Sex & The Book / Expectation and eroticism in lesbian love told by Renée Vivien

Nicknamed "Sappho 1900", Renée Vivien lived between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and embodied in her poetry and in her own person all the morbid and decadent charm of Belle Époque. Born in London in 1877 to an American mother and Scottish father, Pauline Mary Tarn (this is her real name) grew up between the English capital, Long Island and Paris, where she settled permanently in 1899, moving into a luxurious apartment with a Japanese garden. She was a great traveler and especially loved Japan, Constantinople and Mytilene, the city on the island of Lesbos where Sappho was born and where she had a house built herself. Renée never hid her homosexuality. Although his best known relationship was the tormented and stormy one with the rich heiress and American writer, Natalie Clifford Barney, in his verses he will never stop returning Violet Shillito, his young and unfortunate schoolmate, who died in 1901, to whom he linked a purely Platonic love, but which ended up obsessing Renee as much as the smell and color of violets, hence the nickname "Muse of violets".

In the branches the trees have kept the sun.
Veiled like a woman who evokes elsewhere,
the twilight evaporates crying ... And my fingers
quivering follow the line of your hips.
Ingenious fingers linger on shivers
of your skin under the guise of sweet petal ...
The complex and strange art of touching is similar
to the dream of perfumes, to the miracle of sounds.
I slowly become the outline of your hips,
of the shoulders, of the neck, of the unsatisfied breasts,
my delicate desire refuses to kisses:
emerges and dies of ecstasy in the white voluptuousness.

Renée was a tormented spirit. She ended up wasting all her wealth and then getting into debt and attempting to commit suicide in London, ingesting laudanum and being found unconscious, with a bouquet of violets on her heart. She suffered from anorexia nervosa, spent long periods without eating and in addition drank, weakening her body to the point that - ill with pleurisy - she was unable to heal and died very young, at only thirty-two years old. Despite this, she was a prolific author: her first collection of poems came out in 1901 and eleven others followed, as well as a diary, seven volumes of prose, short stories and novels published under different pseudonyms and two works of translation of the poems. by Sappho, enriched by his own verses.

See also

Sapiosexual: when it is intelligence that ignites eroticism

Lesbian sex: this is how it works!

Making love in the water

The poem I have chosen for you is entitled Le Toucher (The Touch) and is part of the collection Evocations, published in 1903. In her verses, full of a delicate and at the same time intense eroticism, the poet recalls the sweet sensation of touching the body of the woman she loves. Imagining and describing that touch - the movement of the fingers, the quivering of the hips and breasts of the other under his hands - is like reliving it, in all its complexity. It is the desire to push her, the voracity with which she would like to possess her, but at the same time it forces and forces her to wait because it is precisely in waiting that the excitement grows, in prolonging that sweet torture before giving in to kisses and indulging in voluptuousness. . The art of touching, he explains, resembles the dream of perfumes, a veiled woman who hides her splendor, because beauty can only be touched, caressed at dusk and then vanish.

That of Renée Vivien is a poem that declines all the imaginary of French symbolism to the feminine. Reading his words one is as if dragged into a vortex of sensations that involve all the senses, just like the amatory art they describe. His verses invite you to enjoy the touch, preliminary par excellence, in all its intensity, with great slowness, experiencing the powerful ecstasy of the discovery of love in the prolonged pleasure of waiting. If you close your eyes and can hear it, you are already on the right track.

by Giuliana Altamura

Here you can read the previous appointment with the Sex & The Book / Lesbian love and sexual ambiguity in Jeanette Winterson's poetic eros