Sexual Personae

Sexual Personae

Author	Camille Paglia
Publisher	Yale University Press
Publication date	1990
Pages	712 pp.
ISBN	ISBN 9780300043969

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1990, is a survey of sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts written by scholar Camille Paglia. Many of its controversial ideas about sex are based, without acknowledgement, on Donald Symons' book The Evolution of Human Sexuality.

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. She writes that "art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature"

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 seeks to refine and dominate nature's ceaseless hostility and thus 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 biological 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).

Among other works of art and literature to which Paglia applies her analysis of the Western canon are: the Venus of Willendorf, the Bust of Nefertiti, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello's David, Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Michelangelo, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lord Byron's Don Juan, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, The Pre-Raphaelites, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Emily Dickinson.

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." 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.

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."

Chapters

Summaries, when necessary, are in square brackets

1. Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
2. The Birth of the Western Eye [Devoted mainly to Paglia's interpretation of Ancient Egyptian art and aesthetics.]
3. Apollo and Dionysus
4. Pagan Beauty
5. Renaissance Form: Italian Art
6. Spense and Apollo: The Faerie Queen
7. Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Cleopatra
8. Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau
9. Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts: Goethe
10. Sex Bound and Unbound: Blake
11. Marriage to Mother Nature: Wordsworth
12. The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge
13. Speed and Space: Byron
14. Light and Heat: Shelly and Keats
15. Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac
16. Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans
17. Romantic Shadow: Emily Brontë
18. Romantic Shadows: Swineburne and Pater
19. Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art
20. The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
21. The English Epicine: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest
22. American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne and Melville
23. Amherst’s Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson

Reception

As noted below, Sexual Personae earned sometimes scathing reviews. Paglia responded by stating, "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." At least part of the negative academic reception to Sexual Personae can be attributed to Paglia's ignoring such prominent structuralist/post-structuralist thinkers as Althusser, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, knowledge of whom had become de rigueur in the academic humanities by the book's 1990 publication.

Academic reviews

The release of Sexual Personae drew strong criticism from most of her reviewers in the academic community, particularly in reaction to Paglia's implicit critique of modern feminism.

Noted second-wave feminist Sandra Gilbert described Sexual Personae as "markedly monomaniacal...bloated, repetitious, [and] awkwardly written," adding that the book is "so 'essentialist' as to outbiologize even Freud." Gilbert accuses Paglia herself of being guilty of "vulgar homophobia" and deserving of "moral contempt," and notes that Paglia "loathes liberalism, egalitarianism, feminism, and Mother Nature."

Professor Beth Loffreda censured Paglia, claiming "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." 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 Paglia's work as "distractingly antischolarly" and labels it "an unacademic wallow in Sadean sadomasochistic chthonian nature." Professor Alison Booth of the University of Virginia similarly characterized Sexual Personae as an "anti-feminist cosmogony." Robin Ann Sheets wrote that in Sexual Personae, "[Paglia] takes a profoundly anti-feminist stance." Teresa Ebert denounced Sexual Personae as a "deeply misogynist and rancorous book" that uses a biological basis to "justify male domination, violence, and superiority in Western culture."

Prominent literary scholar Marianne Noble claimed Paglia misread 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."

Sexual Personae's implicit political orientation likewise came in for criticism. Judy Simons criticized its "potentially sinister political agenda," and decried its "intellectual sleight of hand." In contrast, Valerie Steele contends, "Paglia has been attacked as an academic conservative, in league with Allan Bloom and other defenders of the 'Western canon,' but no conservative would be so explicitly approving of pornography, homosexuality, and rock-and-roll."

Some academic reviews praised Sexual Personae. Harold Bloom, a mentor to Paglia during her graduate studies at Yale University, wrote, "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." Pat Righelato concludes, "Camille Paglia's syncretic theoretical enterprise invoking Frazer, Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom, from anthropology to influence theory and psychobiography, is an immense tour de force." Robert Alter writes, "[O]n purely stylistic grounds, this is one of the few thoroughly enjoyable works of criticism written in the American language in the last couple of decades." He went on to characterize the book as "immensely ambitious, vastly erudite, feisty, often outrageous, and sometimes dazzlingly brilliant." Gerald Gillespie deemed the work "vigorous and capacious," and said of Paglia, "Her passion for her subject matter [...] radiates as a beacon of hope for the survival of the Western heritage beyond the current Babylonian captivity of the American academy."

Popular press

Molly Ivins wrote a critical review of Sexual Personae in which she accused Paglia of perpetrating historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalizations.

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.

Nevertheless, many other acclaimed novelists offered candid praise. Anthony Burgess called Sexual Personae "A fine, disturbing book. Each sentence jabs like a needle." Likewise, Gore Vidal declared, "[Sexual Personae] sounds like Myra Breckinridge on a roll. I have no higher praise."

Cartoonist John Callahan, an ardent admirer of Paglia who shared her distaste for what they both regarded as patronizing left-wing sanctimony, drew several cartoons satirizing the outraged reaction to Sexual Personae. Reprinted in an appendix to Paglia's Vamps and Tramps (1994), in one sketch Callahan depicted prominent feminists Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf hiding behind a small hill, seemingly terrified of Sexual Personae and poking the book with stick. The other cartoon showed Steinem as a stern Odysseus shouting "Don't listen to her!" as she pilots a boat full of weeping young women past the siren-like Paglia who is reading aloud from Sexual Personae.