SOURCE: DeJean, Joan. “Fictions of Sappho.” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 4 (summer 1987): 787-805.

In the following essay, DeJean probes Ovid's fictionalization of Sappho in his Heroides as an abandoned woman who kills herself because of unrequited love.

… [In] the Heroides, … Ovid recounts tale after tale of women abandoned by unfaithful lovers. Ovid's fiction is a prime example of the complicity between female humiliation and canonical positioning … for the Heroides concludes with a vignette that makes plain the bond between physical abandonment and critical appropriation. Ovid transfigures the original woman writer, Sappho, into the archetypal abandoned woman. He portrays Sappho's physical humiliation as both a necessary prelude to her acceptance into the canon of great writers and as the action that empowers him to speak in her name. I would like to suggest the possibility that Ovid fabricated a legend of Sappho in response to what were for him the threatening...