‘Rattling off bitchy asides like a machine gun discharging a belt of ammunition’. (Erica Freudenstein/Getty)
Returning to Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a fraught undertaking. As a teenager I feverishly savoured every one of Camille Paglia’s 700 incendiary pages, struck by the passion being lit from within. Yet revisiting the text decades later was both illuminating and infuriating. Re-issued this year and approaching its 36th birthday, Sexual Personae remains one of the strangest and most sweeping works of art criticism ever written, providing a dark alternative history of Western aesthetics: one driven by shadowy forces of violent fetishism and gender trouble. When it was first released in 1990, the book was an absolute scandal, not least because Paglia parlayed its unexpected popularity to establish herself as an iconoclastic “anti-feminist’s feminist”, far more shock jock than scholar.
In interviews and debates, Paglia would spout aphoristic daggers at her opponents: mostly liberal academics and contemporary feminists, with Gloria Steinem a particularly manic obsession. Her quick, declarative speech-style rattled off grand cultural verdicts, insightful analyses of art history, and bitchy asides like a machine gun discharging a belt of ammunition: “leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist”; “male urination is a form of commentary”; “incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name”.
In subsequent essays and books, Paglia defended child pornography and snuff films; treated campus sexual assault as hysteria; framed the AIDS epidemic as nature’s revenge against homosexual excess; and defended both the right to have an abortion and the right to characterise abortion as murder. Also, somehow, Madonna “cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.”
Paglia’s performance as popular provocateur was ridiculous, at times insightful but more often than not just exhausting. This potential to overburden an audience is clear from her debut book — both in its excruciating length and in its sweeping generalisations about history and the human condition. As critic Roger Kimball noted, Paglia has a tendency “to skid suddenly from the measured to the outrageous, from the reasonable and well supported to the utterly fantastic”. Yet for every misstep in Sexual Personae, every overconfident declaration, there follows a statement so electric one has to pause to breathe it all in:
“A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage.”
The ambition of Sexual Personae is nothing less than civilisational, charting an epic battle across centuries in Western culture between Apollonian form and Dionysian chaos. This dynamic was first popularised by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), describing the twin artistic impulses of Greek tragedy. Nietzsche cast the god Apollo as the deity of image, dream, distance and beautiful illusion; and the trickster Dionysus as the god of music, intoxication and ecstatic dissolution. For Nietzsche, Greek tragedy reached excellence by holding these forces together and giving form to suffering without denying the terrifying, irrational energies bubbling sinisterly underneath.
Paglia translates this Nietzschean lens beyond the narrow purview of Greek tragedy to encompass a variety of motifs throughout Western aesthetics. In her hands, Apollo is line, distance, sculpture, classification, hierarchy, but also the eye, the column and the sculpted hard body. Dionysus is music, frenzy, sex and intoxication but also the “chthonian” in nature: the dark, abject and underworldly — including mud, blood, rot and ooze.
Sexual Personae goes yet further: in marrying Nietzsche with Freud, linking embodied sex differences and familial psychodrama to the production of different visual art forms. Under Paglia’s vision, heterosexuality and Greek tragedy are one and the same. Womanhood has a rightful mythic place within the Dionysian, while masculinity exists as an anxious Apollonian defence against engulfing nature. Female embodiment is the unbearable truth of chthonian forces: the body as a site of blood, fertility, vulnerability and cyclical shifts in mood. Female sexuality is shaped less by a single linear drive than by blurring states of receptivity and sensitivity. In contrast, testosterone-fuelled male embodiment, in Paglia’s view, is “manic depressive” driven by obsessive projective urges of spontaneous desire, visual literalness, violence, competition and excitation.
In Paglian speculative pre-history, Dionysian matriarchy reigned supreme, an “earth cult” of animality, death, vegetation and maternal abundance. Pre-historic art centred on fertile womanhood, epitomised by the Venus of Willendorf, with her swollen belly, pendulous breasts and exaggerated hips. “She is the too-muchness of nature, which man longs to direct to his salvation” notes Paglia.
It is in Ancient Egypt that we see the masculine Apollo take control. Egyptian art is described by Paglia as an intricate balancing of “earth cult” with “sky cult”. The bust of Nefertiti is all geometry and symmetry, the cosmetic correction of swollen Dionysian fertility idols. For Paglia, “Apollonian Egypt made the first shift of value from femaleness to femininity”. This invention of refinement is epitomised by Egyptian feline cults, particularly of Bastet, as cats are those “uncanny creatures of the night” who mould elegance with vicious cruelty. This meshing of Apollonian and Dionysian forces also gives rise to the first “sexual personae” or recurrent erotic archetypes which plague Western culture: the femme fatale, the androgyne, the vampire, the beautiful boy and the Great Mother.
Ancient Greek civilisation would continue this blending of forces. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, war, lust, pride, grief and death are not sanitised nor moralised but beautified in myth and image. Greek theology is a sky cult but with roots in the earth. The Olympians are luminous fascists playing in the primordial goo in which man is drowning. It’s here that we get the first portrayals of war-like womanhood, which Paglia views as distinctive of Western culture. The Amazonian myth, Artemis the Huntress and glorious Athena are projections of a male mind seeking to reconcile nature’s engulfing feminine power with the hard outlines of heroic form. The kouros — free standing sculptures of male youths — depict smooth, hard, youthful, bodies detached from the muck of reproduction. They exist, for Paglia, as “a living idol of the Apollonian eye”.
Whilst Nietzsche documents a decline moving from the early tragic vision of Homer into the rise of Socratic rationalism, Paglia sees such times of “decadence” as cauldrons for great art. We see during this later period an incapacity for culture to integrate the Dionysian, which it then must aestheticise or condemn. Euripides’ Bacchae shows civilisation unable to contain the feminised frenzy and liquefying force of Dionysus. In the playwright’s Medea, the barbarian sorceress becomes another eruption of chthonian womanhood into civic order.
It’s as we move out of antiquity that the central thesis of Sexual Personae becomes rather unconvincing. If you share Paglia’s vision of history, there is no aspect of Western literature or visual art that doesn’t contain some veiled reference to sexual personae. In her pagan eyes, the entire edifice of Western art is merely a series of veiled projections against devouring mothers, oozing sex, lust for twinkish ephebes and hidden transsexual desire.
That’s not to say all her claims are implausible. The Renaissance, of course, sought to revive pagan iconography along with corresponding sexual personae in the process. That Donatello’s “David” is “perverse and pederastic” is no coincidence. Also inarguable is that Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is blatant Apollonian aestheticism, womanhood masked and constrained in beauty. Finally, there’s no denying that the 18th-century dandy is pure pagan throwback. Oscar Wilde, who gets two chapters all to himself, is decadent aestheticism free of womanly influence with his lust for rent boys and cult of beauty.
There is also merit in Paglia’s notion in Sexual Personae that there are two strands of Romanticism: one strand epitomised by Rousseau in his sentimentalisation of nature as innocence, and the other by the Marquis de Sade, who embraced nature as Dionysian cruelty and domination. For Paglia, it was the tendency of Romanticism to flip from the former to the latter which gave rise to the decadent genres of gothic horror, where nature’s ugly side is masked through sexual personae of vampires and ghouls.
All the same, Paglia has to make some ridiculous leaps in order to extend her psychosexual drama across centuries of art. It’s one thing to say that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is “the most extended meditation on sex in the history of poetry”. It’s quite another to claim that the English epic is mere set dressing for Spenser’s desire to explore a “encyclopedic catalog of perversions” that would make Bonnie Blue blush. Goethe’s genius apparently came from an inner “hermaphroditism”; Lord Byron was channelling the beautiful boy personae linking him spiritually with — I kid you not — Elvis Presley given their shared “brooding menace” and “urbane magnanimity”. By the time you get to “Emily Dickinson is the female Sade” it’s difficult to mount any resistance. Sure, why not?
It can be tempting to extend Paglia’s critique into the 21st century, as she did in the Nineties as part of the feminist “sex wars” over pornography and BDSM. Is looksmaxxing a masculine Apollonian resistance? Do K-pop idols signal the “beautiful boy” is in full bloom? Is the trans movement a sign of burgeoning decadence in culture? However, this would be continuing the mistake in assuming our pagan heritage is still within us. Under Paglia’s theory of the Western eye, our visual culture of buzzing screens and ceaseless images should be a high point of Apollonian artistic achievement. That it isn’t should signal that there is more to cultural flourishing than dazzling spectacle.
The strongest parts of Sexual Personae remain in its early chapters describing the pagan vision of early civilisation. A pagan view of modern culture is desperately needed as an alternative to the increasingly exhausting ideologies of liberal progressivism and Christian nationalism. Nietzsche’s vision of an intricate integration of both Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of life in pagan culture, a beautiful melding of the primal and the classical, remains a powerful ideal. However, Paglia’s simplification of these elements — her visions of a humanity separated into two distinct groups with one side responsible for the entirety of civilisation and the other signalling its imminent downfall — is absurd.
Given the questionable validity of Freudian psychoanalysis, one has to wonder why man, just as much a composite of ooze and filth as woman, is not also at risk of signalling dissolution. Paglia’s oft-quoted line that “[i]f civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” envisions a certain heroic, stable masculinity that has not existed since the fall of the Roman Empire. Your average modern man is, both physically and spiritually, more Venus of Willendorf than Achilles.
Perhaps, a more universal pagan lesson can be taken from Sexual Personae, free of gender war and silly provocation: that it is our duty to our Western heritage to wrestle beauty and splendour from the muck and that both sexes are required for the hard labour of civilisation.
