Sappho in the Tropics: “Un-conjuring” Helen in (Post-)Victorian Culture examines the decline of the Helen-like paradigm of female body representation in Western arts and literature, occurring alongside the emergence and consolidation of Sappho’s cultural body in Neoclassical and Romantic Europe, as well as in some of Latin America’s newly independent nations. During the Romantic era, Helen still managed to remain relevant through Faustian reinterpretations of her myth—either as a wanton icon of corrupting beauty and desire, her cultural body summoned through a magician’s pact with the devil, or as an aspirational figure symbolizing the synthesis of classical heritage with Romantic and modern ideals, as seen in Goethe and George Sand. However, such reinterpretations of a “conjured” Helen, popular in England, Germany, and France, are virtually nonexistent within the Hispanic tradition. Instead, it was the myth and lyric body of Sappho, particularly as filtered through Ovid’s Heroides, that captured the imagination of a new generation of Hispanic women writers. Beginning with Sor Juana’s “Sapphic” poetry—characterized by the use of courtly love topoi and Petrarchan conventions in poems where a female speaker addresses a female addressee—and moving to the later appropriation of the themes of “Sappho’s Last Love” and “Last Song” by writers such as María Rosa Gálvez, Carolina Coronado, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the chapter traces the consolidation of Sappho as a hegemonic icon in the inscription of the lyric body during this period. This treatment of Sappho was largely marked by a Victorian sanitization of her homoerotic legacy, reframing her as a symbol of the female writer’s pursuit of legitimacy and recognition within literary and artistic fields still largely dominated by men. The chapter culminates in a detailed analysis of El último amor de Safo (1902), a collection of sonnets by Cuban author Mercedes Matamoros, in which this reimagined Sappho reaches her most complex and transgressive configuration within a new cultural context marked by fin-de-siècle fascination with femme fatality and the rising visibility of non-white bodies across emerging visual media, from photography to cinema. This latter development sets the stage for what I will continue to chart in the next chapter as “the end of hegemony” in body inscription.