Usually when I cover books of the density and length of those I'm doing this month, I break them up into multiple entries to spread out the work of reading and summarizing. But because I wanted to do this "Sappho Special," I'm doing a book a week, and it's being a big grueling (as well as making for some very long blogs). Andreadis is a very dense but readable work, though the theoretical interpretation gets a bit repetitive in later chapters. For this reason, I took more extensive notes in the first few chapters than later ones.
I'm not entirely convinced by her central thesis: that "respectable" women with same-sex inclinations developed a "language of silence" either in order to avoid being associated with (or associating in their own minds) with those sexually transgressive women whose activities were becoming increasingly discussed (if decreasingly described) in popular literature. Phrased in that way, it seems either a bit self-evident (i.e., that people who considered themselves part of "polite society" didn't talk about the details of physical sexuality in public) or perhaps a bit circular (i.e., that women who talked more openly about physical sexuality were those who didn't mind being identified as "transgressive" even if they participated in elevated literary circles).
What is the difference between a Katherine Philips and a Margaret Cavendish? Does it truly represent two separate spheres of thought, or are we sorting historic people into categories based on our own perceptions of what place their work held in society? Are they, instead, individual points on a subtler continuum of approaches to expressing (and experiencing) same-sex eroticism?
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