Victorian Poetry

THAIS E. MORGAN

between the realms of land and sea: "Here came a mortal, / But faithless
was she! / And alone dwell for ever / The kings of the sea" (120-23).
Algernon Charles Swinburne approaches the equivalence between the
lyric and the feminine ensuing from the doctrine of two spheres opposition-
ally. In the long dramatic monologue "Anactoria" (1866), he ventriloquizes
Sappho in order to attack both Victorian sexual morality and Christianity.
His perverse rendition of Sapphic "song" is calculated to shock the middle
class that hypocritically refuses to acknowledge the sensuality in literature.
The ideological effects of Swinburne's ventriloquism of the feminine differ
from those in Tennyson and Arnold. Swinburne focuses on female eroticism
as realized in a gynosocial or all-female world that radicalizes the very
notion of a separate woman's sphere. Swinburne undercuts the Victorian
idealization of woman's nature as spiritual and chaste. Sappho and
Anactoria engage in sadomasochistic lovemaking: "I would my love could
kill thee;... / I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, /... Vex thee
with amorous agonies" (ACS I, 58). The conventional description of
woman as a flower for her beauty and delicacy is reencoded through ironic
evocation of the color symbolism associated with the Virgin Mary. After
Sappho's violent pleasures, the young Anactoria has

eyes the bluer for all those hidden hours

That pleasure fills with tears and feeds from flowers,

Fierce at the heart with fire that half comes through,

But all the flowerlike white stained round with blue[.] (I, 58)

Swinburne focuses our eye on the female body: Anactoria's "fervent
underlid" and her "amorous girdle, full of thee and fair / And leavings of
the lilies in" her "hair" (I, 58). Victorian critics were outraged at this
portrait of woman: "Is purity to be expunged from the catalogue of
desirable qualities?" one demanded. 6
Unquestionably, Swinburne radicalizes the issue of the femininity of
poetry. In allowing Sappho to speak a long monologue without an
omniscient narrator's interruption, Swinburne pays homage to her. Never-
theless, as in Tennyson's early poems, the identification of sensuality and
femininity ultimately aligns him with mainstream Victorian gender
ideology: woman's sphere includes the body and passion. As a poet,
Sappho triumphs over the classical gods, the Christian God, and even
death: she will immortalize the mortal "flower" Anactoria in the "high
Pierian flower" of "song" (I, 63). Sappho's poems will be eternal and
pervasive in their power: "Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea, /

... But in the light and laughter, in the moan / And music, and in grasp of
lip and hand /... Memories shall mix and metaphors of me" (I, 63-64).

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