Sappho and the Virgin Mary as Historical Muses

As I mentioned briefly in my Introduction, previous studies addressing the woman poet's, muse have tended to focus on the use of historical or mythological muse figures. Mary DeShazer traces ‘recurring imagery of goddesses and mythic women’ in twentieth-century women poets' work, including the figures of Ishtar, Isis, Aset, Astarte, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Kore, Circe, Medusa, Helen, the Furies and the Amazons' Alicia Suskin Ostriker traces such ‘revisionist mythology’ back to the nineteenth century, when ‘women used heroines like Sappho and Eve as a cover for writing erotic verse and heroines like Medea and Ariadne for the forbidden theme of women's, rage’. More recently, T.D.Olverson has discussed late Victorian women writers' revisionist use of Greek mythological figures such as Cassandra, Circe and Medea. Studies such as Frederick Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002) have also turned the focus onto religious figures as muses such as Eve, Lilith, Judith, Salomé, Saint Sebastian, the Virgin Mary and Christ himself. Finally, a number of studies (taking their cue from Lowell's, ‘The Sisters’) have combined this mythological focus with a focus on dead, precursor poets; Gilbert and Gubar are significant in this regard, along with Betsy Erkkila, whose study The Wicked Sisters (1994) focuses on women writers’ ambivalent relations with their dead, distant, literary foremothers.