Sexual Personae
Encyclopedia
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
.
, 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
, Sandro Botticelli
, Leonardo Da Vinci
, 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:
From the last chapter, Amherst
's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson:
.
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
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."
wrote a critical review of Sexual Personae in which she accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalization
s.
John Updike
wrote about Sexual Personae:
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."
Nefertiti
Nefertiti was the Great Royal Wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten. Nefertiti and her husband were known for a religious revolution, in which they started to worship one god only...
to Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
is a groundbreaking and controversial survey of sexual decadence
Decadence
Decadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...
in Western literature
Western literature
Western literature refers to the literature written in the languages of Europe, including the ones belonging to the Indo-European language family as well as several geographically or historically related languages such as Basque, Hungarian, and so forth...
and the visual arts
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
written by scholar Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...
.
Overview
Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonicChthonic
Chthonic designates, or pertains to, deities or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek religion. The Greek word khthon is one of several for "earth"; it typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than the living surface of the land or the land as territory...
, earth-religion
Fertility goddess
A fertility deity is a god or goddess in mythology associated with fertility, pregnancy, and birth. In some cases these deities are directly associated with sex, and in others they simply embody related attributes...
on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
did not destroy paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
, but rather drove it into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, and contemporary popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
, especially Hollywood.
Drawing on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian
Apollonian and Dionysian
The Apollonian and Dionysian is a philosophical and literary concept, or dichotomy, based on certain features of ancient Greek mythology. Several Western philosophical and literary figures have invoked this dichotomy in critical and creative works....
, Paglia associates Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
with order, structure, and symmetry, while identifying Dionysus
Dionysus
Dionysus was the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology. His name in Linear B tablets shows he was worshipped from c. 1500—1100 BC by Mycenean Greeks: other traces of Dionysian-type cult have been found in ancient Minoan Crete...
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
Eroticism
Eroticism is generally understood to refer to a state of sexual arousal or anticipation of such – an insistent sexual impulse, desire, or pattern of thoughts, as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality and romantic love...
, astrology
Astrology
Astrology consists of a number of belief systems which hold that there is a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events in the human world...
and pop culture. Other sources of continuity include androgyny
Androgyny
Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...
, 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
Rape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
, 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
Rationalism
In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...
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
Medusa
In Greek mythology Medusa , " guardian, protectress") was a Gorgon, a chthonic monster, and a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. The author Hyginus, interposes a generation and gives Medusa another chthonic pair as parents. Gazing directly upon her would turn onlookers to stone...
, Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her distinctive husky voice and sultry looks.She first emerged as leading lady in the Humphrey Bogart film To Have And Have Not and continued on in the film noir genre, with appearances in The Big Sleep and Dark Passage ,...
); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle, Gracie Allen
Gracie Allen
Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen , known as Gracie Allen, was an American comedian who became internationally famous as the zany partner and comic foil of husband George Burns...
); the beautiful boy (Hadrian
Hadrian
Hadrian , was Roman Emperor from 117 to 138. He is best known for building Hadrian's Wall, which marked the northern limit of Roman Britain. In Rome, he re-built the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma. In addition to being emperor, Hadrian was a humanist and was philhellene in...
's Antinous
Antinous
Antinoüs or Antinoös was a beautiful Bithynian youth and the favourite of the Roman emperor Hadrian...
, Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray is the main character of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.It may also refer to:* Dorian Gray , an Italian film starring Helmut Berger...
); the epicene man of beauty (Lord Byron, Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
); and the male heroine (Baudelaire, Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
).
Other works to which Paglia applies her analysis of Western art and literature include: Pre-historic art
Pre-historic art
In the history of art, prehistoric art is all art produced in preliterate, prehistorical cultures beginning somewhere in very late geological history, and generally continuing until that culture either develops writing or other methods of record-keeping, or it makes significant contact with another...
, Egyptian art
Art of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egyptian art is the painting, sculpture, architecture and other arts produced by the civilization in the lower Nile Valley from 5000 BC to 300 AD. Ancient Egyptian art reached a high level in painting and sculpture, and was both highly stylized and symbolic...
, Ancient Greek sculpture
Ancient Greek sculpture
Ancient Greek sculpture is the sculpture of Ancient Greece. Modern scholarship identifies three major stages. They were used to depict the battles, mythology, and rulers of the land known as Ancient Greece.-Geometric:...
, Donatello
Donatello
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi , also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence...
, Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance...
, Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...
, Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
, Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
's The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene
The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. The first half was published in 1590, and a second installment was published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza and is one of the longest poems in the English...
, William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's As You Like It
As You Like It
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been suggested as a possibility...
and Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra
Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607. It was first printed in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony...
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
, Marquis de Sade
Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...
, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization...
, William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
, William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lord Byron's Don Juan
Don Juan
Don Juan is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630...
, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...
, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
, Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
, Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
, Joris-Karl Huysmans
Joris-Karl Huysmans
Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...
, Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...
's Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847. It was her only novel and written between December 1845 and July 1846. It remained unpublished until July 1847 and was not printed until December after the success of her sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre...
, Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, Herman Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, The Pre-Raphaelites
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...
, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest...
, Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
, Walter Pater
Walter Pater
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction.-Early life:...
, Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
's The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at St. James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae in order to escape burdensome social obligations...
and The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine...
, and Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
.
From the first chapter, Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art:
From the last chapter, Amherst
Amherst, Massachusetts
Amherst is a town in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States in the Connecticut River valley. As of the 2010 census, the population was 37,819, making it the largest community in Hampshire County . The town is home to Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts...
's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson:
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 critique of modern feminismFeminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
.
Noted second-wave feminist Sandra Gilbert
Sandra Gilbert
Sandra M. Gilbert , Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Davis, is an influential literary critic and poet who has published widely in the fields of feminist literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic criticism...
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
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
'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
Allan Bloom
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academic. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Yale University, École Normale Supérieure of Paris, and the University...
and other defenders of the 'Western canon,' but no conservative would be so explicitly approving of pornography
Pornography
Pornography or porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction.Pornography may use any of a variety of media, ranging from books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video,...
, homosexuality
Homosexuality
Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the same sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, homosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, or romantic attractions" primarily or exclusively to people of the same...
, and rock-and-roll."
Some academic reviews praised Sexual Personae. Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
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 IvinsMolly Ivins
Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins was an American newspaper columnist, populist, political commentator, humorist and author.-Early life and education:Ivins was born in Monterey, California, and raised in Houston, Texas...
wrote a critical review of Sexual Personae in which she accused Paglia of historical inaccuracy, demagoguery of second-wave feminists, egocentrism, and writing in sweeping generalization
Generalization
A generalization of a concept is an extension of the concept to less-specific criteria. It is a foundational element of logic and human reasoning. Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteristics shared by those elements. As such, it...
s.
John Updike
John Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
wrote about Sexual Personae:
Nevertheless, many other acclaimed novelists offered candid praise. Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
called Sexual Personae "A fine, disturbing book. Each sentence jabs like a needle." Likewise, Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
declared, "[Sexual Personae] sounds like Myra Breckinridge
Myra Breckinridge
Myra Breckinridge is a 1968 satirical novel by Gore Vidal written in the form of a diary. It was made into a movie in 1970. Described by the critic Dennis Altman as "part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and...
on a roll. I have no higher praise."
Bibliographical information
- Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
Press, 718 pp.)