Sexual Personae
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"I fill in the space between artist and art work with metaphors drawn from the Cambridge School of Anthropology. My largest ambition is to fuse Frazer with Freud."--Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "This book takes the point of view of Sade, the most unread major writer in western literature. Sade’s work is a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau, written in the decade after the first failed Rousseauist experiment, the French Revolution, which ended not in political paradise but in the hell of the Reign of Terror. Sade follows Hobbes rather than Locke. Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power. For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would be to give free rein to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. Sex is power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead."--"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."--"Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau v. Sade" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."--"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender."--"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "Femaleness, I argued, is primitive and archaic, while femininity is social and aesthetic."--"Speed and space: Byron" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia "Pregnancy demonstrates the deterministic character of woman's sexuality. Every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a chthonian force beyond her control. In the welcome pregnancy, this is a happy sacrifice. But in the unwanted one, initiated by rape or misadventure, it is a horror. Such unfortunate women look directly into nature’s heart of darkness. For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live. The so-called miracle of birth is nature getting her own way."--"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" in Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia |
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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a book by Camille Paglia. It is a survey of western literature and the visual arts with an emphasis on sexual decadence.
The book mentions the term gender 143 times, the word daemonic 191 times and sex 2027 times.
The book is sometimes plagued by sloppy research; when Paglia says for example, in the chapter "Return of the Great Mother", that "like Nietzsche, whom he clearly influenced, Sade attacks Christianity’s bias for the weak and outcast" she should have known that there are no textual references to the fact that Nietzsche actually had read Marquis de Sade (see "Nietzsche's Knowledge of the Marquis de Sade").
Overview
Sexual Personae is the dissertation Camille Paglia presented to the Graduate School of Yale University in candidacy for her Ph.D in December 1974, and which formed the basis for her 1990 book by the same name. The 451 page study, organized into four chapters, examined the appearance of sexually ambiguous figures in art and literature from classical antiquity to the modern period. She wrote that her thesis was based on the assumption that "the inner dynamic of all artistic creation is a psychic union between masculine and feminine powers." She described her method as interdisciplinary, as it combined "literary criticism, art history, and psychology in what I believe is a new synthesis."
Background
By Paglia's own account, the ancestor of Sexual Personae was a book on aviator Amelia Earhart that she began to write in high school. Paglia's discovery of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in 1963 inspired her to write a book larger in scope. Sexual Personae began to take shape in essays Paglia wrote in college between 1964 and 1968. The title was inspired by Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, which Paglia saw on its American release in 1968. The work was finished in 1981, but was rejected by seven major New York publishers before being released by Yale University Press in 1990. Paglia credits editor Ellen Graham with securing Yale's decision to publish the book. The original preface to Sexual Personae was removed at the suggestion of Yale editors because of the book's extreme length, but was later published in Paglia's essay collection Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992).
The major influences on Sexual Personae according to Paglia were, in addition to The Second Sex (1949), Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love (1920), Sándor Ferenczi's Thalassa (1924), the collected works of G. Wilson Knight and Harold Bloom, Erich Neumann's The Great Mother (1955) and The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949), Kenneth Clark's The Nude (1956), Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1958), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966), and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).
Paglia said of her objectives with the book, "It was intended to please no one and to offend everyone. The entire process of the book was to discover the repressed elements of contemporary culture, whatever they are, and palpate them. One of the main premises was to demonstrate that pornography is everywhere in major art. Art history as written is completely sex free, repressive and puritanical. I want precision and historical knowledge, but at the same time, I try to zap it with pornographic intensity."
Contents
Paglia begins by proposing a view of human nature in which gender roles are biologically determined. Western Culture is then viewed through this lens: all art either embraces the natural or struggles against it.
Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, productive, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, consumptive, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show how Christianity did not defeat, but rather embraced Paganism. Apollo is her model for the former and Dionysus for the latter, and she uses copious examples from literature and art to assert that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces.
The bulk of the work is a survey of western literature from this point of view, with emphases on: Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Brontë, Swinburne, Walter Pater, Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, and Dickinson.
Some quotations may help to convey the tone of the book, and make clear why the work was so controversial.
In the first chapter "Sex and violence, or nature and art":
- The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden and the serpent.
- Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.
In the last chapter "Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson":
- Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.
Table of contents
Sex and violence, or nature and art
"Let us abandon the pretense of sexual sameness and admit the terrible duality of gender."
The birth of the Western eye
Apollo and Dionysus
Pagan beauty
Renaissance form: Italian art
Spenser and Apollo: The Faerie Queene
Shakespeare and Dionysus: As you like it and Antony and Cleopatra
Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau v. Sade
Amazons, mothers, ghosts: Goethe to gothic
Sex bound and unbound: Blake
- The Mental Traveller
- “Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.”
Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth
The daemon as lesbian vampire: Coleridge
- "Balzac’s Byronic (and therefore Coleridgean) The Girl with the Golden Eyes starts the French version of this theme, which produces Baudelaire’s "Delphine and Hippolyte", from which in turn come Swinburne’s Anactoria and Verlaine’s and Pierre Louÿs’ Sapphic idylls."
- Lesbian vampire
Speed and space: Byron
Light and heat: Shelley and Keats
Cults of sex and beauty: Balzac
Cults of sex and beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans
- Perseus Cutting Off the Head of Medusa, from the metope of Temple C at Selinus, Sicily, ca. 550–540 B.C
- "Huysmans calls the genital flower a “hideous flesh-wound.”"
- Frederick Charles Green
- Dictionnaire érotique moderne
Romantic shadows: Emily Brontë
Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater
Apollo daemonized: decadent art
The beautiful boy as destroyer: Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray
The English epicene: Wilde's The importance of being earnest
American decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
American decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James
Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson.
Translations
Dutch
Camille Paglia, Het seksuele masker. Kunst, seksualiteit en decadentie in de westerse beschaving. [Vertaald door Gerda Baardman, Eugène Dabekaussen, Jan Fastenau, Jacob Groot, Tilly Maters en Tjadine Stheeman.] Prometheus, Amsterdam, 1992.
See also