Sappho, Hegel and Michael Field: Paradox and Desire in Lyric III

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20420/Phil.Can.2021.375

Keywords:

Michael Field, Long Ago, Sappho, Hegel, lyric III, desire

Abstract

This article offers a close reading of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lyric III in Long Ago, a Sapphic volume of verse published in 1889 under the collaborative nom de plume of Michael Field. This collection articulates a dramatic inquiry into the tragedy of unrequited love in a long cycle of lyrics whose third piece most effectively encapsulates the kernel of what the Fields reconstruct as Sappho’s ambivalent eroticism. The outcome of this reconstruction, as analysed in light of lyric III, is a consistent Hegelian view of desire that subsumes a complex system of tropes, myths, paradoxes and imaginative strategies under an overarching ideology of desire as a radical experience of appropriation, violence and self-destruction.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Mayron Estefan Cantillo-Lucuara, Universitat de València

Mayron Estefan Cantillo-Lucuara holds a PhD in Languages, Literatures, Cultures and their Applications, and he works as an Assistant Lecturer in English Studies at the Universitat de València (Spain). His research focuses on nineteenth-century poetry with special emphasis on how it responds to new formalist approaches, how it converses with continental philosophy, and how it is received in other literary traditions. He has written extensively on Michael Field in peer-reviewed journals such as Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat, Miscelánea: A Journal of Anglo-American Studies, Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, Cuadernos de Investigaciones Filológicas or ES Review, among others.

References

BERGER, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.

BERGK, T. 1882. Poetae Lyrici Graeci. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Teubner.

BLAIN, V. 1996. “‘Michael Field, the Two-Headed Nightingale’: Lesbian Text as Palimpsest”, Women's History Review, 5(2), pp. 239-257. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029600200117.

BURBIDGE, J. W. 2008. The Historical Dictionary of Hegelian Philosophy. Ontario: The Scarecrow Press.

CANTILLO-LUCUARA, M. E. 2018a. “Michael Field’s Sapphism: An Ontology of the Feminine in Long Ago (1889)”, Lectora. Revista de Dones i Textualitat, 24, pp. 205-222. https://doi.org/10.1344/Lectora2018.24.12.

CANTILLO-LUCUARA, M. E. 2018b. “Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889) as a Paradigm of Intertextual Theory: From Strangeness to Metaxology”, Cuadernos de Investigación Filológica, 44, pp. 185-210. https://doi.org/10.18172/cif.3442.

CANTILLO-LUCUARA, M. E. 2018c. “Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889): A Transcendental Mythopoesis of Desire and Death”, ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies, 39, pp. 69-96. https://doi.org/10.24197/ersjes.39.2018.69-96.

DILLON, M. C. 2001. Beyond Romance. New York: State University of New York Press.

DOMÍNGUEZ-RUÉ, E. 2010. “Sins of the Flesh: Anorexia, Eroticism and the Female Vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, Journal of Gender Studies, 19(2), pp. 297-308. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2010.494346.

DUBOIS, P. 2015. Sappho. London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

EAGLETON, T. 2007. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

EHNENN, J. R. 2008. Women's Literary Collaboration, Queerness and Late-Victorian Culture. London: Routledge.

EVANGELISTA, S. 2009. British Aestheticism and the Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

FERBER, M. 2007. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FIELD, M. 1889. Long Ago. London: George Bell and Sons.

FIELD, M. 1933. Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field. Ed. T. Sturge Moore. London: John Murray.

FOLEY, H. (ed.). 1999. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

HEGEL, G. W. F. 1979. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

JAFFÉ, A. 1999. Apparitions: An Archetypal Approach to Death Dreams and Ghosts. Einsiedeln: Daimon Verlag.

JOHNSON, B. 1994. Lady of the Beasts: The Goddess and Her Sacred Animals. Rochester: Inner Traditions International.

LANDES, D. A. 2013. The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary. Oxford: Bloomsbury.

LEIGHTON, A. 1992. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Oxford: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

MADDEN, E. 2008. Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

MAXWELL, C. 2001. The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

MAXWELL, C. 2008. Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

MICHIE, H. 1987. The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies. New York: Oxford University Press.

OLVERSON, D. T. 2010. Women Writers and the Dark Side of Late-Victorian Hellenism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

PARKER, S. and VADILLO, A. P. (eds.). 2019. Michael Field: Decadent Moderns. Ohio: Ohio University Press.

PRINS, Y. 1999. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PULHAM, P. 2008. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s ‘Supernatural Tales’. Aldershot: Ashgate.

STERN, R. 2002. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Hegel and the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’. London: Routledge.

STETZ, M. D. and WILSON, C. A. (eds.). 2007. Michael Field and Their World. Birmingham: The Rivendale Press.

THAIN, M. 2007. ‘Michael Field’ Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

THAIN, M. and VADILLO, A. P. (eds.). 2009. Michael Field, The Poet. Published and Manuscript Materials. Peterborough/Buffalo: Broadview Editions.

THOMAS, K. 2019. “Vegetable Love: Michael Field’s Queer Ecology”, in Parker, S. and Vadillo, A. P. (eds.), Michael Field: Decadent Moderns. Ohio: Ohio University Press, pp. 25-46.

VADILLO, A. P. 2014. “Walter Pater and Michael Field: The Correspondence, with Other Unpublished Manuscript Materials”, The Pater Newsletter, 65, pp. 27-85

WHITE, C. 1990. “‘Poets and Lovers Evermore’: Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field”, Textual Practice, 4(2), pp. 197-212. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502369008582086.

WHITE, C. 1996. “Flesh and Roses: Michael Field’s Metaphors of Pleasure and Desire”, Women’s Writing, 3(1), pp. 47-62. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969908960030104.

Downloads

Published

2021-05-23

How to Cite

Cantillo-Lucuara, M. E. (2021). Sappho, Hegel and Michael Field: Paradox and Desire in Lyric III. Philologica Canariensia, 27, 49–63. https://doi.org/10.20420/Phil.Can.2021.375

Issue

Vol. 27 (2021)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Mayron Estefan Cantillo-Lucuara

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Philologica Canariensia is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional. 

Philologica Canariensia allows authors to retain unrestricted copyright and to retain it in the future.

The author is allowed to deposit the publisher's PDF version on his or her personal website, in an institutional or subject repository or in an social network. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

a. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

b. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

c. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website), as it can lead to greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).