Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene)

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson - Camille Paglia The subtitle? "Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson." (The cover strikingly puts that across visually with a bust half-Nefertiti/half-Dickenson.) In the Preface Paglia says her book "seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture." She also revealingly says: "My largest ambition is to fuse Frazer and Freud." I think she succeeds in that fusion, but I can't say that impressed me much, given I'm very skeptical about both thinkers. Freud was famous for his theory of the "family romance," which posited sexuality and aggression in the family formed the psyche. Less well-known to the general public is Frazer, a seminal 19th century cultural anthropologist. His The Golden Bough is on the connections between mythology, folklore, and religion and their origins in trying to control nature; he's a direct ancestor to Joseph Campbell. Paglia's arguments are a bit scatter-shot, and repetitive. By the time I was half-way through the book, I felt Paglia was pounding spikes into my brain with every mention of: androgene, Appolonian, chthonian, daemonic, hermaphrodite, and especially "beautiful boy." Nevertheless she was also audacious and dazzling in the connections she made and her prose often beautiful and quotable. She mixed classical allusions with pop references from Garbo to Elvis to Madonna. In upholding her ideas of "the terrible duality of gender" and the fecundity of homosexuality in culture, she is sure to outrage liberal and conservative alike. At times she seemed to apotheosize misogyny as the driving creative force in Western culture, as in her insistence of the importance of Sade as great literature and her statement that: "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper." Truly, I far prefer Virginia Woolf's take on that question in "A Room of Her Own." I admit that if Paglia were male, I doubt I'd be giving her so much slack for that. At one point she even called female genitalia, "grotesque." The New York Times Review called her "as intellectually stimulating as she is exasperating" and I think that sums her up well. But for a bibliophile and art lover (the book is richly illustrated) there's much to engage your thinking. The writers examined highlighted in the contents page include: Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Sade, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, Dickenson. Paglia left me with lots of food for thought and new ways to look at works I thought I knew from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus to Coleridge's Christobel. Worth reading, and even re-reading, which is why for all that I was skeptical of so many of her conclusions, I rated this as high as I did.