The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750 (review)

Joining the fairly recent project to historicize masculinity, The Yard of Wit takes as its subject the rich early modern discourse of male creativity, explaining how different configurations of sexual tropes—both literal and metaphoric references to the genitals in action—define the poetic character for male writers. This sexualized construction of authorship, Raymond Stephanson argues, both imagined creative ability as genital potency and ranked the writer's position in the public, competitive world of the literary marketplace according to his capacity for virility and manliness. Stephanson begins his study with the claim that in the period 1650–1750, the relationship of the symbolic phallus to the penis had not yet been severed, as the male body was the site where masculinity was being strenuously negotiated and tested (for example, in depictions of the potent middle-class paterfamilias compared to the vitiated aristocrat or effeminate sodomite). Rather than suggesting a static condition of empowerment, "The Enlightenment yard was often a problematic emblem of male identity because its function could be related to the psychological and physical complexities of individual men" (52), including their experience with the vicissitudes of age, health, and desire.

In the chapter on "Masculinity and Male Genitalia," Stephanson thoroughly examines this cultural tension by analysing an extensive archive of materials, including pornography, impotence trials, dildo narratives, and medical texts. While masculinity in the eighteenth century was increasingly tied to the male sexual body—and particularly to the "reproductively potent penis" (48) that validated dominant cultural norms—contemporary depictions of the ungovernable tarse, men's mental subordination to their yards, or even the replacement of men by a detachable phallus or phallus substitute convincingly show the vexed relation between the groin and the head, or the penis and its putative owner. As Stephanson maintains, the effect of this discourse was to divide male identity irremediably: "To be defined by a body part which is also symbolically detached from you and transformed into a public item of potential value over which you do not necessarily have ownership or control is the very process by which the literal part becomes synecdoche and a commodity in circulation" (91). This historical shift is expressed in images of power and loss, as men's possession of the literal yard paradoxically undermined their symbolic role as agents of authority.

Chapter 3, entitled "The Sexual Traffic in Male Creativity," is the core of the book, and Stephanson excels in explaining how the idea of erotic strength and depletion influences portrayals of male literary inspiration and performance. Stephanson argues that prevailing constructions of male literary labour were thoroughly informed by "the head-groin connection" (94), and that a rhetorical hierarchy of sexual metaphors indicated both the male writer's relation to his interior creative process and the status of his work in the literary marketplace. For example, production of the text was represented as divinely autogenetic, springing forth fully formed from the self-sufficient male mind; less divinely as a child emerging after long gestation and labour in the feminized body of the male writer; and finally as an anal birth, the most debased trope of literary creativity. Portrayals of the author's public persona were organized hierarchically as well, and ranged from the self-contained, aggressively phallic "cocksman" independent of the market and composing for his own libidinal pleasure, to the servile, mercenary hack, imaged as a prostitute selling her body promiscuously for pay.

Yet as Stephanson points out, if the directly proportionate head-groin configurations characterized the sexual discourse of authorship, an inverse model simultaneously emerged, proposing an exchange of imaginative force for male genital potency, or "poetry for pego" (154). In this exchange, male literary achievement served as compensation for sexual frustration or failure, with writing taking the place of the absent or injured penis. Both the direct and the inverse relations of body and mind, however, revealed the anxieties of men over their ambivalent social status as...