SUSAN BROWNVIInterest in Sappho did not simply disappear. But the sense that Sappho was,
as Margaret Reynolds puts it, a "fixed icon rigidly posed at the moment of
self-display and self-destruction" certainly did. 39 After the mid-century, she
is frequently transformed into a more politicized, more overtly mediated
figure. Mary Catherine Hume folds a critique of woman as aesthetic object
into a feminist analysis of prostitution in "Sappho" (1861), and Catherine
Amy Dawson - in a long poem of the same name (1889) - rewrites Sappho
in the image of a Victorian feminist educator and reformer. 40 In women's
poetry, negotiations of the fraught relationship between the female body,
aesthetic and sexual consumption, and poetic production seem more free,
perhaps most remarkably in Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (1862). Here the
contradictory relations among gender, aesthetics, and economics that we
have been tracing are resolved in a closed-circuit of homoeroticism when
one sister saves the other from a fatally consuming desire for participation
in the market, exclaiming: "Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much
of me" (CR 471-72). The poem posits a form of sisterly consumption that
brings increase, not decrease. Enabling ironies of production, however,
persisted: Rossetti's publisher Macmillan envisioned the publication of
Goblin Market and Other Poems in terms of "an exceedingly pretty little
volume" for Christmas, marketing it in the tradition of the annuals. 41
Augusta Webster, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in which
Rossetti moved, depicts in a dramatic monologue, "A Castaway" (1870),
another woman who manages to profit from the consumption of her own
body. As a fashionable prostitute named Eulalie, she is the literalization of
the poetess in "A History of the Lyre." But whereas L.E.L.'s Eulalie's heart
consumed itself with unsatisfied desire, Webster's speaker takes a more
materialist line that puns on the fact that her face is her fortune: "Aye let
me feed upon my beauty thus, /... triumph in it, / the dearest thing I
have." 42 Though by no means resolved, the cultural contradictions of the
earlier part of the century have taken a different complexion. Webster was
a learned classicist. Yet she is not compelled to take up Sappho. Instead, her
powerful series of monologues turns to Medea: the classical archetype of
the unwomanly woman who negates her assigned cultural role in response
to male oppression.
From the 1870s onward, the explicit invocation of the poetess is more
critical than poetic, even though the project of keeping poets and poetesses
in separate literary spheres is breaking down. This point becomes clear
when we look at Emma Caroline Wood's anthology called Leaves from the
Poets' Laurels (1869) that appears in Moxon's Miniature Poets series. It
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