Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 15 of Sexual Personae

[Note 1]

If a culture or artistic genre lasts long enough, it tends to go through two main phases: An earlier "high" or "classic" period versus a later "low" or "late" period. In the case of Romanticism, the genre is subdivided into High Romanticism versus Late Romanticism; and Late Romanticism is a synonym for Decadence. Paglia says that High Romanticism started with Rousseau around 1750 and lasted to 1830, while Decadent Late Romanticism began around 1830 with Balzac. 

 

Paglia notes a couple main themes marking the transition from the High Romanticism of Rousseau to the Decadent Late Romanticism of Balzac.

 

The androgyne

Typically in High Romanticism the poet presented himself as a Dionysian male: An effeminate, passive "male heroine" in thrall to a masculine female, often an androgyne. I noted this pattern repeatedly in my notes for Chapters 8-14. However, the switch to Late Romanticism/Decadence with Chapter 15 marks a move away from the Dionysian male and in favor of an embrace of the male androgyne. In other words the male poet increasingly identifies himself as an androgyne, and many of the themes of Decadent poetry and literature reflect the self-containment of androgyny. Or to put it another way: Decadence is the result when the world is seen through the eyes of an androgyne, or when society as a whole adopts the thought patterns of the androgyne. At least, that seems to be the case for Balzac in Chapter 15.

 

As I've described in my notes for previous chapters, the main feature of the androgyne is self-sufficiency and self-completion. Paglia says that the androgyne is a closed circle, self-contained. Androgynes have no need to seek their other half in marriage or in society at large; they are their own "other half." 

 

Paglia says that Balzac was foreshadowed by Henri Latouche's novel Fragoletta, published in 1829: "Latouche is, to my knowledge, the first writer to join the androgyne to the amoral cult of beauty, a Decadent staple." (p. 389) She then goes on to say that Balzac is generally considered a social novelist and that the social novel is usually hostile to androgynes. But she says, "Normally classed as a social novelist, Balzac also belongs to the history of nineteenth-century Decadence. Many of his major characters are double-sexed." (p. 390) 

 

Just a couple examples of Balzac's "double-sexed characters":

• In Sarrasine, the artist Sarrasine is an androgyne in love with Zambinella, a hermaphroditic castrate who passes as a beautiful woman. Sarrasine's bubble of androgyne self-sufficiency is ruptured by Zambinella's own androgynous beauty: "Sarrasine’s susceptibility comes from his artistic self-absorption. He has no sexual needs because he is already half-feminine. [...] Hence the androgyne Sarrasine can be emotionally subjugated only by another androgyne." (p. 391) Pulled out of his own solipsistic state of self-completion, Sarrasine allows himself to fall in love; but when he learns that the object of his love is in fact male, it's a bridge too far for him; he falls into a rage with deadly results.

• In The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Paquita lives in sexual bondage to a Spanish lesbian, the Marquise de San-Real. One day Paquita is out in public and she notices that the effeminate aristocrat De Marsay bears a physical resemblance to the lesbian marquise; she surreptitiously invites De Marsay back to her chambers, dresses him as the marquise, and has transvestite sex with him. Paquita is simply working out a private fantasy: Heterosexual sex with the lesbian marquise. As Paglia puts it, "De Marsay has been drafted into a sexual theater: he exists only to phallicize an absent woman lover." (p. 396) "[Paquita] fabricates a servant Hermaphrodite, a male mannequin of the marquise." (p. 401) But De Marsay and the marquise are both androgynes of a sort, as well as eventually turning out to be brother and sister by the same father. Paglia says that the lesbian marquise is "the first ferocious chthonian female of the Decadence, prefiguring Cleopatra, Herodias, and Salomé. She is the virago androgyne, plushly female but mentally masculine." (p. 397) Paglia says of De Marsay and the marquise, "Brother and sister have 'the same voice.' Both are aesthetes, sensualists, murderers. Balzac makes half-feminine Byron the progenitor of twin androgynes." (p. 400) As was the case with the artist Sarrasine, De Marsay and the marquise were willing to be pulled out of their androgyne self-containment for the lovely Paquita; but when they learn of Paquita's "sexual theater" and the existence of each other as third parties in what they each thought was a closed circle of two, they both find it too much to bear--too alien to their comfortable habit of androgyne self-sufficiency--with murderous results.

• And so it goes with the stories Seraphita and Cousin Bette. Paglia concludes Chapter 15 by saying that "these many androgynes are Balzac’s self-portraits." (p. 407) She notes that Balzac tends to describe the male androgynes as elevated by their feminine side: Effeminate, delicate, aristocratic, and even spiritual. Whereas the female androgynes tend to be coarsened by their masculine side: Iron-willed, practical, and even vampiric. Paglia says that Balzac himself was actually more like his female androgynes: "Ironically, Balzac's coarse female androgynes are closer to him in body and mind. [...] The male androgyne is fantasy, the female androgyne reality." (p. 407)

 

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

 

Stilling of anxiety

The shift toward androgyny and decadence seems to spring from a desire to still the anxiety that accompanies High Romanticism. To review:

 

In my notes for Chapter 14 I said that the embrace by High Romantics of the ideals of freedom and rejection of rules and structure led to excesses of emotional Dionysianism and repression of Apollonianism. The repressed Apollonianism is projected out into the world in daemonic form as a threat or a temptation, resulting in anxiety about the world on the part of the High Romantic; this in turn leads to self-punishment to head off further excess and quell the anxiety. 

 

Socialization and conscience make it difficult for most people to stray too far from the beaten path. When we are young children, we throw tantrums in order to test our freedoms, but we know that it's only a matter of time before our parents say, "Enough!" and punish us. We play out the same cycle in adulthood: Our anxiety increases as we take greater and greater liberties; and if no one is around to punish us, then we punish ourselves. 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)

 

Passivity and self-punishment are one means of stilling anxiety; another is to adopt androgyny. We saw this play out in the case of Lord Byron (see my notes on Chapter 13). Lord Byron depicted the anxiety and fear of Romanticism in the form of 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.

 

Balzac's version of Decadent Late Romanticism models itself upon the androgyne in much the same manner, that is, for the purpose of creating artistic characters untroubled by anxiety or even conscience. In Balzac's literature the androgyne starts out in a bubble of contented self-containment and only subsequently is gradually pulled out of that bubble by a great attraction or obsession: He is drawn into the wider world of emotion, feelings, and anxiety, often very much against his will; the result is usually disastrous.

 

In the story Sarrasine, the androgyne artist Ernest-Jean Sarrasine attends the opera one day and notices the great beauty of the lead singer, La Zambinella. However Sarrasine is content to maintain his distance, observe her performances from the audience, and sketch her from memory back in his studio. He beams with love at the sight of her great beauty, but as an androgyne he has no intention of contacting her and getting to know her. Instead, Zambinella notices him in the audience and requests that he visit her. Sarrasine obliges but he knows that making the transition from androgyne self-containment and complacency to lover means unleashing a tidal wave of long-denied emotion. He relishes the project but at the same time predicts trouble: “‘If it is a mere caprice,’ he thought, [...] ‘she does not know the sort of domination to which she is about to become subject. Her caprice will last, I trust, as long as my life.’" Ultimately, in order to resolve the ensuing emotional obsession with its tangle and anxiety, one character or the other must die.

 

Objectification via the western eye

Paglia says that the anxiety-stilling function of androgyny is due in part to the androgyne's use of the Apollonian "western eye."

 

Comparing the High Romanticism of Rousseau to the Decadent Late Romanticism of Balzac:

• High Romanticism: The typical High Romantic is a Dionysian male who welcomes the disorder and chaos of the Great Mother. (The Dionysian is associated with the Feminine influence, that is, disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.) The High Romantic Dionysian male therefore rejects and represses his Apollonian side, and the repressed Apollonian side returns as daemonic projections of fears and temptations that haunt the Dionysian male and create anxiety.

• Decadent Late Romanticism: The androgyne, on the other hand, has his Apollonian and Dionysian sides in balance. (The Apollonian is associated with the Masculine influence, that is, order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky.) The androgyne is Dionysian like the High Romantic insofar as he tends to be passive and effeminate; but at the same time the androgyne consciously embraces his Apollonian side and uses its focus and structure to analyze the world around him: He exercises his analytical "western eye." Because his Apollonian side isn't repressed, there is no daemonic projection, guilt, or anxiety.

 

In other words Rousseau and High Romanticism embrace Dionysian freedom, but those same freedoms make the world chaotic and overfull of attractive stimuli that threaten to overwhelm us. In turn, Balzac's Late Romantic androgyne rejects Dionysian chaos; the androgyne himself recedes from the world, encased in his bubble of self-completion. If he notices the world at all, he brings his dispassionate, analytical Apollonian "western eye" to bear on the world, freeze it in place, and chop it up into small pieces for analysis: Hence objectification. Paglia sums it up as follows: "Romantic imagination broke through all limits. Decadence, burdened by freedom, invents harsh new limits, psychosexual and artistic. It is a process of objectification and fixation, disciplining and intensifying the rogue western eye. [...] Decadence is an Apollonian raid on the Dionysian, the aggressive eye pinning and freezing nature’s roiling objects." (p. 389)

 

Decadent closure

Paglia repeatedly talks about the concept of Decadent "closure," and credits Balzac with originating the concept: "The ominous closed spaces of the Decadence are created by Sarrasine." (p. 390) Thus High Romantic passivity in the face of anxiety is transformed into Decadent Late Romantic sequestration, quarantine, and closure.

 

Again, comparing the High Romanticism of Rousseau to the Decadent Late Romanticism of Balzac:

• High Romanticism: The typical High Romantic values freedom, even at the cost of chaos. But chaos results in anxiety, which causes the High Romantic to embrace passivity in the attempt to quell the anxiety (see my notes on Chapter 14 for more on this).

• Decadent Late Romanticism: The androgyne, on the other hand, recedes from the chaos of the world and locks himself away in his bubble of self-containment. For example, Paglia says that Seraphitus "is self-sequestered in the magic circle of ritual purity, a shamanistic quarantine. Like Byron’s Manfred, Seraphitus declares, 'I live by myself and for myself.'" (p. 403) The androgyne stills his anxiety by making himself as free of attachments as possible. When he does take an interest in something or someone, the androgyne's analytical Apollonian "western eye" also separates out and cordons off objects of interest for analysis, effectively putting them in a bubble of "closure" as well. In other words, both the androgyne and the things most dear to him are fated to live in a state of lockdown and Decadent closure.

 

Comparing the two, Paglia says, "High Romanticism valued energy, room to breathe. Decadent Late Romanticism shuts the doors and locks self and eye in pagan cultism." (p. 389) Zambinella and Paquita, both beloved by androgyne patrons in their respective stories, are isolated by their patrons in luxurious one-person harems where they can be enjoyed and studied without interference from the rest of the world. In The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Paquita is kept by the androgyne marquise in the following manner: "The lesbian marquise, constructing a seraglio for a one-woman harem, is a female aesthete and hence the first Decadent architect. She is a Sadean libertine, her citadel, with its soundproofed walls, shutting out society and law. Her sexual arena is a kind of tomb. Again we are in the claustrophobic space of the Decadence." (p. 396)

 

This Decadent need for closure is likely why Balzac's androgyne stories repeatedly end in disaster: When the isolated inhabitant of a closed-off Decadent harem unexpectedly invites a third party into the picture, the bubble or quarantine of closure is disrupted and the androgynes are pulled into the normal world of emotion, anxiety, and rage, which they are ill-equipped to handle. Paglia says of The Girl with the Golden Eyes: "Paquita has polluted a female sanctuary. For her sacrilege of admitting a male, like Publius Clodius transvestized at rites of the Bona Dea, she is slain and the temple destroyed. The marquise murders Paquita as a holocaust to an angry goddess. Since this is a Romantic fiction, the sanctuary harbors a cult of the self: the marquise is that goddess." (p. 401)

 

Incest and the double as a type of sexual closure

Late Romantic brother-and-sister and androgyne-and-androgyne pairings spring up repeatedly in Chapter 15. This is similar to the previous High Romantic focus on incest and doubles, but with a difference. Again, comparing the High Romanticism of Rousseau to the Decadent Late Romanticism of Balzac:

• High Romanticism: The High Romantic's attraction to incest and spiritual "doubles" seems to spring in part from a desire for complementarity: The High Romantic Dionysian male rejects and represses his Apollonian side, and the repressed Apollonian side is then projected out into the world in daemonic form as both fear and temptation. An Apollonian sister-figure creates a certain "synergy" of recognition and attraction between the parties as a result of this projection and helps fulfill a complementary pairing. (See my notes for Chapter 14 and the relations between Shelley and Emilia.) Paglia says that High Romantics see their doubles as reflections in a mirror and suggests that Byron's incest "may be a dream of copulating with oneself in sexually transmuted form." (p. 400) Modern freedom allows for the contemplation of taboos, which basically equates to contemplation of one's own repressed side. As Paglia says, "Incest is part of the sexually archaic material released into society whenever hierarchies weaken." (p. 267)

• Decadent Late Romanticism: The androgyne, on the other hand, looks for sameness. There is no daemonic projection because the androgyne doesn't repress anything; however, the androgyne lives in a bubble of Decadent closure and requires the same of his love interest. So an androgyne of the opposite sex is the perfect pairing. Two androgynes when paired up in this manner become a spiritual "brother-and-sister" couple, mirroring one another in their sameness.

 

Apollonian cult of beauty

I said above that High Romantic passivity turns into Decadent Late Romantic closure. Similarly, High Romantic effeminacy and emotionality turn into a Decadent Late Romantic cult of beauty:

• High Romanticism: Rejecting the Apollonianism of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, Rousseau and the High Romantics embraced effeminacy and emotionality as the wellspring of creativity. In Chapter 8, Paglia said, "Rousseau feminizes the European male persona. The late eighteenth century, the Age of Sensibility, gives the ideal man a womanlike sensitivity. [...] For Rousseau and the Romantics, the female principle is absolute. Man is a satellite in woman’s sexual orbit. [...] Rousseau’s nature-theory is grounded in sex. Worshipping nature means worshipping woman. She is a mysterious superior force." (pp. 232-233)

• Decadent Late Romanticism: Androgynes, on the other hand, revive Apollonianism in the form of the analytical western eye in order to create a "cult of beauty." As I said above, androgynes separate out and cordon off objects of attraction for analysis, effectively putting them in a bubble of "closure." Isolated in this manner, attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne.

 

Analysis by the western eye strips things of sentimental meaning and emotionality. Apollonian focus and attention bring clarity by distinguishing and separating details out from their surroundings and hardening their boundaries as objects of Decadent obsession. Paglia says, "Art supplants nature. The objet d’art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality." (p. 389) 

 

Isolation and analysis also entail breaking things down into their parts. Small details seize the attention. When Paquita is murdered by the marquise, Balzac doesn't focus on the loss of life as such; instead he provides a lascivious, detailed examination of the murder scene so as to draw out the most attention-grabbing details of the crime. Paglia says, "Balzac demonstrates the Decadent transformation of person into object in this horrifying scene, where the girl with the golden eyes is torn to shreds by her pitiless mistress. [...] Balzac’s technique is astonishingly prophetic of cinematic style. His eye is camera and spotlight. He pans the boudoir, zooms in on a foot, then slowly rises to take in the statuesque marquise. The bitten foot belongs to a Decadent aesthetic. Havelock Ellis says of Decadent art, 'The whole is subordinated to the parts.' Overall design is atomized, as in Mannerism. Balzac’s marquise appears not just as a foot but as part of a foot, an instep, and even as part of that, the muscles of an instep. The human is reduced to the bestial..." (pp. 397-399)

 

Summary

Paglia explains the difference between High Romanticism and Decadent Late Romanticism as follows: "Decadence is the Mannerist late phase of Romantic style" (p. 389). Mannerism isolates artistic themes and features from a high/classic period and exaggerates them to an unnaturally elegant or florid or artificial degree in the late phase.

 

In other words, High Romanticism was a coherent world view that sprang organically from a rejection of Apollonian structure and hierarchy and the embrace of Dionysian freedom. Decadent Late Romanticism, on the other hand is a Mannerist magnification of certain themes from High Romanticism, sometimes to a bizarre or performative extreme. Thus, to sum up the themes mentioned above:

 

• High Romantic Dionysian "male heroines" are transformed into Decadent Late Romantic androgynes.

• High Romantics still their anxiety through passivity and self-punishment; Decadent Late Romantics still their anxiety through the self-containment and solipsism of androgyny.

• High Romantic Dionysian males reject and repress their Apollonian side, which subsequently reappears as daemonic projections of fears and temptations; Decadent Late Romantics embrace their Apollonian side and employ it to see the world through the analytical "western eye."

• High Romantics value freedom at the cost of passivity and anxiety; Decadent Late Romantics recede from the chaos of the world and lock themselves away in a bubble of self-containment, imprisoning themselves and the things they love in a prison of Decadent "closure."

• High Romantics are attracted to incest and spiritual "doubles" from a desire for complementarity. Decadent androgynes, on the other hand, look for sameness in their partners: Sameness reinforces self-containment and closure.

• High Romantics reject Apollonianism and embrace effeminacy and emotionality as the wellspring of creativity; Decadent androgynes, on the other hand, revive Apollonianism in the form of the analytical western eye in order to create a "cult of beauty."

 

[Note 2]

Almost all of the characters mentioned in Chapter 15 are self-contained androgynes who bounce off one another and occasionally pull each other into ill-advised obsessions and entanglements. The one major exception is Paquita in The Girl with the Golden Eyes: She is mainly just a sexual object for the androgynes De Marsay and the lesbian marquise. And when Paquita acts on her own and complicates their world, both De Marsay and the marquise simultaneously plot to murder her (and only meet each other for the first time over her corpse).

 

Paglia suggests that Paquita's main failing is her embrace of Dionysian femininity to such as extreme that she has no will of her own beyond the enjoyment of sex. Paglia says, "De Marsay calls Paquita 'the most adorably feminine woman I have ever met.' As in Spenser, Blake, and Sade, femininity is an invitation to disaster. [...] The illiterate girl knows nothing but sex [...] Balzac confirms Spenser’s and Blake’s intuition of the erotic perversity of unqualified femininity: flirting with De Marsay, Paquita induces her own rape-murder." (p. 401)

 

This harks back to Chapter 6, where Paglia says, "In The Faerie Queene, helpless, retiring femininity is a spiritually deficient persona." (p. 184) Paglia suggests that the male rapist and the female "damsel in distress" are engaged in some kind of mutually destructive relationship: "Vulnerability generates its own entrapments, creating a maelstrom of voracity around itself. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into the spiritual emptiness of pure femininity in Spenser rush a storm of masculine forces. [...] Sadism and masochism engender one another in dizzy oscillation. Caught on the swing of the sexual dialectic, the rapist vainly strives to obliterate his opposite." (p. 186)

 

In other words Paquita's deficiency is "unqualified femininity," that is, a lack of masculine characteristics to temper and balance out extremes of feminine vulnerability. Incapable of agency or initiative beyond the ability to attract androgynes for sexual play, she becomes a victim when the androgynes turn murderous in their frustration with her overly-Dionysian promiscuity.

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~Posted January 23, 2025