Sappho and Pocahontas in Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005)

Abstract

The New World (2005), Terrence Malick’s fourth film, retells the story of the seventeenth century Powhatan woman, Pocahontas, and her involvement with the Jamestown colony.¹ It features prominently the ahistorical love affair with John Smith that has become a staple of the Pocahontas myth tradition.² Although viewers have found allusions to the epic poetry of Homer and Vergil in The New World, the presence and purpose of Sappho’s erotic verse remains unexplored.³ As we shall see, The New World is very much rooted in a male-centered, classical epic tradition, yet in two scenes central to her relationship with Smith, Pocahontas delivers lines from Sappho in her own voice and as her own sentiment.⁴ The normative reflex of epic is to relegate a woman in Pocahontas’s position either to the role of victim, however sympathetic, or possession. Malick uses Sappho to develop a model of female amatory consciousness that is necessary for Pocahontas’s evolution into the protagonist.