Sexual Personae

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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a groundbreaking and controversial survey of sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts written by scholar Camille Paglia.

Contents

[edit] Overview

Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not destroy paganism, but rather drove it into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism, and contemporary popular culture, especially Hollywood.

Drawing on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian, Paglia associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, while identifying Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She then proceeds to analyze literature and art from the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these binary forces.

According to Paglia, the major patterns of continuity in western culture find their origin in paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology and pop culture. Other sources of continuity include androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive "western eye," which has created our art and cinema. Paglia discusses sex and nature as brutal daemonic forces, and she criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the cause of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes. She also stresses the biologic basis of sexual difference and sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement.

In keeping with the theme of unity between classical art and pop culture, the "sexual personae" of her title include the female vampire (Medusa, Lauren Bacall); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle, Gracie Allen); the beautiful boy (Hadrian's Antinous, Dorian Gray); the epicene man of beauty (Lord Byron, Elvis Presley); and the male heroine (Baudelaire, Woody Allen).

Other works to which Paglia applies her analysis of Western art and literature include: Pre-historic art, Egyptian art, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Byron's Don Juan, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, The Pre-Raphaelites, Ingres, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Emily Dickinson.[1]

From the first chapter, Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art:

“ Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements."[2] 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.[3] ”

From 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." [4] ”

[edit] Development

The two-volume manuscript of Sexual Personae was completed in February 1981 and rejected by seven publishers and five agents throughout the 1980s before its eventual acceptance by Ellen Graham for Yale University Press in 1985.[5] For the next few years,[6] Paglia continued to teach while perfecting volume one of the book for its eventual publication in February 1990, and releasing a few additional portions of it in other journals and books.

Her paper "Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene" was published in 1988 in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, edited by Bloom; '"Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art", was published in 1988 in Western Humanities Review; and "Sex," was published in the Spenser Encyclopedia by A. C. Hamilton in 1989.

After the release of Sexual Personae on 15 February 1990[7] the book received little publicity from its publisher as was typical of university presses at the time, but it sold well for months, prompting Yale University Press to send it for a second printing by November 1990. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award that year, and then reprinted in paperback by Vintage Press in 1991. It became a best-seller, as did her subsequent books Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992) and Vamps and Tramps (1994).

Throughout the 1990s, Paglia said that a second volume to Sexual Personae would be forthcoming, and was to include her thoughts on sports and popular culture.[8] Eventually, she decided not to proceed with the book as planned, as it would need to undergo too many revisions in order to reflect her changing attitude towards popular culture.

[edit] Reception

The release of Sexual Personae drew strong criticism from most of her reviewers in the academic community, particularly in reaction to Paglia's critique of modern feminism. In her review, Professor Beth Loffreda wrote, "She garners most of her publicity by loudly and nastily proclaiming everyone wrong on the sensitive issues of gender, sexuality and rape." She concluded of Paglia, "Hers is a seductiveness of simple answers, of clear narratives, of motivations and actions traced solely to a biological origin—a place stripped of the complex ambiguities, the complex interactions of self, skin, group, and institutions that make up daily life."[9]

Literary critic Mary Rose Kasraie echoed Lofreda's analysis, saying, "Paglia gives no indication she has read any studies related to women, or recent studies about imagination, nature and culture" and reiterates the "terrible gaps in her coverage." Kasraie criticizes her work as "distractingly antischolarly" and labels it "an unacademic wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature."[10]

Prominent literary scholar Marianne Noble eviscerated Paglia for misreading sadomasochism in Emily Dickinson's poetry. Speaking more broadly, Noble wrote, "Paglia's absolute belief in biological determinism leads her to pronouncements about female nature that are not only detestable but dangerous, because they routinely receive serious widespread attention in the contemporary culture at large." "Paglia," she concludes, "derives appalling social conclusions."[11]

When Paglia came onto the public scene in 1991, Molly Ivins wrote a scathing review of Sexual Personae in which she accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations.[12] Ivins concluded her polemic against Paglia with this much-reproduced passage:

“ There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "Poor dear, it's probably PMS." Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, "What an asshole." Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole. ”

John Updike wrote about Sexual Personae:

“ It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style — one short declarative sentence after another -- eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission.... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occurring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax.[13] ”

In the aftermath of Julie Burchill's scathing review of Sexual Personae, Burchill and Paglia became embroiled in a public feud that culminated in a letter to Paglia that read, "Fuck off you crazy old dyke." The entirety of their exchange was printed in the Modern Review.[14]

Other academic reviews singled out Sexual Personae for effusive praise. Renowned literary critic Harold Bloom enthused, "Sexual Personae [is] an enormous sensation of a book, in all the better senses of 'sensation.' There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design or insight."[15]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Paglia, Camille. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London & New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. vii-viii. ISBN 0-300-04396-1. 
  2. ^ Paglia, Camille. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London & New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 1. ISBN 0-300-04396-1. 
  3. ^ Paglia, Camille. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London & New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 11. ISBN 0-300-04396-1. 
  4. ^ Paglia, Camille. (1990). Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London & New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 673. ISBN 0-300-04396-1. 
  5. ^ "Sex, Art, And American Culture," p. xi.
  6. ^ She cites only three books that were published in the 1980s: "Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of His Life and Images" (New Haven, 1983); "The Diary of Virginia Woolf" (London, 1980); and "The Complete Notebooks of Henry James" (New York, 1987.)
  7. ^ In a letter to Clayton Eshleman, Paglia included a copy of feminist Lillian Faderman's 18 February 1990 review of "Sexual Personae" in the "Washington Post" and noted that it was "the first review," as the "the book was released 2/15/90."
  8. ^ Letter, Camille Paglia to Boyd Holmes, March 1993: "Re: the second volume of Sexual Personae. It was completed with the entire book in February 1981 and discusses modern popular culture. The contents, in order, are: movies, television, sports, rock music. I wanted to write a book that began with cave art and ended with the Rolling Stones. The title isn't totally fixed for the second volume yet; these things change up to the last minute. The subtitle to Volume One, for example, was a matter of mass hysteria, between Yale Press and me and my advisors. More items went in and out of that subtitle! Then literally at production deadline, the marketing department tried to get the main title changed (as an obscure Latinism that would limit sales), leading to a major crisis. Thank heavens the executive editor of Yale Press took my side, and the title Sexual Personae (which has now entered the language even of ad copy and captions in fashion magazines) was spared. It will probably be several more years until Volume Two appears; Yale Press will release it in hardback. Thousands more note cards have accumulated in the intervening 14 years, and I am in the process of working them in. I try to avoid subjects too recent, as those tend to date quickly. As with Volume One, I want the book to be a more permanent statement."
  9. ^ Lofreda, Beth. "Of Stallions and Sycophants: Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae." Social Text, No. 30. (1992), pp. 121-124
  10. ^ Kasraie, Mary Rose. Review: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. South Atlantic Review, Vol. 58, No. 4. (Nov., 1993), pp. 132-135.
  11. ^ Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. pp. 225n.
  12. ^ "Mother Jones," September/October 1991. pp 8-10, http://www.its.caltech.edu/~erich/misc/ivins_on_paglia
  13. ^ Updike, John (2000) More Matter: Essays and Criticisms. New York: Ballantine Books.
  14. ^ "The Battle of the Bitches."
  15. ^ Yale University Press

[edit] Bibliographical information

  • Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990, Yale University Press, 718 pp.)
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