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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.2 (2000) 422-426



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Book Review

Victorian Sappho


Victorian Sappho. By Yopie Prins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. 256 pp. $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Recorders ages hence?
Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior,--
       I will tell you what to say of me:
Publish my name, and hang up my picture as that of the tenderest lover.

Thus Edward Dowden invokes Walt Whitman in his discussion of Shakespeare's sonnets. What's in these names? Who is W. H.? For even Whitman's Song of Myself is "dramatic"; even Whitman's Calamus poems, however revealing, also conceal: "Here I shade and hide my thoughts."1 Cultured Victorians would not have imagined that an "I" in a lyric poem belonged to a unified or autobiographical self; never mind Tennyson's dramatic monologues (including In Memoriam)2 or Arnold's melancholy personas, even Wordsworth's prosaic poetry was instantly revealed as "literary" by Coleridge in the Biographia. So why is it so interesting to ask--as Yopie Prins repeatedly does in her remarkable book--who is the "I" in this poem"?

It is interesting because ideas of selves, personifications, and authors remain fluid, even contradictory. Prins willingly stands at a complex crossroads of identity theories, where one no longer speaks, for example, of "intentionalism" but of "performances." Thus the performance of a sentimental lyric can still outflank and out-know a disparaging critic who fails to take into account the vexed absences and displacements inherent in the history of Sapphic personification. Prins's superb ability to mobilize theoretical perspective together with historical context and detailed interpretive reading comes through spectacularly in her analysis of Caroline Norton (209-25), in which she not only shows convincingly that Norton's rather normal-looking poetry in fact "interrogates the Sapphic persona" but also links this lyric rhetoric to aspects of Norton's public, political prose. Victorian writers had various compelling ways to understand selves, and Prins does, too.

Victorian Sappho is one of the most successful books on Victorian poetry that I have read, and it deserves attention from students of both lyric theory and gender issues. Although Prins constantly questions form, she structures [End Page 422] her argument with great care: from a classicist's introductory chapter on Sappho's name and fragments, we are brought to Sappho's afterlife in Victorian texts such as Henry Thornton Wharton's Sappho (1887) and Michael Field's Long Ago (1889), to conclude with brilliant readings of Sappho in Swinburne and then in a variety of Victorian women poets. Prins has always her eye on Sappho's republished name, as well as on the various portraits. She works through interrogation, and suddenly renders even minor-looking poems important enough to ask questions of.

The critical methodology here depends on a difficult alliance--an "uncanny coupling," writes Prins--of deconstruction and feminism. Prins quotes Barbara Johnson, who wondered "whether there is a simple incompatibility between the depersonalization of deconstruction and the repersonalization of feminism, or whether each is not in reality haunted by the ghost of the other" (21). Or, as Prins herself formulates it: "I argue that the transfer of personhood to rhetorical entities--especially as performed in lyric--is not the elimination of sexual difference but another way to articulate the historical effects of gender" (21). The conventional, presenced other of deconstruction is metaphysical Platonism. To me, the "discovery" that a historicized sexuality is somehow a ghostly companion to de Man (in lyric above all?) seems more like a professional accident (gender studies following on deconstruction) than an authentic insight amid de Man's blindness. (Beauvoir's gendering of Sartre's existentialist ontology provides a narrative of feminist progress that, it would appear, neither Johnson nor Prins would care to inhabit.) Stylistically, the deconstructive ghost has apparently scared much of the affect out of the criticism; I recall only one outright case of "appreciation" (Catharine Amy Dawson's Sappho is "quite an extraordinary performance" [239]). There is, then, the usual problem that attends deconstruction: de Man and Derrida tell...

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