Patterns of Experience: Sappho and the Erotics of the Generation Gap

Abstract

The relationship between rescuer and rescued in Joanna Russ's 1967 short story ‘Bluestocking’ (1967) may be associated with Elaine Marks's ‘Sappho model’. The Sappho myth has been invoked to domesticate women's bodies and their relation to language in circumscribing the woman who loves women in a discourse that reduces her to her sexuality. This chapter argues that Russ's rescue stories are intimately connected to the Sappho model and that the maternal, the erotic, and the ‘autoerotic’ between two women of different generations in the texts emerge as reassuring yet unstable female spaces. It looks at the dynamics of sexual relationships between women, one of whom is significantly older, and how Russ's texts make the erotic tension explicit. In discussing sapphic intergenerational erotics, the chapter analyses four texts spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s: ‘Scenes from Domestic Life’ (1968), The Female Man (1975), ‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982), and ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ (1983). Finally, it shows how Russ's texts destabilise gender and the female body as bases of identity.