Review by monkeelino - After Sappho

monkeelino 's review for:

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

4.0

Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

I would say I liked this better in concept than in execution. Schwartz uses a kind of collective chorus-like narrator to highlight and connect late 19th/early 20th century lesbian writers/artists with Sappho. It's a blending of forms (speculative biography, alternative history, history, etc.) that feels somewhat hampered by that blend (i.e., you don't get the depth/insight into these fascinating figures you would with a historical/nonfiction piece, but you don't get the emotional development or narrative pull you might from a more traditional novel). Despite for a lull in the middle of hopscotching amidst these connected vignettes, I did find myself rather drawn to the reading overall, as if a mythical collective of sapphists were being called into existence.

In addition to learning about a number of figures completely unfamiliar to me, I really enjoyed the humor and the exploration of language.

Humorous samples:

"Some of us were sent by our families to distant schools to be finished, so that we would come to our proper ends. But it was not our end. It was barely our beginning."

"She had her ways of escaping the century."

"… naked all afternoon they apostrophized each other in the vocative."

"In fact we had learned to motor by reading the manuals. It was not unlike tribadism or clitorism, if you studied the diagrams closely you could generally manage the manoeuvers once en route."

"Reluctantly the Italian politicians recognized the emergence of foemina mercatrix, a female merchant, as if she were a new species of beetle."

Besides language playing a central role in the artistic lives of these writers/actresses, it plays a social one (a limiter in terms of laws granting rights/power; a definer in terms of what roles/behavior were acceptable/"normal"). Sometime the classical forms/grammars limit the actual mood/thinking even possible so that progress continually depends on stretching these forms and abandoning them when necessary. Literature becomes a field of potential victory where history has failed to be so for women---social/sexual relations in narrative open up the possibility for such relations in reality (or, rather, for them to be accepted/acknowledged in public life).

"For so long we had said to ourselves that we were going to be Sappho that Cassandra’s words were strange on our tongues. We pronounced them in halting litany, as if we were reciting the tenses of foreign verbs.
We who had come after Sappho would now go onwards.
From her fragments would emerge our new and modern forms.
There would be a future for the mood we lived in.
No longer would we follow in the style of, wistful and optative.
… We discarded our classical grammars."