Sexual Personae: Guerrilla Scholarship or Monkey Business?

Review Article Sexual Personae: Guerrilla Scholarship or Monkey Business? Stephen Whitworth O NE OF THE BLURBS on the paperback edition of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae suggests that the work is a piece of “guerrilla scholarship.” 1 Sexual Personae is important, we are told, because its critical position is outside the confused ideological struggle in which feminist, Marxist, and gay political theories constantly founder. Paglia achieves this “objective” position by attempting to fuse arche­ typical criticism and psychoanalysis. She stresses “the truth in sexual stereotypes” and “the biologic basis of sex differences” (xiii). Western culture is the illusion that the masculine must create to protect itself from the multiplicity, fluidity, and violence of female nature. The recurrent, archetypal figures of Western art that hauntingly remind man of his ulti­ mate subservience to the Great Mother or that perpetuate the masculine cultural dream of “liberty” are what Paglia calls “ sexual personae.” They reflect mankind’s continual struggle to establish rigid identity or to create a bulwark against the potential anarchic dissolution by the female. According to Paglia, anatomy is destiny: sexuality is always about violence and power. It is the site “ where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges” (3). Nature or femaleness is “daemonic” ; it is an inextricable combination of good and evil. For Paglia, a certain liberal naivete lies at the heart of much contemporary thought, for it is absurd to believe that if we “readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality,” and “purify sex roles . . . happiness and harmony will reign,” because “no change in society will change nature” (1). For Paglia, “there is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us” (19). The male is sexually com­ partmentalized, whereas a “woman’s eroticism is diffused throughout her body” (19). Female anatomy is characterized by its interiority, by its menacing hiddenness. For a man, the sexual encounter is a dangerous descent into the primordial muck of nature where all singularity is dis­ solved. During sex, a man is forced to witness the disappearance of his Vol. XXXII, No. 4 93 L ’E sprit C réateur penis in the bower-like space of the vagina. For a man, sex is the per­ petual threat of castration. To overcome this anxiety, yet make the neces­ sary procreative return to the primordial chthonian bower, man must initiate a spasmodic process of concentration and projection, which allows him to achieve the temporary illusion of stability and dominance. Based upon conceptualization and imaginative projection, culture is a specifically masculine creation. “Art is order” ; it must involve a mis­ representation of the flux that is nature (29). The Western idea of beauty can best be understood as the cultural (masculine) attempt to reduce the fluidity and violence of the raw material of existence to a freeze-frame. Female anatomy cannot serve as the basis for the phenomenon of cul­ ture. Woman is auto-erotic and self-sufficient; her psyche has no need to conceptualize or project; she has no will-to-power that produces the objectifications necessary to construct culture. Not very surprisingly, Paglia calls the male and female impulses the Apollonian and Dionysian drives. Associated with the protean poly­ morphism of female nature, the Dionysian “hermaphroditizes” sexual categories to emphasize frenzy, vegetative growth, and procreative force. It is radically antithetical to the cultural and is characterized by identifi­ cations. The Apollonian objectifies: it separates reality into parcels and freezes them as knowable identities under its gaze. The Apollonian eye also tends to hermaphroditize its objects, but without emphasizing procreative force or metamorphosis. The Apollonian emphasizes hierarchy, which is “ conceptualized eroticism” (144). Art removes the sexual object from the context of sex; it divorces the image from its content and fetishizes it. Paglia suggests that artistic periods may best be understood as attempts to shift the focus of art toward one polarity or the other. Dur­ ing Apollonian periods, the sexual persona of the “beautiful boy” is a recurrent concept. He is the embodiment of masculine culture’s triumph over the violent sexuality of femaleness. During Dionysian periods, the horrifying archetypal figure of the femme fatale appears. She represents the violent dissolution of self characteristic of nature; she is the symbol of man’s...