Prelude
Early in 1900, at the dawn of a new century, the name SAPHO began cropping up on theater posters all over New York City. They advertised a new play by Clyde Fitch, adapted from a popular French novel by Alphonse Daudet and starring Olga Nethersole. The SAPHO posters became instant collectors’ items when Nethersole and others were arrested in February for “violating public decency” during a performance at Wallack’s theater.[1] Obscenity charges, however, did not hold and the defendants were acquitted in March. New posters subsequently appeared, paving the way for a national tour. “New York’s Raging Sensation” played to sellout crowds that summer, from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to Chicago.
So how and why did “Sapho 1900” come to define a lesbian cultural phenomenon in Paris, not New York?
This exhibit tells that story, revealed here for the first time based on newly discovered materials in the Barney archives at the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, unpublished letters between Natalie Barney and Eva Palmer, and archival materials held at Bryn Mawr College and Princeton University. The story’s principal setting is Bryn Mawr, an affluent commuter suburb west of Philadelphia. In 1900, Bryn Mawr was transforming from a bucolic Victorian summer resort into a year-round community, thanks in part to the new and prestigious women’s college that took the name of the village. Our story’s main characters are three lesbian icons: American writer Natalie Barney, American performer Eva Palmer, and English poet Pauline Tarn (best known by her pen name Renée Vivien), dubbed Sapho 1900 forever after.
Pauline, Eva, Natalie: three rock stars of page and stage who formed the core group that helped give birth to lesbian modernism. Fans have long thought that we knew everything that inspired their work. But do we?
Since Pauline’s tragic death at thirty-two in 1909, her legacy and literary reputation have been cultivated and managed by literary insiders who insisted that her work belonged to the tail end of the Symbolist movement and bore little or no relation to her real life.[2] Critics dubbed her a genius of poetic imagination and succeeded in making a permanent place for Renée Vivien in the French canon. They argued that Vivien’s poetic language—marked by idealized, symbolic images of flowers, gemstones, and women’s faces—was purely imaginative, not drawn from life models or real events. In claiming Vivien as a successor to Charles Baudelaire, who still has rock star status among poets today, these scholars marginalize her as derivative. The same logic they used to enshrine her ended up pegging her, instead, as a follower, not a leader. Decade after decade, Vivien has been minimized as a “daughter” of Baudelaire—a filiation the poet herself never acknowledged.[3]
What has been lost is how ambitious a poet Pauline really was. Contrary to the claims of late twentieth century academics, Pauline’s alter ego Renée Vivien was a writer purpose-built not just for the mainstream (male) literary canon but for the female one. This exhibit tracks her ambition at a pivotal point when she decided to join forces with Natalie Barney to form a school of their own that would show off her lesbian work to better effect.
Barney, too, has been dismissed as a minor poet. Many readers assume she was not a trailblazer because her first book of poems, published in 1900, painted lesbian portraits using traditional forms such as the sonnet. But evidence shows that Barney was consciously modern in her subject matter and just as artistically ambitious as Vivien. So ambitious, in fact, that she intentionally designed her poetic début to showcase her mastery of old styles in order to position herself as a lesbian Petrarch and Shakespeare in a direct line of succession stretching over 2,000 years back to Sappho. By 1900, Barney’s ambition was to be the first modern woman to stand in for Sappho. She aimed to fill in the historical gap...with herself.
Eva Palmer grew up in a distinguished, bohemian New York family where expectations ran high. Her father was one of the country’s leading liberal intellectuals. Her brother was a concert pianist playing on international stages.[4]Divas passed through her living room and sang at her piano. Irish writer Oscar Wilde was a family friend whom Eva vividly recalled from her childhood in letters to Natalie. Eva had been drawn to the performing arts from a young age, and like Vivien and Barney, she had regularly sought out classical sources. In 1897 at age twenty-three, Eva put her artistic development on hold to study ancient Greek at Bryn Mawr College. It was a decision, triggering a chain reaction of dramatic events, that would directly lead to the formation of one of the first lesbian and bi “girl groups” of all time. We call them The Three Sapphos.
With provocative tableaux vivants and lyric poetry accompanied by music, their concerts were more like queer performance art pieces, given on borrowed stages to rapt audiences at a time when a Greek revival craze was sweeping the country. In the brief time they were all together, each of The Three Sapphos served as a creator in her own right—and a muse to both of the others.
While tracing the origins of this sapphic troupe, we learned that Eva Palmer was among the early victims of an ongoing power struggle over the future of the college and of women’s education in the United States. It was a power struggle that pitted Bryn Mawr’s influential president, M. Carey Thomas, against the trustees, faculty, and student government. Much has been written about the key players, the tangled web of professional and personal relationships that animated the conflict, and the bigamy scandal—called the “Hodder scandal”—that eventually decided its outcome. But Alfred Hodder (straight man that he was) was a latecomer to the scandal that eventually took his name. This is the untold story of the Eva Palmer scandal, which brought the long-simmering Bryn Mawr conflicts out into the open.
Bryn Mawr College records suggest that we should be reading between the lines of The Three Sapphos and listening to Eva Palmer’s silences. Alone of the three, Eva did not publish during her lifetime, and events at Bryn Mawr shed light on one possible reason for that.[5] Archival research and analysis also reveals that Tarn was a more singular and relevant poet, and Barney a more complex and ambitious one, than many readers have given them credit for being.
This story also leads us to reconsider, as we approach Barney’s sesquicentennial, what influenced Barney as an artist. Blind ambition was there, but it was not the only driver. We have found, for example, that at least one of Barney’s carefully crafted, “old-fashioned” sonnets was not a love poem at all, but rather an outburst of rage and jealousy. This exhibit tells that story in detail.
The birth of lesbian modernism was traumatic. For The Three Sapphos, it meant the eventual breakup of the band. Natalie and Pauline each settled separately in Paris, while Eva left for Athens and Leukas. In retrospect, it becomes clearer why so many of the wealthiest and most artistically gifted lesbians of their era—those who could choose to live wherever they wished—chose to build their community and their culture in Europe, not in the United States.
Notes
[1] Kiki Loveday, “Sapho Kiss: Queer Reproduction in Early Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 21, no. 1 (2023): 32-73.
[2] See, for example, Lillian Faderman’s claim that “the preponderance of [Renée Vivien’s] poetry, particularly as it deals with the subject of lesbianism,” was based not on “real-life epiphanies” but on “literary influences,” in Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: Viking, 1994), 368. Natalie’s first biographer, George Wickes, a Paris Review insider, states, incorrectly: “The love poems that Natalie wrote at this time were clumsy bits of free verse.” See The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (New York: Putnam, 1976), 43. Karla Jay makes a similar argument with respect to Barney as well as Vivien: “[T]hey stand outside the female literary tradition...and often must be viewed in relation to male French Symbolist predecessors rather than to the canon of women writers, for the similarities to the latter are, alas, accidental.... [T]hey also believed that symbol and myth were fully detachable from the social context which had given rise to them.... [T]hey tended unwittingly to adopt the assumptions which underlay these images and to apply them uncritically to the new forms of relations which they were seeking to invent... [N]o claim may be made that either Natalie Barney or Renée Vivien was a writer of the first rank.” The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), xv.
[3] Camille Islert, Renée Vivien: Une poétique sous influence? (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2024), esp. 62–71, 139–40, 163–67, 572–77.
[4] Composer and pianist Courtlandt Palmer Jr. (1871–1951) had been a child prodigy. He made his piano début at Madison Square Garden on March 3, 1894. He was known in New York and abroad for private performances given by music patrons such as George Vanderbilt. Leontis, Eva Palmer Sikelianos, xxxiv; New York Times Magazine, 17 July 1904, 6.
[5] Suzanne Stroh, Artemis Leontis and Giulia Napoleone are currently editing and translating Eva’s letters to Natalie, including some of her poems.