Sappho and the Virgin Mary by Ruth Vanita

Sappho and the Virgin Mary Reviews

• 
  Persephone Abbott

  After the first few chapters of this academic volume which I came to think as the glorification of mammalian bound culture, the relentlessly argued theme of non-phallic symbolism continued with the start of chapter three: “In this chapter I will argue that Walter Pater drew on medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic models of love between women to develop his new hedonism. His aesthetic of intensity was built around images of clitoral ecstasy.” A page later I met with: “Miracles of healing lepers and the blind are attributed to her, and her emblem is an ox (from her association with Oxford where she died).” I was rather relieved about the environmental explanation of the ox, after fields of female anatomy.
  
  I nearly gave up on this exercise of what was becoming a dive into what felt like a world of militant lesbian research of symbolism in art, at times paintings (images of the paintings discussed are to be found at the back of the book and by the time I found them I honestly had to have a hard look for the themes Ms. Vanita was proposing but then I readily accept that one’s romantic and/or sexual orientation will have an intense impact of the reading of a painting), when the tone of the book switched and literature began to be discussed. Herein I found quite some interesting arguments, and thematic breakdowns of works by Austen, Wilde, Woolf, Shelley, Keats, and others.
  
  This book was quite engaging for paragraphs on end especially when it came to the reviews of books I have previously and perhaps with much naivety read, and yet at intervals I had to put it down and take a deep breath to continue what seemed to me to be serious rationalization using over-sexualization of just about everything temporal, philosophical, mobile or immobile. Perhaps this book is to be recommended for those long winter evenings alone with a glass of port, sipping up some slow moving blood red purification liquid, the juice from old squashed sacrificial grapes looking clitoral, red stained ten toes of S****** dipping into the bathing pond while lurking controlling heterosexuals spy guarding the world of aberration from Adam and Eve etc. etc and Mary help you if you find Sappho sitting on your lap.