Overview
Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not destroy paganism, but rather drove it into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism, and contemporary popular culture, especially Hollywood.
Drawing on the Greco-Roman polarity between the Apollonian and Dionysian, Paglia associates Apollo with order, structure, and symmetry, while identifying Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. She then proceeds to analyze literature and art from the premise that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these binary forces. She writes that "art is form struggling to wake from the nightmare of nature"
According to Paglia, the major patterns of continuity in western culture find their origin in paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology and pop culture. Other sources of continuity include androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive "western eye," which seeks to refine and dominate nature's ceaseless hostility and thus has created our art and cinema. Paglia discusses sex and nature as brutal daemonic forces, and she criticizes feminists for sentimentality or wishful thinking about the cause of rape, violence, and poor relations between the sexes. She also stresses the biological basis of sexual difference and sees the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they fleetingly escape through rationalism and physical achievement.
In keeping with the theme of unity between classical art and pop culture, the "sexual personae" of her title include the female vampire (Medusa, Lauren Bacall); the pythoness (the Delphic Oracle, Gracie Allen); the beautiful boy (Hadrian's Antinous, Dorian Gray); the epicene man of beauty (Lord Byron, Elvis Presley); and the male heroine (Baudelaire, Woody Allen).
Among other works of art and literature to which Paglia applies her analysis of the Western canon are: the Venus of Willendorf, the Bust of Nefertiti, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello's David, Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, Michelangelo, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Lord Byron's Don Juan, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, The Pre-Raphaelites, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Emily Dickinson.
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." 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. | ” |
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." | ” |
Read more about this topic: Sexual Personae