Sexual Personae

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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990, Yale University Press, 718 pp.) is Camille Paglia's first published book: a survey of sexual decadence in western literature and the visual arts.

Paglia begins by proposing a view of human nature in which gender roles are biologically determined. Western Culture is then viewed through this lens: art either embraces nature or struggles against it. Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, productive, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, consumptive, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not defeat, but rather embraced Paganism. Apollo is her model for the former and Dionysus for the latter, and she uses copious examples from literature and art to assert that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces.

Quotations help to convey the tone of the book, and make clear why it was so controversial.

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.' [1] '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.' [2]

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.'

Contents

[edit] Contents

[edit] Chapters

  • 1. Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
  • 2. The Birth of the Western Eye
  • 3. Apollo and Dionysus
  • 4. Pagan Beauty
  • 5. Renaissance Form: Italian Art
  • 6. Spenser and Apollo: The Faerie Queene
  • 7. Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra
  • 8. Return of the Great Mother: Rousseau vs. Sade
  • 9. Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts: Goethe to Gothic
  • 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: Shelley and Keats
  • 15. Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac
  • 16. Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans
  • 17. Romantic Shadows: Emily Brontë
  • 18. Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater
  • 19. Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art
  • 20. The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray'
  • 21. The English Epicene: Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
  • 22. American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
  • 23. American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James
  • 24. Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson [3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ 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. 
  2. ^ 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. 
  3. ^ 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. 

[edit] See also