Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 14 of Sexual Personae

[Note 1] 

As I described in my notes for Chapter 8, society was largely Apollonian through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. Rousseau changed all that by unleashing a Dionysian backlash: He rebelled against hierarchies and the problems of civilization and kicked off the era of Romanticism, which remains more or less in effect up to the present. (See Note 1 of my notes on Chapter 8 for more.)

​

One of the legacies of Rousseau is the stereotype of Romantic males who tend toward effeminacy and passivity; as such, they seek female partners who demonstrate male assertiveness rather than traditional femininity--usually Androgynes, Apollonians, or Femmes fatales (see my notes on Chapter 8 for more). Shelley's poems Adonais, Prometheus Unbound, and "Ozymandias" share these features: The poet is passive and is punished for asserting himself; society is portrayed as virile and cruel and too Apollonian for the sensitive poet; but Shelley suggests that the poet will win out in the end because the passivity and patience of Dionysian art will outlast the temporary structures built by Apollonian society. (p. 366)

 

[Note 2]

Again, as a passive and rather effeminate Romantic male, Shelley doesn't seek the same femininity and passivity in his female partners or literary protagonists. Instead Shelley embraces the new freedoms of Romanticism and, with his poem The Witch of Atlas, he explores the theme of the female Androgyne in his poetry. So once again, Shelley plays out the stereotype of the passive Romantic male fascinated by females who demonstrate male assertiveness rather than traditional femininity--usually Androgynes, Apollonians, or Femmes fatales.

 

The Androgyne witch is "sexless" and self-complete; Paglia says, "Self-populated, she needs no mate or friend" (p. 367). However, the witch does invent "a mechanical companion to power her spirit-boat. Out of 'fire and snow' she makes Hermaphroditus, 'a sexless thing' with the 'grace' of both genders. It has 'gentleness and strength'..." (p. 367) Hermaphroditus is an Androgyne as well, and is basically a "double" of the witch. Paglia says, "The Hermaphrodite is [Shelley's] version of an experimental automaton, an Apollonian angel of emotional detachment and aesthetic perfection." (p. 369)

 

[Note 3]

Shelley's poem Epipsychidion continues the theme of the passive, effeminate poet attracted to the androgynous, assertive female. Epipsychidion is a meditation on an idealized love between Shelley himself as the poet and a spiritual Androgyne (modeled on his own attraction to a real-life acquaintance, Emilia Viviani). Like other poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley tries to tame the daemonism of Romantic emotion and make it palatable for moralists; as a result Paglia argues that the relationship between Shelley and Emilia as described in the poem is chaste. (The opposite course of action would be that of Sade: Revel in the daemonism and take it to extremes of lust and sadomasochism.) So in reference to Shelley's Epipsychidion, Paglia says, "It attempts to convert Romanticism, a daemonic and chthonian mode, into the Apollonian." (p. 369)

 

Paglia says that Shelley injects Apollonianism into the poem via the use of the device of "seraphicization": Shelley takes a Great Mother figure and elevates her out of the Dionysian ranks and up to Androgyne status by injecting Apollonian spirituality into her profile. She says, "One of Shelley's favorite strategies is to use Apollonian light to temper or sweeten chthonian mysteries." (p. 367) "Like Wordsworth, Shelley seraphicizes the beloved woman, giving her a numinous glamour. Flooded by Apollonian light, Emilia is desexualized and dematerialized. She becomes a shimmering presence of unfixed gender." (p. 370) Elsewhere Paglia says that Shelley's poetry in general is characterized by upward movement. She says, "Shelley is spiritual verticality [...] Shelley's objects, as we shall see, are weightless and porous, penetrated by vision." (p. 355)

 

If the relationship described in the poem is to be chaste and spiritual, then it makes sense to portray the poet and his beloved as brother and sister--as twins, in fact--to explain their preternatural closeness and mutual attraction. And as twins, they make up a complementary pair and create a certain "synergy" of attraction between them:

• As the Dionysian male in the relationship, Shelley portrays the male poet as effeminate and passive. Paglia says, "Shelley enjoyed subordination to female power. [....] Shelley wears his persona of elected passivity throughout Epipsychidion." (p. 372) 

• And his female partner is a projection of his own repressed masculine side. Paglia says, "Shelley's feminine psyche pursues what it does not have--masculinity, which it embodies in a female epipsyche. [...] Emilia is penetrator, Shelley penetrated. Sometimes Emilia is a gentle sister or 'poor captive bird,' [...] At other times she is imperiously Amazonian [...] Medusa is Apollonian Emilia's chthonian twin. [...] In Epipsychidion, therefore, a passive poet glorifies a woman who is alternately an incestuous twin, a genderless spirit, and an Amazon."

 

However, in describing the "idealized love" between the twins, Shelley gets pulled into sexual daemonism by the nature of lyric poetry and Romanticism. Paglia says, "Lyric, a Greek genre, is based on simple parallelism between nature and emotion." (p. 365) Emotions guide actions. But emotions tend to expand endlessly and turn overwrought and hysterical when not bounded by social structure, convention, and hierarchy. Rousseau's Romanticism doesn't recognize social structure or boundaries, leaving lyricism adrift. Paglia says that "Lyric cannot stand alone as a genre," and she talks about "the torment implicit in lyric emotion, when unframed by stable social structure." (p. 365)

 

Thus, in the course of depicting his "idealized love" between twins Shelley is drawn into increasingly florid expressions of mutual attraction that tend to sound increasingly incestuous. And Paglia argues that the attraction between Shelley and Emilia is, in fact, incestuous at its foundation--a staple of Romantic poetry. Shelley seeks his complementary twin in a sister figure, and he projects that onto Emilia both in real life and in his poetry. Paglia says, "As Emilia's twin, the poet would be united with his likeness and escape human anxieties of separation and incompletion." (p. 370)

 

To resolve the mounting attraction between the pair and bring the poem to a climax (while presumably keeping the climax "chaste"), Shelley has the two protagonists withdraw to an ancient cavern on a Greek island and simply merge into a single being through an alchemical process. Paglia says that this represents a symbolic regression to the womb, where the twins originally emerged from a single source. But this ending entails a release of the daemonic; the climax ends up sounding so overwrought and sexual that some critics have interpreted it as a justification of free love and incest. Paglia herself finds the ending unsatisfactory: "Epipsychidion implodes. The search for a new identity based on gender-free eroticism ends in the extinction of all identity. The unity of incestuous twinship collapses into nondifferentiation. Incest restores primeval chaos. Shelley sinks into dispiriting density, like the swamp mud of the Great Mother. [...] At the moment the poet thinks himself victorious over matter, the earth exerts her malign gravitation and plummets him downward to her embrace." (p. 375)

 

To sum up: Lyric poetry describes emotion, and emotions require boundaries or a natural end point. But Romanticism doesn't recognize structure, boundaries, or hierarchies, so the lyric poems of the Romantics tend to run to excess. In Chapter 13 Byron recognized this when he wrote about dark, brooding heroes haunted by evil and guilt; he eventually resolved the problem by resorting to an Androgyne hero who is self-complete and self-contained: Don Juan's adventures become a light-hearted sexual travelogue with no need for excess emotion. (See my notes on Chapter 13 for more.) Shelley, on the other hand, attempts to avoid the daemonic of lyric excess by "seraphicizing" his protagonists, that is, by injecting them with spiritual and Apollonian characteristics to lift them out of the muck of Dionysian sexuality. But again, Epipsychidion is about the nature of ideal love, love is an emotion, and Romantic and lyric excess make it difficult to resolve the poem in a satisfactory manner. With no boundaries or natural endpoint, emotions overflow and the action merges into indistinctness and blur.

 

[Note 4]

Paglia revisits the idea of the passivity and effeminacy of the Romantic poet in her analysis of Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind." Shelley describes the poet as a passive Aeolian lyre that is played by the wind. The west wind is a powerful masculine "ravisher" that "rapes" the poet-lyre and extracts music from him in the form of poetry and art. Paglia says, "The 'uncontrollable' west wind's tremendous masculine force exaggerates the poet's frailty or creative reactivity. [...] The poem's greatness, its electrifying expansive rush, resides precisely in the poet's ability to project himself and us into the sensation of passive surrender to titanic power. Shelley's ecstasy comes from convention-defying sex experience. He is erotically joined, body and soul, to the wind as masculine ravisher. 'Ode to the West Wind' is a tour-de-force of sex-crossing Romantic imagination." However, the poet is victimized by this interaction: "The nervous, impressionable poet has a feminine sensitivity. He is a stranger exiled among virile men. The price for the Romantic poet's appropriation of female powers is mutilation..." (pp. 379-380).

 

To explain this interaction, Paglia returns to the theme of the poet as passive and effeminate, projecting his repressed masculinity onto others. As I discussed in my notes on Chapter 6, repressed psychological material tends to reappear as daemonic in form. The more we run toward one extreme, the more we repress the opposite extreme; the repressed opposite extreme then haunts us unconsciously in "daemonic" form as a fear or temptation.

 

Before Rousseau, the appearance of the daemonic was explained away as "evil," to be remedied by the application of religion. But Romanticism weakens religion and removes boundaries and limits. The effeminate poet runs to extremes, and his own repressed masculinity reappears as paranoid visions of punishing enemies, guilt, and fear, resulting in anxiety. Haunted in this manner, and lacking any convenient religious scripts to explain away his fears, the poet falls into the trap of passivity and fatalism: He avoids asserting himself for fear of drawing down even more attention, anxiety, and punishment.

 

To sum up: Lyric Romanticism, with its lack of boundaries and structure, encourages emotional extremes. As an effeminate, passive male Shelley represses masculinity. Running to extremes, he then projects his own repressed masculinity outward in the form of daemonic fears or temptations: His repressed masculinity reappears as a fear of society, which he registers as "virile" and punishing, or as a distressing fascination with androgyne witches, incestuous female twins, and ravishing winds. As daemonic apparitions these things are both an attraction and a torment. And the further Shelley goes to Romantic excess, the more these daemonic influences cause him anxiety. Paglia says, "With the failure of hierarchies at the close of the Enlightenment, consciousness became stronger, but it did not become more masculine. Paradoxically, the more it asserted, the more it had to fear. We saw in Kleist's Penthesilea that unlimited expansion of self produces paralyzing anxiety." (pp. 380-381)

 

Concerning Penthesilea, Paglia said in Chapter 9, "The failure of traditional hierarchies in the late 18th century removed social and philosophical limitations essential for happiness, security, and self-knowledge. Without external restrictions, there can be no self-definition. The dissolution of hierarchical orders permitted personality to expand so suddenly that it went into a free fall of anxiety. Hence, the self has to be chastened, its boundaries redefined, even by pain. The self must be reduced in size. This is the ultimate meaning of Penthesilea's erotics of mastectomy." (p. 263)

 

Similarly, Coleridge and Byron explore hedonism, sensuality, and lust to the point of white-knuckle extremism, tantalizing and also tormenting themselves with the accompanying fascination and anxiety. Egos expand into neurotic territory to explore their own limits in much the same way that two-year-olds throw tantrums for the purpose of exploring the limits of what's permissible. But they know that it's only a matter of time before the Great Mother lowers the boom and punishes extreme behavior, hence anxiety and a sense of increasing doom as they push the limits.

 

Running to extremes turns into self-punishment, passivity, and anxiety. With no clear explanation or solution for his anxiety, the poet blames society, feels increasingly shamed and alienated, and runs to ever-greater extremes of isolation and passivity to evade what he sees as society's disapproval and punishment. It's a vicious cycle. Paglia says of the start of Romanticism, "There was an excess of phenomena no longer ordered by social structures, phenomena flooding consciousness in an exhausting plenum. The femininity of the Romantic artist partly expresses his passivity toward this oppressive multiplicity. The artist sacrifices his virility as a propitiation of unknown gods." (p. 381)

 

 As Paglia puts it: "The problem of evil had an assigned place in all-inclusive Christian theology. But as religion weakened, evil sprang free. [...] Romantic imagination faced evil without the organized certitudes of church and state. The power to punish was taken over by the self. Hence the nineteenth-century abundance of daemonic epiphanies of the double. The self ambushes, harasses, flails itself. Romanticism's most terrifying encounter with the double was ironically by the atheist Shelley. Making himself feminine, the poet was under the fascist rod of what he had repressed." (p. 381)

​

To sum it up: Excessive freedom results in anxiety, which leads to self-punishment to head off further excess and quell the anxiety. As Paglia says, "Sadomasochism will always appear in the freest times, in imperial Rome or the late 20th century. It is a pagan ritual of riddance, stilling anxiety and fear." (p. 263)

 

As described in this and previous chapters, Romantic poets deal with this expansion of the ego and daemonism of Romanticism in the following manner:

• Rousseau and Wordsworth: They simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of daemonism in Romanticism; they sentimentalize the Great Mother, and in the process they effectively negate sexuality in general.

• Sade: He revels in the daemonism of Romanticism and takes it to extremes of lust and sadomasochism; but he pays for it by spending his life in jail.

• Goethe, Coleridge: They acknowledge and depict the daemonism of Romanticism and explore the darker side of emotion and sexuality; but then they try to inject Apollonianism into their work after the fact by bending their poems around to a moral ending; in doing so, they potentially reject and cripple their own creative visions in the end.

• Byron: He acknowledges and depicts the daemonism of Romanticism, resulting in dark, brooding heroes haunted by evil and guilt. Eventually he rejects emotion and daemonism in favor of androgyny: The self-contained Androgyne can engage in sexuality without excessive emotion, emerging from his trysts unscathed.

• Shelley: He actively seeks to counter the daemonism of Romanticism by "seraphicizing" his emotions: He injects romantic encounters with spiritual and Apollonian characteristics to lift them out of the muck of Dionysian sexuality. But emotional excess and daemonism win out in the end, pulling his creations back down into the mud.

 

[Note 5]

Paglia says that the poems of John Keats present the poet as an Androgyne. She describes Keats as a "transexual shaman"; she says, "Keats is the Teiresias androgyne, the nurturant male [...] The Teiresias androgyne rules The Eve of St. Agnes: the most brilliantly written part of the poem is when the male reverses sexual convention and feeds the female" (pp. 382-383) (See pages 45-46 for a long description of the "Teiresias androgyne" in Chapter 2 of Sexual Personae.)

 

A couple themes emerge in Paglia's analysis:

• The poet as effeminate and passive. Keats embraces all the markers of a Romantic male poet: He tends toward effeminacy and passivity and seeks female partners who demonstrate male assertiveness rather than traditional femininity--usually Androgynes, Apollonians, or Femmes fatales (see my notes on Chapter 8 for more). Paglia says that "Keats esteems a happy 'Laziness' or fainting 'languour,' 'a state of effeminacy.' [...] Great men [...] above all, possess negative capability, which is female waiting, a refusal to intervene, impose, or dominate." (p. 381)

• Awareness of the chthonian nature of femininity. Paglia says that Keats is aware of the daemonic and chthonian side of women to the same degree as Coleridge. Keats's poems routinely start off describing deadly, rapacious female figures. For example, Paglia talks about Keats's "poems of sexual danger, from Endymion through “Lamia" to "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (p. 385-6); The poem Lamia is about "a snake-vampire imprisoning a male in a house of illusion" (p. 383); "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" describes a “'beautiful woman without mercy,' destroying warriors, princes, and kings" (p. 385); Hyperion's Mnemosyne is a "dominatrix," a "female colossus" who "rapes" Apollo (p. 386-7); in The Fall of Hyperion, Moneta is "silent, terrific, uncanny [...] Keats's towering women are androgynes, monumental totems of world-force." (p. 387)

• Sentimentalization of femininity. Yet, despite the power and deadliness of the female characters, Keats sentimentalizes the women and treat them as objects of love and warmth. Paglia says that Keats engages in "neutralization of woman's sexual danger" (p. 382). "Keats seems the most reverent and affectionate of nature-sons" (p. 383); "Keats's poetry treats the chthonian with ritual euphemism." (p. 388) Speaking of the "snake-vampire" character of Lamia, Paglia says, "Lamia, a sexual fiend and man-killer, is beautifully reimagined until she improbably glows like a Raphael Madonna" (p. 384). However, Paglia says that this sentimentalization of women was, in fact, a defense mechanism; in real life, Keats's letters about women "seethe with jealousy, hostility, obsession [...] Keats flees the company of women to escape being swallowed up by them. Their hunger is infinite." (pp. 384-385) Paglia says, "Keats's sexual anxiety, suppressed in the poems, is perfectly apparent in his letters" (p. 381).

• The poet as androgyne. Paglia suggests that Keats resolves this contradiction between sexual anxiety toward women in real life and sentimentality toward women in his poetry by assuming the poetic "masque" of an Androgyne (p. 383). Compare the example of Lord Byron: In my notes for Chapter 13 I said that the Byron initially embraced emotion and daemonism in his early poetry but then shifted in favor of androgyny for his epic poem Don Juan; the self-contained Androgyne can engage in sexuality without excessive emotion, emerging from his trysts unscathed. Similarly, Paglia suggests that by assuming the attitude of the self-sufficient Androgyne in his own poetry, Keats can then afford to be relatively indifferent to and unaffected by the powerful, daemonic female characters. As I said above, Paglia identifies Keats as a "Teiresias androgyne." Paglia says that Keats neutralizes the character Lamia by distancing her: "Her daemonism is honored but distanced, repositioned in safe relation to the psyche." (p. 384) Paglia says, "By becoming the identity-free chameleon poet, Keats eliminates gender." (p. 384) In his role as Androgyne, Keats is self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-complete. His poetry doesn't even require a female protagonist, because Androgynes contain both sexes within themselves. Paglia says "In 'To Autumn,' woman is unneeded, for she has been internalized by the poet, with his capacious, fecund, and self-irrigating imagination. The feminized male self becomes all-encompassing and self-sufficient." (p. 384) Thus, Keats need not fear powerful women; the Androgyne is self-contained and untouchable: "Keats's poems, opening the reader to nature, close off the poet in his own rigorous precinct." (p. 384)

​

For more on the nature of the Androgyne, see my supplemental essay on that subject which I wrote for the main blog in the chapter on Sensing:

Link to supplemental essay: The Androgyne

​

Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

​​​

~Posted January 4, 2025