs of homosexuality: “We can no longer have suspicions about her chastity, which was acknowledged by Alkaios of Mytilene, her contemporary and countryman.”¹³ He explained that until the fourth century BCE Sappho was considered to be a perfectly respectable woman, but “after that time, critics began to drag her down into the mud to such an extent that eventually a second Sappho had to be recognized—one who was definitively classified as a prostitute.”¹⁴ All the evidence seems to point to the fact that Sappho’s love for other women would not have aroused condemnation in ancient Greece and that the stigmatization of homosexuality was due to the advent of Christianity.

Despite her defenders’ efforts, Sappho’s name continued to be associated with sin. Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle / Great Universal Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century criticized the subterfuges that were meant to shield Sappho from rumors about her sexuality: “It is difficult to know for sure if there is any substance to the allegations of classical authors about Sappho’s immorality, especially regarding the lesbian debauchery with which she has been persistently accused. Modern literary critics, who are troubled by finding such poetic talent associated with libertine morals that are unacceptable in our society, take a marvelous way out of the dilemma: they invent two historical Sapphos.”¹⁵

“Was she a courtesan or a noble lady? Should we see her as the haughty, pure model of an impassioned muse, the way Plutarch envisioned her, comparing her to the pythoness on her tripod? Or was she a common mistress and a teacher of depraved morals?” wondered Théodore Reinach, the famous Hellenist, in 1911.¹⁶ With admirable caution, he limited his response to saying that the Greek bard had most of all wanted to make her pupils “real women.” Yet the controversy continued to rage in the first decades of the twentieth century. An article entitled “Was Sappho Sapphic?” reported on the reactions of Maurice Croiset and Anatole France, who were both scandalized by a lecture intended to exculpate Sappho that Reinach had given at the Institute de France.¹⁷ In addition, the Courrier français, an illustrated weekly newspaper, put the final nail in the coffin by publishing this satiric doggerel:

Now, thanks to Reinach Théodore,

We have been introduced to a Sappho,

A Sappho no one ...