Forging lesbians: Sappho and The Songs of Bilitis

Abstract

In Les Chansons de Bilitis (‘The Songs of Bilitis’, 1894), Pierre Louÿs purports to have translated into French for the first time the long-lost Greek poems of Bilitis, a contemporary of Sappho. Classicists have often heralded Bilitis as a watershed moment for reclaiming the lesbian Sappho from the clutches of homophobic, misogynist philologists. This paper complicates this narrative by reframing Bilitis as an object that participates in a broader cultural — and potentially queer — history of forgery. Rather than categorizing Bilitis as a forgery per se, I use forgery (and related textual practices) as a lens for illuminating how Louÿs ‘plays’ the forger and how this performance relates to readers’ divergent desires and reactions. This lens also brings into focus the queer dynamics and effects of this text in relation to Sappho’s corpus. At the same time, following Kadji Amin’s cue to ‘deidealize queerness’ (2017), I show how such queer dynamics are inextricable from colonialist and patriarchal relations of power, in particular an Orientalizing tradition of forgeries by white European and American men. This framework illuminates the affective and political ramifications of forging queer narratives and identifications through the medium of this curious artefact.