Lesbian erotics: the utopian trope of Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis"

Famous for its self-assertive masculinity, John Donne's love poetry nonetheless includes a verse elegy which stands alone not only in his work but also in the entire literary production of the Renaissance for its celebration and defense of a passionate lesbian relation binding the two women of its title. No editorial grounds exist for denying Donne's authorship of "Sapho to Philaenis"; rather the interpretive task is to reconstitute the poem's significance in period terms. The task is complicated by Donne's penchant for flouting literary and social convention as he successively overturns Ovid's influential portrayal of Sappho as an aging voluptuary reclaimed for heterosexuality, the virulent homophobia of Renaissance humanists, and the coy idealizations and transient evocation given to lesbian affectivity by the very few Renaissance writers (including Shakespeare) who touched on the subject at all. When "Sapho to Philaenis" is set in the context of Donne's other love elegies in verse as productions by a young intellectual moving in sophisticated London circles and writing for a coterie audience, lesbianism looks like a master trope for positively resolving a dilemma that confounded Montaigne and many other authors of the age. Could the perfections of love and friendship be united in a relation of equality between two persons? Gender hierarchy and separate socialization precluded a heterosexual construction of any such equality in the Renaissance, and the greater opprobrium cast on male homosexuality in this era must have influenced Donne's decision to figure his equal lovers and friends as a lesbian couple. Yet the disclosive power of "Sapho to Philaenis" goes far beyond the entailments of a specific choice of poetic representation. Donne really undertakes to imagine the pleasures, sustenance, and ideological implications by which lesbianism, as a mode of loving and being, resists patriarchal disposition and diminution of women. Donne anticipates the advances of twentieth-century feminists (Colette, Kofman, Irigaray) as he poetically articulates possibilities and knowledge that were otherwise denied expression by Renaissance culture and its exponents.