GLR May-June 2023

Algernon Swinburne’s ‘Sapphics’ ARTMEMO

E MILY R. Z AREVICH T HE POET Algernon Swinburne wrote without shame in late Victorian Eng land, where moral behavior was so strictly regulated that artists with bohemian ideas were performing incredible stealthy feats in order to launch their careers. The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood paid for and hosted their own exhibitions of original paintings when the established salons refused to en tertain their too-realistic biblical scenes and brazen red-headed women in striking poses. (1837–1909) can be best described as a colorful eccentric who lived and

subtle. His masculine name may have got ten the work past censorship, but those fa miliar with his terminology would have understood that he was writing the closest thing to girl-on-girl soft erotica that he could get away with. He actually uses the words “lesbians” and “sapphics” to describe women who love other women. And in his portrayal in “Sapphics,” another creative decision that is surprisingly modern, he presents lesbianism not as something dirty, scandalous, or doomed to tragedy, but as a sacred act on a par with an artist’s worship of their muse. In “Sapphics,” he writes about the Muses—of which Sappho herself

with feverish, desperate longing, demon strated with the traditional seduction tactic of performing music for their object of de sire. Aphrodite’s female admirers are essen tially sirens, trying to gain her attention and lure her in through song, and they pursue her as obsessively as any male suitor with amorous intentions from Greek literature and mythology: “So the goddess fled from her place, with awful/ Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;/ While behind a clamor of singing women/ Severed the twilight.” The women in the poem also explore their sexuality with each other. Here is

Swinburne, perhaps inspired by his friends at the Brotherhood, de fied his age entirely when he de cided to write a poem about a romance between women. In the 19th century, lesbianism was a taboo topic on a par with bodily functions. Even the landowner and traveler Anne Lis ter (1791–1840), a notorious se ducer of women, recorded her private diary in a complicated se cret code. It’s not an accident that her diaries ended up stashed in a wall for years, read by no one. But the educated elite of Victorian England also had a convenient historical smokescreen behind which they could veil their ven tures into lesbian themes: Sappho of Lesbos, the great poet of Ar chaic Greece and an admirer of women. In the time of Swinburne, Sap pho’s existence was something of an inside joke among the cognoscenti, which included his torians, theater people, and liter ary types, especially those who had similar predilections to those of Sappho. Through Sappho, au thors could disguise their queer coded love poems as innocent appreciations of Greek culture.

where Swinburne is at his boldest, and perhaps his most sympathetic to queer women. The kissing and touching between his female characters is strictly for their own pleasure and no one else’s, a strik ing subversion from the pornogra phy of the previous Romantic Era, where physical acts of female-to-female contact were conducted primarily for the enter tainment of men (think the con troversial Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess , published anony mously in 1833, or the works of the Marquis de Sade, where les bianism is both grotesquely fetishized and weaponized against the Catholic Church). Here are Swinburne’s words, which are ro mantic in nature, and not too in nocent to the point where lesbianism can be interpreted as an adolescent “phase” which these Muses—all fully grown, consenting women—are expected to ease out of someday: “Saw the Lesbians kissing across their smitten/ Lutes with lips more sweet than the sound of lute strings,/ Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand, her chosen,/ Fairer than all men;”

In this writer’s opinion, there are few male authors who can be trusted to handle the topic of lesbianism with dignity (Michael Cunningham’s TheHours comes to mind, and not may others). Yet Swin burne’s poem is, for the late nineteenth-cen tury, an impressive attempt for its age. Not entirely perfect representation—he wasn’t writing directly from a lesbian’s perspec tive, after all—but passably Sapphic. Emily R. Zarevich is an English teacher and writer from Burlington, Ontario.

Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) did exactly that when they published their lesbian-themed collec tion of poems LongAgo under the male penname Michael Field (who was assumed to be a single man writing about his love of women) . Swinburne pulled off a similar feat when he published “Sapphics” in his 1866 collection Poems and Ballads. Unlike “Michael Field,” he enjoyed the privilege of publishing under his own name. In this poem, Swinburne is anything but

appears as the Tenth—who are infatuated with the goddess Aphrodite, a sexual icon who had always been reserved for the male gaze. In the words of literature scholar Joyce Zonana, who conducted an in-depth analysis of the poem: “Sappho as Muse challenges tradition not simply in her hu manity; she also directly confronts the Western (male) poetic imagination through her full sexual femaleness.” The attraction of the fangirl-esque Muses to Aphrodite in “Sapphics” is expressed

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