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Love As a Commodity: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and “Sappho”

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Love As a Commodity: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and “Sappho” Love as a Commodity: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and “Sappho” Masae Kawatsu Synopsis The legendary leap of Sappho because of unrequited love for Phaon has inspired various fi ctional accounts from ancient times to the present. In this essay, I consider the early nineteenth-century fi ction of Sappho through a focus upon the poems of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Landon, who achieved commercial success in the 1820s and 1830s, was pre- sented as the “English Sappho” by William Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette and Landon’s publisher. Moreover, he was the father of Landon’s three illegitimate children and their relationship lasted from 1822 to at least 1834. Although the rumor concerning these two individuals circulated in 1826, Landon publicly denied the relationship during her lifetime, and it was not until Cynthia Lawford discovered hard evidence in 2000 that the affair turned out to be true. I pay atten- tion therefore to the way Landon weaved her affair with the married editor twenty years her senior into her story of Sappho in “Sappho” (1822) and “Sappho’s Song” in The Improvisatrice (1824), which were published before the rumor began. Transforming her real passion to fi c- tional passion, Landon creates a Sappho who is, unlike Ovid’s, always heterosexual and modest, therefore blameless, and who always laments the loss of love, considering love more important than fame. No doubt Landon knew that her Sappho conformed to the time’s tastes. Even af- ter the rumor, Landon kept publishing many poems on the same theme of unrequited love and death in her volumes and literary annuals. Thus she succeeded in turning her own and Sappho’s love into a commodity to satisfy readers’ demands. * * * [ 133 ] 134 Masae Kawatsu English Sappho Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–38), known to her public by the initials “L. E. L.,” was the “English Sappho” of her time. The Literary Gazette fi rst conferred the title on her in a review of her second volume The Improvisatrice and Other Poems (1824) (389 [3 July 1824]: 417).1 The anonymous reviewer is presumed to be William Jerdan, Landon’s neigh- bor and publisher, and the editor of the Literary Gazette notorious for “puffi ng” the publishers’ leading authors.2 Moreover, he was the father of Landon’s three illegitimate children, and their relationship lasted from 1822 to at least 1834. Although a rumor concerning these two individuals circulated in 1826, Landon publicly and privately denied the relationship during her lifetime. It was not until Cynthia Lawford discovered solid evidence in 2000 that the existence of the affair was proved (“Diary”). Since Stuart Curran’s 1988 reevaluation of Landon’s poetry, critics have tended to consider the feelings of love and sorrow of her female characters to be products of Landon’s fertile imagination and not derived from her personal experience (Armstrong; Greer; Stephenson). Some re- jected the likelihood of a physical relationship between Landon and Jerdan (Greer 292; Mellor 122). Lawford’s 2000 discovery caused this reading to be reexamined. In her 2003 essay, Lawford herself persuasively indicated that much of the passion in Landon’s poems “was directed toward Jerdan” (“Thou” 3). However, such an autobiographical reading alone would not suffi ce to give an adequate explanation for Landon’s commercial success in the 1820s and 1830s. In order to explore this factor of her commercial success, in this paper, I focus on the way Landon wove her affair with the married editor twenty years her senior into her fi ction of Sappho in “Sappho” (1822) and “Sappho’s Song,” a short poem contained in The Improvisatrice (1824), both published before the rumor began. The Reception of Sappho’s Leap The story of Sappho taking a fatal leap from the rocks of Leucas into the sea because of unrequited love for Phaon had come down from Menander’s comedy through Ovid’s epistle “Sappho to Phaon.” Alexander Pope’s translation of Ovid’s poetry in 1712 contributed to making the image of the Ovidian Sappho widely known. But it was Joseph Addison’s academic Love as a Commodity 135 or pseudo-academic articles in the Spectator, Nos. 223, 227, and 233 in 1711 that popularized Sappho’s leap throughout Britain. Addison uses the French philosopher Pierre Bayle as his authority for saying that the place of Leucas was called “Lovers-Leap” since despairing lovers leaped from there for “the Cure” to stop the pains of lost love, and that Sappho was one of the leapers (Joseph Addison 2: 366, 2: 408–09; Bayle 3: 1922n(B)). Addison as well as Bayle also remarks that Sappho did not commit sui- cide but took a dangerous leap fearlessly with the expectation of survival. As time went by, ideas about Sappho’s leap had changed. Whereas John Addison, an English translator of Sappho’s poetry in 1735, followed the view of Joseph Addison that Sappho was heterosexual and leaped to cure her heartbreak (John Addison 253), William King added notes to his 1736 edition of The Toast that Sappho was “a famous Tribade,” which tarnished her reputation as the “Tenth Muse,” and that as a pun- ishment for her homosexuality she “killed herself at last for the Love of a Man” (110n). As far as I know, King’s text was the earliest that presumed Sappho’s leap to be for the sake of suicide. In late eighteenth century, English translators of Sappho also de- picted her leap as suicide. But unlike King, they admired the heterosexual Sappho’s “masculine” ability in composing poetry and her “masculine” suicide leap. In 1768, for instance, E. B. Greene distinguished clearly between other lovesick women who “peaceably” dispatched themselves “by the noose, or the river” (133) and the masculine Sappho who killed herself by leaping into the sea from a precipice which was a much higher place than bank. In the 1780s and 1790s, Sappho’s suicide leap became a popular subject for literary works and paintings. This was probably infl uenced by the case of Thomas Chatterton’s killing himself in 1770 and Goethe’s popular novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774; fi rst English trans. 1779). Although the attitude to suicide changed greatly from severe pun- ishment to compassion in the eighteenth century, the debate on suicide was not monolithic. The anonymous translator of Goethe’s novel (Werter and Charlotte, 1786), for instance, admired the similar sensibility of Chatterton and Werther: their feelings were “too fi ne to support the load of accumulated distress” (Preface iii). On the other hand, Charles Moore in A Full Enquiry into the Subject of Suicide (1790) criticized Werther’s “voluntary” suicide for “an ungoverned passion,” to distinguish it from 136 Masae Kawatsu Chatterton’s “involuntary” suicide for pecuniary diffi culties (2: 141–42). Sappho’s suicide leap was in relation to two aspects of affl iction of an unrequited lover and a poetic genius. But at the time when there were contrary reactions to suicide for love (admiration for “too fi ne” a sensi- bility and accusation against “an ungoverned passion”), it is little wonder that Sappho’s leap took on various aspects. The French Abbé Barthélmy in Travels of Anacharsis (1788; fi rst English trans. 1791–92) reestimated Sappho as a great poet of sensibility, and presented her leap as a suicide for breaking away from cold Phaon on her own initiative (2: 64). Drawing on Barthélmy, Mary Robinson went further in Sappho and Phaon (1796) to proclaim Sappho as the representative of all women poets in later ages. Robinson’s Sappho repeatedly laments the death of “Sappho” (=her poetic self) while “I” (=her female self) is held captive by love to Phaon, so that she decides to kill her female self by bravely leaping at Leucas in order to be revived as the great “Sappho” in the future.3 Unlike Robinson, Robert Southey in “Sappho: A Monodrama” (1797) portrays Sappho as still be- ing attached to Phaon just before leaping. Southey’s Sappho dies only to make Phaon regret what he has done, and to urge him to kill himself to join her in death. On the other hand, the Italian Alessandoro Verri in The Adventures of Sappho (1782; fi rst English trans. 1789) depicts a Sappho who is fearful of leaping because of “the timidity natural to the sex” (2: 323). Verri’s Sappho is consequently killed and thrown down by Venus. The French Étienne-François de Lantier in The Travels of Antenor in Greece and Asia (1797; fi rst English trans. 1799) also presents the fearful-leaping Sappho, and turns her leaping moment into a sublime sight that the viewers regard “with sympathetic horror” (1: 262). Such a horrid, sublime scene was also the subject of paintings such as Cipriani’s “Sappho Throwing Herself from the Rock” (1782). As we move into the nineteenth century, Lord Byron depicted Sappho as “the poet” (in the sense of a representative of poets, male or female) as well as “the lover” (in the sense of a representative of lovers, male or female). In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron intentionally disregards both the name and sex of Phaon, Sappho’s legendary love, to generalize her passion.4 While Byron resisted the current trend of heterosexualiz- ing Sappho, women poets of the 1820s and 1830s, such as Landon and Felicia Hemans, were more interested in heterosexual Sappho singing just Love as a Commodity 137 before her fatal leap. Their Sappho is like Corinne, Madame de Staël’s heroine in the popular novel Corinne ou L’Italie (1807), who sang her last song before death.5 Both Landon and Hemans depict their Sappho as an exemplar of a woman of genius who considers love more important than fame.
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