The Victorian poetessthe poetess forms part of a structure of representation that both aestheti-
cizes and commodifies her - in this particular case through a sculpture by
John Gibson that was exhibited in Italy and England. Hemans observes
how the statue embodies Sappho's paradoxical position as a woman who
cannot find in her artistic vocation any compensation for the "unutterable
sadness" that drags her down as a woman disappointed in love. Here
Sappho literally droops and sinks, threatening (though not quite managing)
to drop the instrument that represents her poetic calling, and indeed her
fame.
Yet this Sapphic moment, which locates the futility of such vocation,
ironically becomes for Hemans and many other women a prime vehicle for
poetic utterance. Hemans's "The Last Song of Sappho" (1834) takes as its
starting point a sketch by Richard Westmacott Jr. that depicts Sappho
"penetrated with the feeling of utter abandonment." With this image in
mind, Hemans articulates Sappho's own voice in the moment before the
poet took her life. The "living strings" of her lyre are "quench'd," since
"broken even as they, / The heart whose music made them sweet, / Hath
pour'd on desert-sands its wealth away" (FH VII, io-n).Yet Sappho's
undoing occasions Hemans's poetic doing. In the final stanza, Hemans
speaks through her famous precursor an ecstatic climax expressing a
visionary poetic self that accords well not only with the Romanticism on
which her work draws but also with a specifically female aesthetic:
I, with this winged nature fraught,
These visions wildly free,
This boundless love, this fiery thought -- Alone I come - oh! give me peace, dark sea! (VII, 11)
Here is an ostensibly lyric utterance that unexpectedly rejects the lyre, with
a poet who is both "winged[ly]" transcendent and reliant on gravity to
achieve her desired doom. Hemans is caught in a circular logic. She writes,
as Marlon B. Ross observes, as if "fame, along with death, is the sole threat
to the power of feminine affection - an irony, since the creative genius that
makes [early-nineteenth-century] women famous resides in that power." 10
Sappho's death emphasizes the extent to which this feminine aesthetic is
grounded in contradiction. In order to speak as a woman writer, Hemans
offers up both the lyric voice and the sacrificial body of the paradigmatic
poetess for consumption as an aestheticized object - what Poe called "the
most poetical topic in the world."
Women poets were not alone in seeing correspondences between Sappho
and themselves. Victorian critics constantly invoked Sappho as a precedent
for the poetess. In 1841 Laman Blanchard, the biographer of Letitia183