Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap:(Re-)constructing Gender and Authorship through Sappho

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Published: Nov 8, 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.25258
Keywords:
gender authorship classics sappho Erica Jong Sappho's Leap Sapphic fragments (conceptions of) male/female authorship adaptation and literary creativity
Emily Hauser
Lecturer, University of Exeter
Abstract
For contemporary female authors, Sappho is a literary forebear who is both a model for women’s writing and a reminder of the ways in which women have been excluded from the literary canon. Poet and novelist Erica Jong takes up the challenge to gender and authorship posed by Sappho in her 2003 novel, Sappho’s Leap. Jong weaves Sappho’s poetry into her fiction to both complement the Sapphic tradition and to supplant it, proving that female poetry —and authorship— is alive and well, with Sappho continually mediated by and validating each subsequent writer in the female tradition. In addition, Jong’s emphasis on the authentic expression of sexual desire as a bridge to authorship transcends gender binaries, turning Sappho’s Leap into a study of authorship that is not confined to gender. This enables Jong to shift the debate away from the sense of burden placed on female authors post- Sappho and to transform her Sappho into a positive role model for all authors, turning the focus towards a poetics of passion and away from prescriptive assumptions of the relationship between gender and authorship.
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Author Biography
Emily Hauser, Lecturer, University of Exeter
Emily Hauser is Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter and the author of the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy retelling the stories of the women of Greek myth. She read Classics at the University of Cambridge, studied at Harvard University as a Fulbright Scholar, and received her PhD in Classics from Yale University in 2017. Her research focuses on women in antiquity, gender studies, Greek and Latin poetry, and the theory and practice of classical reception, particularly in contemporary fiction. Her current book project, forthcoming with Princeton University Press, looks at the gendering of authorship in ancient Greek poetry.