GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS
After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz
The problems of Albertine are
(from the narrator’s point of view)
a) lying
b) lesbianism,
and (from Albertine’s point of view)
a) being imprisoned in the narrator’s house.
—Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout
Sappho, c. 630 BCE
The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho.
Who was Sappho? No one knew, but she had an island. She was garlanded with girls. She could sit down to dine and look straight at the woman she loved, however unhappily. When she sang, everyone said, it was like evening on a riverbank, sinking down into the moss with the sky pouring over you. All of her poems were songs.
We read Sappho at school, in classes intended merely to teach poetic meter. Very few of our teachers imagined that they were swelling our veins with cassia and myrrh. In dry voices they went on about the aorist tense, while inside ourselves we felt the leaves of trees shivering in the light, everything dappled, everything trembling.
We were so young then that we had never met. In back gardens we read as much as we could, staining our dresses with mud and pine-pitch. Some of us were sent by our families to distant schools to be finished, so that we would come to our proper end. But it was not our end. It was barely our beginning. Each one lingered in her own place, searching the fragments of poems for words to say what it was, this feeling that Sappho calls aithussomenon, the way that leaves move when nothing touches them but the afternoon light.
At that time we were not called anything and so we cherished every word, no matter how many centuries dead. Reading of the nocturnal rites of the pannuchides we stayed up all night; the exile of Sappho to Sicily turned our eyes to the sea. We began writing odes to clover blossoms and blushing apples, or painting on canvases that we turned to the wall at the slightest sound of footsteps. A sidelong glance, a half-smile, a hand that rested on our arms just above the elbow: we had not yet memorized the lines for these occasions. Or there were only fragments of lines that we could have offered, in any case. Of the nine books of poems written by Sappho, mere shreds of dactyls survive, as in Fragment 24C: we live/…the opposite/…daring.
CHAPTER ONE
Cordula Poletti, b. 1885
Cordula Poletti was born into a line of sisters who didn’t understand her. From the earliest days, she was drawn toward the outer reaches of the house: the attic, the balcony, the back window touched by the branches of a pine tree. At her christening she kicked free of the blankets bundled around her and crawled down the nave. It was impossible to swaddle Cordula long enough to name her.
Cordula Poletti, c. 1896
Whenever she could, she took a Latin primer from the Biblioteca Classense and went to sit in a tree near the cemetery. In her house they called, Cordula, Cordula!, and no one would answer. Finding Cordula’s skirts discarded on the floor, her mother openly despaired of her prospects. What right-minded citizen of Ravenna would marry a girl who climbed up the trees in her underthings? Her mother called, Cordula, Cordula?, but there was no one in the house who would answer that question.
X, 1883
Two years before the christening of Cordula, Guglielmo Cantarano published his study of X, a twenty-three-year-old Italian. In excellent health, X went whistling through the streets and kept a string of girlfriends happy. Even Cantarano, who disapproved, had to admit that X was jovial and generous. X would throw a shoulder to a wheel without complaint, could make a room roar with laughter. It wasn’t that. It was what X was not. X was not a willing housewife. X remained unmoved by squalling infants, would not wear skirts that swaddled the stride, had no desire to be pursued by the hot breath of young men, failed to enjoy domestic chores, and possessed none of the decorous modesty of maidenhood. Whatever X was, Cantarano wrote, it was to be avoided at all costs.
Thus X was locked away in an asylum and Italian mothers were instructed to watch for signs of deviance in their daughters. Even those who had normal breasts, Cantarano cautioned, might turn out to be like X, whose apparently standard genitals had not prevented the attempt, late one night, to set the family home on fire.
C— Poletti, c. 1897
She shut the insistent voices of her family inside the house and went up her tree. From a haven of leaves she looked out over the cemetery. The tombs of poets were wreathed in laurel and etched in glorious verses, while the graves of the ordinary listed as their only accomplishments the names of children produced or a spouse bereaved. So many dead in childbirth, she observed, and so few by shipwreck.
Her mind was a tangle of lyric odes and unconjugated verbs. Each line of Ovid demanded an unspooling of which object bore the action, and by whose brave hand. Each epithet traced to its source showed the divine moving behind the scenes of human life: in her tree was a great rustling of gods, owls, winged serpents. As soon as she finished the Latin primer she went on to the Greek. She stayed up late, rapturously late. It became apparent that she wasn’t Cordula at all.
Lina Poletti, c. 1899
Towards the end of the century she changed names. Cordula sounded anyway like a heap of rope. Lina was a swift, sleek line, a hand brushing a row of buttons. Lina was the one who would read Sappho.
Lina lived with her family on Via Rattazzi, not far from the tomb of Dante. A tomb is a dead place in the ground. There is a rock on top of it, covered with tiny nicks that are words. Lina stayed up late writing verses for the tomb. Not for Dante himself, who had been dead since 1321, but for the incisions that words make on immutable substances.
It would be many years before we learned of Lina Poletti. In her childhood she dwelt alone, her only companions the solemn constellations of the night sky. The refrain rang through her house, Cordula, Cordula!, but Lina listened only to the silence of stars. Eventually she would learn to translate Sappho without a dictionary. She would find that she was one of us. But in those years it was a great wonder that Lina, unlike X, did not set fire to the family home.
Lina Poletti, c. 1900
As the century turned, Lina Poletti outpaced her classmates in classical subjects from elocution to the elegiac mode. Moreover she kept her distance when they paired off to walk home or passed each other scraps of crude rhymes. Lina walked alone to the Biblioteca Classense and noted various uses of the genitive.
The genitive was a case of relations between nouns. Often the genitive was defined as possession, as if the only way one noun could be with another were to own it, greedily. But in fact there is also the genitive of remembering, where one noun is always thinking of another, refusing to forget her.
Sappho, Fragments 105a and 105b
Sappho writes of many girls: those who are pliant and bind up their hair modestly, those who are golden and go willingly into the bridal chamber, and those like the hyacinth in the mountains that shepherd men/with their feet trample down. An entire book of Sappho is made of wedding songs; like the hyacinth in the mountains, none have survived.
For the girl who wishes to avoid being trampled down by the feet of men, Sappho recommends the farthermost branch of the highest tree. There are always those rare few, Sappho notes, that the applepickers forgot—/no, not forgot: were unable to reach.
Lina’s father made his living selling earthenware pots. With four daughters to maintain, he saw the necessity of their marriages like the exchange of dry goods. A line of daughters was already a liability, and there was no market for girls who were not pliant.
Whenever Lina’s mother called her, Cordula, Cordula!, to embroider the trousseau of linens for her dowry, Lina was already elsewhere. She was at the very end of the Greek primer, she was ensconced in a far corner of the Biblioteca Classense, she had gone out the back window and into the pine tree to read poems from a century less muffled in fabric.
We could picture Lina in those years: her high buttoned boots, her erudite citations. Above her boots she seemed hardly to be wearing skirts. Lina Poletti was like that, she could make visible things seem scant and unremarkable. She had her own ways of escaping the century.
Sappho, Fragment 2
A kletic poem is a calling, both a hymn and a plea. It bends in obeisance to the divine, ever dappled and shining, and at the same time it calls out to ask, when will you arrive? Why is your radiance distant from my eyes? You drop through the branches when I sleep at the roots. You pour yourself out like the light of an afternoon and yet somewhere you linger, outside the day.
It is while invoking the one who abides and yet must be called, urgently, from a great distance, that Sappho writes of aithussomenon, the bright trembling of leaves in the moment of anticipation. A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.
Lina Poletti, c, 1905
Lina Poletti fought to sit in a chair at the library. She fought to smoke in the Caffè Roma-Risorgimento. She fought to frequent literary gatherings in the evenings. She did up her cravat with determined fingers and presented herself in public, over and over, to murmurs in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II.
She went on, against the wishes of her family, to the university in Bologna. She studied under the esteemed poet Giovanni Pascoli, who was surprised to find her there. He peered at her, although she was sitting clearly in the front row of the lecture hall with her pen ready. There weren’t many women who wanted to write a thesis on the poetry of Carducci. People were always saying that about Lina Poletti: they were surprised to find her, there weren’t many like her. It was true that she had very striking eyes, with golden rims around her pupils. She seemed volatile, alchemical. Something might flash through her and change everything. As Sibilla Aleramo would say to us later, Lina was a violent, luminous wave.
CHAPTER TWO
Rina Faccio, b. 1876
As a girl, Rina Faccio lived in Porto Civitanova and did what she was told. Her father told her to work in the accounting department of his factory, and she did it. She was twelve years old, dutiful, with long dark hair.
In the factory glass bottles were produced, thousands every day, tinting the air with ferrous smoke. Rina was charged with the figures, how much sodium sulfate was carried to the furnace on the shoulders of how many portantini, the boys who worked eight hours a day for one lira. There was no school in Porto Civitanova, so Rina tried to teach herself how to account for all of this.
Rina Faccio, 1889
In 1889 Rina’s mother told her something wordlessly that she never forgot. Her mother was standing at the window, looking out, in a white dress that hung off her shoulders. Then suddenly her mother went out the window. She plummeted, her dress trailing like a scrap of paper. Her body landed two floors down, bent into a bad shape. That was what Rina Faccio’s mother had to say to her.
Nira and Reseda, 1892
Nira was the first time Rina changed her name. She wanted to write for the provincial local papers, but she was afraid that her father would find out.
When Rina Faccio turned fifteen, she grew out of anagrams. She chose the name Reseda because it reminded her of recita, a verb for actresses: it means, she plays her role, she recites her part. When her father thundered in the drawing-room about the opinions of these hussies, whoever they were, appearing in print, Rina Faccio looked up from her needlepoint as blank as a page.
Rina Faccio, 1892
Despite having been warned wordlessly by her mother, Rina Faccio didn’t foresee her fate. She was obediently adding and subtracting numbers about the factory, keeping the ledgers in straight lines. A man who worked at the factory was moving in circles around her. He had brute hands that fastened on levers, a breath that crawled up the back of her neck. She didn’t see him until the circles were very tight, and then it was too late. Her dress was shoved up. She cried out, but only the brute palm of his hand could hear her.
Rina Pierangeli Faccio, 1893
Once Rina’s father learned that she had been possessed by that man, there was nothing to do but transfer her to him in name and deed. Articles of Italian law bound a daughter into becoming a wife at the word of her father. In particular Article 544 of the Penal Code was like an iron lever, maneuvering girls of sixteen into position as brides to the very men who had trampled them down.
In the winter Rina was handed from one household to another, sallow and dazed. In the house of Rina’s father, her two sisters sat silently at their needlepoint while her mother, or what was left of her, was consigned to the asylum at Macerata. There were no words for what happened in the house of the husband to whom Rina now belonged. After Rina Pierangeli Faccio had been delivered to him, along with some dining-room furniture, the curtains were drawn. When in the early months she miscarried in a feverish rush of blood, she did not ask why. But she felt welling up in her a tumultuous hatred of life, this life, her life.
The Pisanelli Code, 1865
The politicians hailed the Pisanelli Code as a triumph of the unification of Italy. The new state was eager to grow into its full shape, stretching the length of the entire peninsula and covering the populace with its laws. As one politician said, We made Italy; now we have to make the Italians.
Under the Pisanelli Code, Italian women gained two memorable rights: we could make wills to distribute our property after our own deaths, and our daughters could inherit things from us. Our writing before death had never seemed so important. Those of us in Italy considered whether we might bequeath to our daughters some small gift that could be pawned for a future.
Rina, 1895
In 1895, amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gave birth to the child of that man. It was a son. When the infant turned two, she found the bottle of laudanum and wordlessly took all of it.
The laudanum didn’t kill Rina Pierangeli Faccio, but it ended her days as a dutiful wife. The woman she had been until that night was dead, she said. The doctor prescribed bed-rest, the husband reproached her. But Rina would only speak to her sister.
Often that was the first thing we did when we were changing: we would find a sister and stay with her, taking breakfast in our room. Or we would find someone in her room and stay with her, pretending if needed that we were sisters. The housekeepers would widen their eyes, but if we prevailed, milky tea and toast were served in our room, on trays that spanned the whole width of our bed.
Dr. T. Laycock, A Treatise on the Nervous Disorders of Women, 1840
The eminent Doctor Laycock of York, writing on the nervous disorders of women, could not help but notice that the more young women consorted with each other, the more excitable and indolent they became. This condition might strike seamstresses, factory girls, or any woman who associated with any number of other women.
In particular, he cautioned, young females cannot associate together in public schools without serious risk of exciting the passions, and being led to indulge in practices injurious to both body and mind. Novels, whispers, unsigned poems, general education, shared sleeping compartments: no sooner were girls reading in bed than they were reading in bed together. What might look like sisterly affection or a schoolgirl’s fancy ought to be diagnosed as the pernicious antecedent of hysteric paroxysms. In the throes of it they were highly contagious and might throw whole households into disorder.
Anna Kuliscioff, b. c. 1854
Before Anna Kuliscioff spent her life fighting for the rights of Italian women, she was born in southern Ukraine. As soon as she was old enough to grasp the basic idea of human life, she began explaining its principles to those around her, for which she was exiled, arrested, and imprisoned across Europe.
In 1877 she sang for her supper in a public park in Kiev, then fled the country with a false passport. Hardly had she arrived in Switzerland in search of a clandestine printing press when the police swarmed in, asking pointed questions about her revolutionary belief that women ought not be held as property.
She was expelled from France, she was arrested in Milano, she was jailed in Firenze although there was no evidence for her guilt except that she was clearly incorrigible. By 1881 she had a daughter, fathered by an Italian anarchist. Anna Kuliscioff was careful not to marry him, she had other ideas.
Dottoressa Anna Kuliscioff, 1888
Anna Kuliscioff was so often the object of outcry and imprecation that by 1884 she scarcely registered an insult. She enrolled in the university of Napoli to study medicine, despite the fact that no woman had ever done so before. She was interested in epidemiology and why on earth so many Italian women were permitted to die from puerperal fevers. At least upon her graduation in 1886, when she was decried as a pathological perversion of femininity, Anna Kuliscioff could recite the medical definition of ‘pathogenesis.’
Thereafter, on the grounds of sheer human life, Anna Kuliscioff opposed the Pope, the Russian czar, and most of the Italian socialists. It was ludicrous, what these men busied themselves with instead of preventable post-partum infections. What was worse, what was truly malignant, was the casual breaking of bodies in the back rooms of a household, nearly always the bodies of women, authorized under a civil law called the patria potestas.
Patria meant both ‘the father’ and ‘the fatherland,’ and potestas was the thick knot of their power to dispose magisterially of women, children, and domestic goods. Patria potestas had been handed down from father to father since the Roman Empire. In the Pisanelli Code of 1865 it was wedded to the autorizzazione maritale, which authorized the husband to treat his wife as a child forever: no matter how she grew in mind and body, she would never be fully a person in the fatherland.
As soon as she could, Anna Kuliscioff became a doctor, specializing in gynecology and anarchism.
Amendment to the Pisanelli Code, 1877
The rights we didn’t have in Italy were the same rights we hadn’t had for centuries, and thus not worth enumerating. But in 1877, a modification to the Pisanelli Code allowed women to act as witnesses. Suddenly, legally, we could sign our names to what we knew to be true. Our words, which had always before been seen as gauzy and frivolous, gained a new weight as they settled on the page.
Then, too, we were beginning to notice how the outlines of our doorways and dowries were matched up, so that one box could be carried through another, signifying the transfer of a bride. No one could leave a marriage, but some of us could discern the shape that it made of our lives. As one politician said at that time, In Italy, the enslavement of women is the only regime in which men may live happily. He meant that we ourselves were the small gift, pawned for the future of the fatherland.
Dottoressa Anna Kuliscioff, Il monopolio dell’uomo, 1890
In 1890 the Dottoressa Kuliscioff somehow got herself invited to lecture at the Philological Society of the university of Milano, where no woman had ever lectured before. She chose for her talk the title The Monopoly of Men. On a bright day in April, Anna Kuliscioff seized her chance to explain to those assembled how marriage was fundamentally a humiliation of women. The philologists should know full well, she pointed out, that patria potestas was nothing but Latin for fathers who sold their daughters cheaply to the very men who had violated them.
Dottoressa Anna Kuliscioff, Critica sociale, 1899
Condemned by a military tribunal to several months in prison, the Dottoressa Anna Kuliscioff was freed on the first day of 1899. She came home to the dust on her books, to the winter light through the windows, to the white-spired spectacle of the Duomo of Milano preaching its dominion over the piazza. For the length of a coffee Anna Kuliscioff allowed herself to sit on the green divan. It was a new year; it would soon be a new century; even if half of the radical socialists who wrote for Critica sociale were still imprisoned, Anna Kuliscioff reasoned, publication could not be delayed.
In a rush of ink and dust, Anna Kuliscioff wrote to everyone who might help with the next issue: comrades, revolutionaries, socialists, feminists, writers, editors. Among the comrades of Anna Kuliscioff was the socialist revolutionary whose feminist journal was now edited by a young writer named Rina Faccio.
Rina, 1901
In the evenings Rina could read freely and go to the theater. In the north then we were beginning to hear the word femminista, which sounded like the French femme, meaning both ‘wife’ and ‘woman.’ Much preferring women over wives, we watched closely for signs of what was to come. For example, the theater in Milano was so crowded that Rina could barely find her seat. The play was Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the story of a woman named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife. In the last act, Nora leaves her house, her husband, and her children, clicking the latch of the door behind her with a sound like a century snapping shut.
Eleanora Duse, Nora, 1891
A Doll’s House had first come to Italy in the form of the actress Eleonora Duse. She was already famous when she swept into a theater in Milano in 1891, thirty-two years old, melancholy and determined. On the cold stage she took off her hat and furs and, bowing her head, had a chain put round her neck with heavy keys on it. The tines of the keys hung down to the tops of her thighs, so that every step she took made the sound of keys and chains, chains and keys. On opening night, tickets to see her cost twice what they should, and still the theater was creaking with bodies all the way up to the balconies. Then the curtain went up, and Eleonora Duse became Nora.
Rina, Sibilla, 1902
In 1902 Rina left that man, the child, and her name. She escaped to Rome and rented a tiny room with a writing desk. Between giving private lessons and volunteering in a dispensary for poor children, she fell in love with a distinguished novelist. When the novelist asked her name, she said it was Sibilla, like the sibyl of Delphi. A new name was like a blank notebook; Rina could write herself into it. With a folio of fresh pages she could write herself into becoming Sibilla, enigmatic and sibilant.
Under the Pisanelli Code her conduct was inexcusable: no one could leave a marriage, but especially not a wife and a mother. A lawyer would barely take her case out of the charity of his heart. The problem of Mrs. Pierangeli Faccio was hopeless, he said; she would never see her child again. Her old names would drag after her like chains. As she left the lawyer’s office, Sibilla made a sound in the back of her throat like vapors escaping from cracked earth. Then she went back to her writing.
Sibilla Aleramo, b. 1906
In later years, Sibilla Aleramo would say that she had been born in 1906 when the first copy of Una donna was printed in Torino. She held the book in her hands. It was not like a baby. It was not like a bottle of laudanum. It was a solid object, the volume of a life. It bore her new name on its spine. Whether it was a novel or an autobiography no one could say, but its pages were the sustenance of Sibilla as she came into the world, unblinking, thirty years old. It was the story she told herself of herself, like a sibyl who eats her own words.
Una donna, 1906
The manuscript of Una donna had initially been rejected by a set of editors in Milano because it was too boring. It was only the story of a woman, they said. It was a story that they already knew, there was only one story. It had no dramatic tension.
Una donna was the story of a woman whose mother goes out the window in a white dress like a scrap of paper, whose body is trampled down like a hyacinth, whose father delivers her to that man, whose son is born amid laundry and bruises. It was the story of a woman not named Nora who ceases finally to be a wife.
Una donna was published instead by a small typographical agency in Torino, and almost immediately throngs of readers bought up all of the copies. The editors in Milano were greatly surprised, but as reasonable businessmen they acquired the rights for reprinting the book. Perhaps there was a new market in boring stories about women, they remarked, or perhaps the women who read such stories found them of some unfathomable interest.
Congresso nazionale delle donne italiane, 1908
The Queen Elena herself, in a bold blue skirt and feathered hat, attended the first National Congress of Women in Italy in the spring of 1908. The price of train tickets had been reduced so that schoolteachers, postmistresses, and the matrons of foundling-houses from all over Italy might converge upom Rome, ascend the hallowed steps of the Capitoline Hill, and mingle with countesses and infamous femministe. More than a thousand women watched the Countess Gabriella Rasponi Spalletti preside over the inaugural ceremonies in the frescoed Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi; there was a tea in the gardens, and then, together, they took up the question of women.
In fact there were many questions of women; the demands of immigrant women were not the same as those raised by countesses. Suffragists wanted the vote; schoolteachers wanted literacy efforts; the matrons of foundling-houses wanted aid for unwed mothers. And yet two propositions were universally affirmed: an end to the odious autorizzazione maritale, and a rule that any man attending the Congresso should be denied a vote on its proceedings.
Sibilla Aleramo and Lina Poletti, 1908
By 1908 Sibilla Aleramo was a famous writer and an infamous femminista. Lina Poletti was a golden-eyed poet of twenty-three who stood in the marble doorway of the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, watching her. They were in Rome, in April, and there were women everywhere. Women were in hot rooms together discussing the rights they should have. Even the queen had come, and the princess Maria Laetitia with her, to hear about the education of girls. Anna Kuliscioff was there, exhorting everyone not to content themselves with the mere education of girls when they could seize the right to vote down the patria potestas and the autocratic men who upheld it.
A poet is someone who stands on the doorsill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. Lina took her breath in and then strode into the crowd, the shoals of jutting shoulders, the swelling of conversations and the sweep of skirts all around her; finally, arriving at Sibilla, she exhaled, triumphant. At the rush of breath on the back of her neck, Sibilla turned, and there was Lina with her eyes molten. A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.
Sibilla and Lina, 1908
This time it was Sibilla who stayed up all night, feverish and poetic. From the moment she had walked out of the Sala on Lina’s arm, the air around her had been stirred by a sound of leaves massing like tiny wings on every branch, turning to feel on all surfaces what had set them trembling. Lina was that sound in the air, Sibilla wrote, or perhaps Lina was the light soundlessly touching all of the leaves at once. Lina spoke in a very low voice and was difficult to explain in words. While the rest of Rome lay silent and hollow in its sleep, Sibilla was writing to Lina, You are a violent, luminous wave.
R, c. 1895
R was distinguished by her mania for writing letters, Cesare Lombroso reported, and by the way she strolled under the windows of women. As a child, R had fancied herself a brigand, a bandit, a captain of the trees at the edge of the park. Now thirty-one years of age, R was an artist. R cropped her hair decisively and painted in the mornings. It was noteworthy that R could not be bothered to chatter or ornament herself, and in general found men empty. Cesare Lombroso, who was a criminologist in the positivist vein, put this down to the fact that R’s father was a neuropath and her mother a verifiable lunatic. Her brother, too, was very queer, Cesare Lombroso noted, pleased to have discovered such a good case study.
R appeared on pages 423 and 424 of Cesare Lombroso’s La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, published in 1893 in Torino. Translated into English in 1895 as The Female Offender, the book did not reach to pages 423 or 424, because any mention of sexual practices or non-mammary organs had been cut out by the translator. It was thus a short book that offered little practical guidance on delinquent women, but those of us in England read it avidly anyway. Most of us were artists, and we were all guilty of writing too many letters.
Article 339
We still lived in a little hollow between laws. What we wrote to each other and where our beds were, in which rooms, was not prohibited exactly. In Italy the unification had swallowed up some regulations, and others had gone out with the Savoy kingdom. It was a time of uncertainty, despite the efforts to catalogue almost everything and set it into typologies and monographs.
In fact the fixity of some things was the cover for others. For example, there was an extreme reticence in the nineteenth century when describing women together. The English dictionaries used shy Greek terms, or omitted the possibility entirely. Only the criminologists wanted to discuss it, and only in order to chronicle the interiors of insane asylums, brothels, and unnatural mothers.
In 1914 an anonymous book called Tribadismo, saffismo, clitorismo: psicologia, fisiologia, pratica moderna appeared. It was promptly censored under Article 339 and its publisher Ettore Cecchi put in prison for three months, since the author, the anonymous tribade, could not be punished for her obscene existence. Of the many ways in which we could be together, tribadism and clitorism were merely two of the more externally visible. But still we felt a little thrill, which we left unspoken in our room together, for fear of the housekeeper. It was there in plain script on the title page: sapphism was a modern practice. Now that we had become a book of our own, we studied the diagrams intently. We needed a great deal of practice before we could become Sappho.