Ventriloquizing Sappho: Ovid, Donne, and the Erotics of the Feminine Voice

Abstract

When in John Donne's Valediction: of the Book, the male speaker urges his mistress to compose the annals of their love, he also implicitly interrogates both the status and viability of female au thorship. He advises his beloved to chronicle their passion so that she might achieve fame as an author and out-endure Sybil's glory, casting into obscurity even those women he cites as paradigmatic ex amples of feminine literary pre-eminence: Her who from Pindar could allure,/ And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame,/ And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find and name(7-9). Al though the speaker ostensibly praises these three women, suggesting that their talents either surpassed or helped to shape the poetic gen ius of Pindar, Lucan, and Homer, his rhetoric ironically deflates the encomium. He describes the women periphrastically but declines to name them, substituting instead the names of the men whose reputa tions have supplanted theirs. This elision of the proper name within the poem mimetically reproduces the historical effacement of the women's identities, underlining and re-enacting the mechanism through which their accomplishments were originally eclipsed. The speaker initially seems to be asserting that Homer plagiarized his poems, but the qualification they say introduces an element of in determinacy, and the acts of finding and naming blur the dis

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