Women’s Paradise and Lesbian Limbo: Renée Vivien and Christine de Pizan as Readers of Dante

Despite living and writing roughly four centuries apart, Anglo-French poet Renée Vivien (1877–1909) and Italian-French poet and philosopher Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–1430?) share several similar biographical and literary characteristics. Most significantly, both women produced texts that have been described as feminist or proto-feminist utopian genealogies avant la lettre: Christine de Pizan, in her Livre de la cité des dames (1405); Renée Vivien, in her poetry and translations of Sappho and other ancient Greek women poets (1901–1909). In this paper, I argue that these utopian genealogies share an intertext: the Comedia of Dante Alighieri. If, as medievalists have suggested, Dante’s representation of the poet Virgil and the noblewoman Beatrice as his literary and spiritual guides inspired Christine de Pizan’s search for women such as the Cumaean Sibyl as mentors of her own, it is likely that Renée Vivien’s veneration of Sappho can also be traced to her reading of Dante, whose Comedia she attempted to translate in her adolescence. And if Christine de Pizan saw the city of ladies as a Paradise for women who wished to preserve their chastity, Renée Vivien imagined Mytilene, the city of Sappho on the island of Lesbos, as a Limbo for a new kind of “pagan”: lesbians like herself, whose love for women, she believed, placed them outside the bounds of Christian law.