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Chapter 8 - Sapphic Remembering, Lyric Kleos

from Part II - Sappho and Homer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2023

Melissa Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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Summary

Taking Penelope’s exemplary remembering of Odysseus as its point of departure, this final chapter argues that Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus of women’s remembering from male to female objects, in this way creating an “avuncular” variation on the Odyssey’s conjugal paradigm. The fragments examined display the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside marriage – something the Odyssey itself does not explore. Sappho’s fragments feature the girls and women that wives once were before they were married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. The scenes of recollection are appropriately adorned with lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils, suggesting the precariousness and fragility of these bonds, in comparision with the supposed enduringness of marriage and patrilineal lineage, with its accumulated household wealth passed on from one generation to the next.

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Sappho and Homer
A Reparative Reading
, pp. 175 - 192
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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