French poet, writer, and dramatist Constance de Salm advocated for equality for female writers in Parisian literary circles. Her 1794 libretto Sapho was her most ambitious and grand-scale feminist literary undertaking. By representing the Greek poet as a tragic heroine whose creative voice was silenced by patriarchal oppression, Salm subverts canonical depictions of Sapho as a tragic figure driven to suicide by romantic betrayal. Her portrayal of Sapho offers a feminist critique of the persecution and exclusion of female citoyennes in France’s male-dominated literary culture during the Revolutionary Era. Despite its egalitarian aims, Sapho falls short of feminist revisionist mythmaking, reflecting a broader trend in revolutionary women’s opera of exerting agency while operating within the context of gendered power dynamics. To address the intertextuality and treatment of feminist themes in Sapho, this study uses the theoretical framework of feminist critical discourse analysis in the context of Salm’s moderate bourgeois feminism. This analysis reveals three key themes: the limits of women’s creative agency, gendered instruments of patriarchal oppression, and the symbolic death of the female genius representing women’s erasure from history. This study will examine to what extent Salm’s reinterpretation of Sapho’s mythology deconstructs versus reproduces the patriarchal structures she condemns.
Presenter: Izzy Fincher, UW-Milwaukee