“Femmes damnées.” Saphisme et poésie (1846–1889) by Myriam Robic (review)

The publication of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, which he originally intended to title Les Lesbiennes, is the starting point for Myriam Robic’s comprehensive study of sapphism in French poetry from the period 1846–1889. Verlaine’s “Ballad Sappho,” which appeared in 1889, provides the ending point for her discussion of a key period in literary history that she refers to as the “tremplin” for the fin-de-siècle sapphic fictions that would follow. While Baudelaire and Verlaine anchor Robic’s book, her study is not organized around individual authors or specific poems. Instead, her five chapters examine Sappho and sapphism from a variety of different perspectives that allow her to draw the many intertextual references that resonate throughout the book while providing a context that roots her discussion firmly in mid nineteenth-century French society.

Robic’s opening chapter, “Du mythe de Sapho à la réalité du lesbianisme,” traces the sources of the literary myth and Sappho’s place in nineteenth-century literature and art. Chapter two, “Saphisme et société,” includes a fascinating discussion of Baudelaire’s obscenity trial, and describes how poets used references to Sappho as a way of avoiding censorship while still writing provocative verses. Robic discusses the vocabulary that developed around lesbianism, with words such as “tribade” and “gougriotte” appearing in dictionaries of the period. She also links Sappho to medical discourse, and in particular the figure of the hysteric, and provides information about the place of Greek and Latin texts in the school curriculum to explain the possible sources used by poets such as Baudelaire. This type of information helps establish a context for the reevaluation that Sappho and “la lesbienne” were undergoing during this period, a reevaluation Robic attributes to Baudelaire’s influence. Not only was Sappho’s lesbian sexual identity more firmly established, but, according to Robic, the lesbian “n’est plus vécue comme un unique fantasme mais comme une réalité sociopolitique” (85).

While Robic’s contextualization of sapphism is fascinating, the real strength of her study lies in close readings of selected poems, and a dense intertextual analysis that shows Baudelaire’s influence on the lesbian poetry of writers such as Théodore de Banville, Henri Cantel, Pierre Louÿs, and especially Paul Verlaine. Verlaine, whom she discusses at length in the final chapter, “Stratégies et enjeux,” made strategic use of Sappho in his so-called “coming out” poem, “Ballad Sappho,” where he identifies with the Greek poet in order to reveal his own homosexuality.

Robic’s discussion of Verlaine’s ballad is one example of her attention to the irreverent use of fixed poetic forms that also includes the “inverted sonnet” favored by writers such as Pierre Louÿs who used it for his pornographic poem “Acrostiche saphique.” Robic’s third chapter, “Les Jeux de la versification à la parodie,” also refers to poets who subvert the tradition of alternating feminine and masculine rhymes to serve homosexual or lesbian themes, as we see in Banville’s “Erinna” which is written in feminine rhymes only. Banville exemplifies the poets who took advantage of the commercial value of lesbian themes that were increasingly in vogue, although Robic describes his lesbian poems as “dépouillé de toute érotisation” when compared with those by Baudelaire (133). Robic’s reading of Verlaine similarly traces Baudelaire’s influence, and examines how both poets capitalized on the shock value and amorality associated with lesbianism. She shows, however, how Verlaine distanced himself from Baudelaire’s “femmes damnées” in that his sapphism lacks the “douleur,” “intellectualisation,” and “dimension métaphysique” we find in Baudelaire’s lesbian poems (227).

Although Robic analyzes some well-known sapphic texts, such as the three condemned lesbian poems that Baudelaire was forced to withdraw from Les Fleurs du mal, she also includes numerous poems not frequently anthologized or taught because they are extremely erotic or even obscene. In her fourth chapter, “Sapho ou l...