SAPPHIC MODERNISM

Coupling the notoriously unstable term ‘modernism’ with the equally overdetermined ‘lesbian’ or ‘sapphic’ serves to draw attention to the pervasive links between modernist textual production and same-sex desire between women. Sapphic modernism does not necessarily describe a clearly defined literary or artistic subgenre produced exclusively by women who identified as lesbian or bisexual or who are known to have had sexual relations with other women. Rather, sapphic modernism can refer to a wide range of cultural productions that were enabled or structured by an awareness of the possibility (rather than the actual experience) of same-sex desires and relations between women. It is the exploration of the various intersubjective, political and aesthetic implications of such desires and relations that constitutes sapphic modernism.

Negotiations of same-sex desire in the modernist period were shaped by sexological and PSYCHOANALYTIC models of sexual development and sexual identity (see SEXUALITY), and writers like Bryher, Radclyffe Hall, Olive Moore or Dorothy Richardson engaged creatively with these ideas. However, as the term ‘sapphic’ usefully indicates, there was a rich array of alternative literary, cultural and historical traditions on which authors could draw to express samesex desire. H.D.'s work, for instance, demonstrates the aesthetic and erotic possibilities opened up by the intertextual engagement with the legacies of Sappho herself. The representational field within which same-sex desire between women could be articulated was also constituted by the languages of religion and spirituality, citizenship, race, class and age, creating multiple links between sapphic modernism and other topical early twentieth-century discourses, such as EUGENICS, HELLENISM and FEMINISM.

Anglophone sapphic modernism emerged against the backdrop of lesbian scandals and trials. The widely publicised 1918 ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ scandal erupted after actress Maud Allan sued British MP Noel Pemberton Billing for writing an article in which he implied that Allan was a lesbian and involved with German wartime conspirators. Ten years later, the publication of Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) led to a series of obscenity trials as a result of which the book was banned in Britain. While this climate of CENSORSHIP restricted expressions of same-sex desire, it also facilitated textual innovation, as is illustrated by highly EXPERIMENTAL texts such as Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack (1928) and Nightwood (1936), Hope Mirrlees's Paris (1918), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914) and Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928).