Psychoanalyzing Sappho's "Deviance"
It is not at all surprising that there is a vast academic industry of Sappho studies. In the past I’ve covered a number of excellent, detailed publications that speak directly to the historic and social context of Sappho’s life and work, especially as it speaks to female same-sex relations. (Or to the reception of her life and work in other eras.) So I’ve gotten past the point of trying to include every Sappho publication I run across in someone’s bibliography, unless it looks like it might add to my existing coverage. I have a handful of articles in that field in my current set, of highly variable relevance. This one does NOT fall in the "excellent" category.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #516 Devereux 1970 The Nature of Sappho's Seizure About LHMP Full citation:Devereux, George. 1970. “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 LP as Evidence of Her Inversion” in The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1: 17-31.
I probably should have been clued in to the angle of Devereux’s article by the word “inversion” in the title. This article is a modern psychoanalysis of Sappho fragment 31 (“He is like a god to me”), interpreting the emotional and physical reactions described in the poem as indicating, not romantic desire or even jealousy, but an anxiety attack triggered by Sappho’s recognition of her “abnormal” and “deviant” homosexual desires and her consequent shame at experiencing them. That is, the author works from the following premises and logic: A) same-sex desire is inherently and existentially abnormal and pathological; B) this was not only true in all historic times and places, but people have always been self-aware of its pathology; C) the poem represents an actual experience by Sappho; D) the described experience differs qualitatively from what a “normal” person would experience in a situation of desire or jealousy; E) therefore the existence of the poem is proof positive that Sappho was a lesbian (modern sense) who was self-aware of her pathological and deviant desires..
To this, Devereux adds the sneering coda that such a conclusion need not contradict theories that Sappho was a teacher of young women, as “even in our day and age, ‘tweedy’ games-mistresses and the like are far from rare” and “as much as in some modern societies, female inverts tended to gravitate into professions which brought them in close contact with young girls, whose partial segregation and considerable psycho-sexual immaturity—and therefore incomplete differentiatedness—made them willing participants in lesbian experimentation.”
[Note: An article like this reminds us of the cultural and academic atmosphere in which the beginnings of queer history struggled to emerge. This article was published in 1970, the year after the Stonewall riots. I would have been twelve years old (and obviously not yet reading academic journals!), beginning to form my own ideas about my sexuality, but fortunately starting to learn to read cultural messages critically.]
Time period: Classical EraPlace: GreeceMisc tags: love poetryEvent / person: Sappho View comments (0)
