Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France by Gretchen Schultz

Abstract

Reviews 207 conservées à la bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, rédigée et copieusement annotée par Sophie Astier. Les éditeurs de ce volume ont voulu faire revivre la figure d’un polygraphe dont les seiziémistes rencontrent souvent le nom dans les textes publiés entre 1540 et 1550. Ils y sont remarquablement parvenus en offrant de stimulantes pistes de recherche pour ceux qui s’intéressent non seulement à la poésie de la Renaissance, mais plus généralement à l’histoire de la littérature, de la culture et de la poétique. University of Maryland, College Park Hervé-Thomas Campangne Schultz, Gretchen. Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from NineteenthCentury France. Toronto: UP of Toronto, 2015. ISBN 978-1-4426-4672-8. Pp. xix + 295. $65. From 1850 to 1900, France witnessed an explosion of lesbian-themed literature. A discourse produced chiefly by men (the“Fathers”of the title), the poetry and fiction about lesbians informed the nascent disciplines of sexology and psychology, and were, in their turn, influenced by the findings of the positivist scientific community. With the goal of exploring how representations of lesbianism become available to a sexual minority lacking an awareness of itself, Schultz begins her erudite and nuanced analysis with Baudelaire’s and Verlaine’s sapphic poetry in which she locates possibilities for sapphic investment as subjects of discourse. It is a unique moment of opportunity. All subsequent representations, at least until century’s end, treat the lesbian solely as object of discourse. Chapter two,“Tribades for Sale,”examines Adolphe Belot’s prolific lesbian-themed oeuvre within the context of the period’s expanding readership and publishing industry. Schultz moves deftly through Belot’s novelistic production as she traces the formation of clichés and stereotypes, and the hardening of the contours and conventions governing various genres. The next two chapters focus on Péladan’s The Gynander (1891) and Mendès’s Méphistophéla (1890) on the one hand, and the evolving scientific discourse on sexual“pathologies,”hysteria, prostitution , and heredity in France on the other. The latter analysis demonstrates the centrality of the figure of the lesbian to cultural anxieties about depopulation, loss of national prestige, democratization, and shifting gender roles. The subtle readings of the first four chapters culminate in “Intertexts and Afterlives,” in which the reader is afforded a romp through lesbian pulp fiction in the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s, and the role this flourishing industry might have played in lesbian identity formation. One of the amazing “take-aways” of this ambitious study is the uncovering of the enormous intertextual debt of the American lesbian pulp movement to the French “sapphic fathers.” Schultz has given us an elegant and sweeping survey of the discourses that converged and overlapped to produce representations of the lesbian in France in the last half of the nineteenth century. She has convincingly linked these representations to the shifting ideologies and political valences of the day. One of the beauties of her analysis of representations of lesbianism lies in the fact that Schultz consistently chooses ambiguity and ambivalence over easy categorization. She problematizes the moralizing stance of Belot’s popular novels by invoking his other, shadier pornographic oeuvre, which is more ambivalent about Lesbos. She shows Mendès’s work to be marked by similar ambiguities. Schultz’s willingness and ability to hold contradictions in suspension serve her well as she concludes that, in the absence of a consolidated sapphic community, and given a representational void, this French male-authored body of fiction, however much it objectified and occasionally vilified sapphist practices, nonetheless provided a site of self-recognition and identification . At the very least, the French sapphist fathers were a starting point for lesbian identity formation in the United States even if their representations would be challenged and transcended as the homophile movement gained traction over time. University of Maryland, College Park Carol Mossman Solomon, Nathalie. Voyages et fantasmes de voyages à l’époque romantique. Toulouse: PU du Mirail, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8107-0291-6. Pp. 307. 24 a. On s’étonnerait presque qu’un territoire aussi largement exploré que la littérature des voyages puisse...