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3. Aphrodite Garlanded: Er
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c h a p t e r t h r e e Aphrodite Garlanded Erôs and Poetic Creativity in Sappho and Nossis* Marilyn B. Skinner When I finished speaking, there was immediate reaction to my statement that “it is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.” It became clear during the ensuing discussion that different women had heard this sentence in different ways. Some women asserted that they created out of their bisexuality, not their “female side”; others , that their creativity came from their commitment to black struggle; others, that they created out of love for their (male) children as much as out of love for women. One lesbian asserted that if “the lesbian in us” was to become a figurative term, she, as a woman who had been oppressed for physically expressing her love for women, wanted another name for who she was. Some women heard me as saying that all creation has simply a sexual basis (vide Freud) and that women can create only out of erotic experience with other women. My intention was, of course, to say something more complex. Adrienne Rich, footnote to “‘It Is the Lesbian in Us’ . . .” (1979) Can a woman poet have a muse? Feminists have debated this question urgently ever since they realized the pitfalls of subscribing to the androcentric and heterosexist paradigm of creativity that describes poetry as the product of intercourse between the artist and his own powers of inspiration personified as his mistress.1 As numerous critics have observed, this model symbolically appropriates female reproductive ability, subordinating it to a genius regarded as intrinsically masculine.2 Implicitly, then, it denies fleshand -blood women the capacity to make anything other than babies, even as it devalues biological, in contrast to intellectual, paternity.3 When the heterosexual framework is inverted, and the woman writer is visited by a hypothetical male muse, she risks the same fate as the prophetess Cassandra, doomed to unintelligibility for resisting the god Apollo’s advances.4 Femi60 nist literary criticism has responded to this dilemma by envisioning a selfsuf ficient female imagination unshackled from conventional perceptions of the creative process. Much of that criticism, however, has been involved in a “war of images” dealing with whether the dynamics of pure, autonomous female creativity can fittingly be troped as “lesbian.”5 By declaring, in a paper given at the Modern Language Association meeting in December 1976 and published in 1979, that “it is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack” (my italics), Adrienne Rich pioneered the theoretical application of the term “lesbian” as a metaphor for each and every woman’s inherent capacity to record her personal experience.6 When I attended my first National Women’s Studies Association (nwsa) meeting in June 1984, controversy over Rich’s dictum was still heated. I vividly remember an agitated debate that sprang up at a publisher’s reception—of all places!—where one woman-identified woman expressed rage at the perceived insinuation that “being straight only a little bit and only to communicate” might doom her to “hackhood.” For even when acknowledged as figurative, the language is open to a reductionist rendering. Rich, of course, was careful to distinguish her use of “lesbian” from the strictly carnal, “the fact that two women might go to bed together,” and to define it as “a sense of desiring oneself; above all, of choosing oneself ” and as “a primary intensity between women.” One could argue, though, that by requiring the woman poet to repudiate her duty to the fathers, Rich was fabricating an artists’ ghetto where the lesbian imagination, secluded from both the patriarchal literary tradition and the general community of readers, can speak intelligibly only to itself.7 My acquaintance at nwsa was expressing precisely this concern: although herself lesbian, she feared being marginalized as a “lesbian writer.” That incident provided an initial stimulus for the following essay. Its point of departure was the recognition of a marked difference between classical and modern women writers in respect to one’s sense of authority to speak as an artist. In her definitive account of women’s contributions to Greek and Roman literature, Jane Snyder contends that ancient female poets did not experience a personal “anxiety of authorship” comparable to that of present-day women. She attributes ancient women’s artistic con...