Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 8 of Sexual Personae

Chapter 8 is a pivotal chapter in Sexual Personae; it sets up the transition from classical Apollonianism to modern Romanticism and Decadence. As a result the notes section will be longer than usual.

 

[Note 1]

The title of Chapter 8 is "Return of the Mother." This title suggests that Paglia sees Western culture as comprising three main eras:

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--1) Ancient Dionysian era: Largely prehistoric, this period is defined by savage Great Mother fertility religions, human sacrifice, etc. Most of the rites of the early fertility religions are lost, but some of them survived into Greek and Roman times in the form of "Great Mother mystery religions" such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Dionysian Mysteries, the Cybele cult, etc.

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--2) Apollonian era: This era starts with the High Classic period of Greece (Paglia suggests that Aeschylus' Oresteia represents the start of the era on p. 230) and lasts through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. It is defined by patriarchal religions and hierarchical social structures. Its central feature is the "Great Chain of Being" which sets up a hierarchy for all of life: God & monarchy at the top, nobility, tradesmen, peasants, and slaves in the middle, and animals and plants at the bottom. In the Enlightenment period (roughly 1650-1775) Apollonianism is taken to the extreme with an emphasis on science and logic as the solution to all man's problems.

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--3) Modern Dionysian era: Rousseau represents the start of a new Dionysian era. The extremes of Apollonianism during the Enlightenment (see previous paragraph) result in a Dionysian backlash: Rousseau (writing in 1750-1780) rebels against hierarchies and civilization. Instead, Rousseau views man-in-nature as the starting point for his new philosophy of Romanticism. He points out that indigenous societies in the New World managed to co-exist with nature, and that nature-in-man (natural urges, drives, etc.) should be the touchstone and guide for anchoring man and giving him a place and purpose in the world. Paglia says that Rousseau's Dionysian philosophy of Romanticism remains more or less in effect in modern times in everything from the antiestablishment stance of the Rolling Stones (p. 231) and the "paternalism" of social workers and childcare experts (p. 232) to modern ideas on sexual freedoms and identities (p. 234): Paglia says, "Rousseau makes freedom a western watchword." (p. 230-231)

 

[Note 2]

The Marquis de Sade wrote his books about 10-20 years after Rousseau, and Paglia says that Sade's purpose was to satirize Rousseau's theories (p. 235). Paglia says that Sade himself had a decadent outlook on life (p. 231 & 236), but she says that Sade was writing in the same literary period as Rousseau, that is, during the High Romantic period. The Decadent period didn't start until 50 years later. So that makes Sade a Romantic writer rather than a Decadent writer. Paglia says, "Sade's emphasis upon energy, instinct, and imagination puts him squarely in Romanticism" (p. 235). So I've listed Sade himself as a Decadent (ExDion) but I've put his philosophy and books in the same category as Rousseau (Dion) in my list above.

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As a Romantic thinker and writer, Sade is obsessed by the maternal influence and the Great Mother as much as Rousseau is. The difference between the two is that Rousseau romanticizes the maternal, while Sade sees the maternal as punishing. Comparing the two:

• Rousseau: Paglia says of Rousseau, "In love, he is passive; women must make the first move. [...] Idolizing woman is natural and right, a cosmic law. [...] 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." (p. 232)

• Sade: Paglia says: "Rousseau revives the Great Mother, but Sade restores her true ferocity. [...Sade] calls nature our 'common mother.' Sade’s world is ruled by a female titan: 'No, there is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.' The Great Mother, Sade’s supreme female character, begins and ends all" (235-236). Elsewhere Paglia compares Rousseau to Sade as follows: "Rousseau’s mother nature is Christian Madonna, lovingly enfolding her infant son. Sade’s mother nature is pagan cannibal, her dragon jaws dripping sperm and spittle" (p. 237). And so on.

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As Romantic artists, both Sade and Rousseau agree that the outdated Enlightenment rank and hierarchies should be swept aside. But they disagree as to what will be the result. Rousseau hopes to initiate a new golden age for mankind; whereas Sade says that people are driven by base motives and that cruelty and rape will be the result of a world without structure and rules. Sade says that if you get rid of social hierarchies and structure the end result will be anarchy and the law of the jungle: People will be free to prey upon each other and sadomasochism will spring up as a system of sexual hierarchy to replace the old social hierarchies. (The two opposing positions of Rousseau and Sade pretty much sum up the "defund the police" debate in modern times.) Thus, Rousseau is a Romantic idealist who promotes utopian theories about freedom and nature, while Sade represents a darker mode of Romanticism that shades into Gothic literature.

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Paglia herself agrees with Sade: She says that if civilization and Apollonianism are abandoned, then the result is "a regression to the primeval" (p. 230); in other words, society returns (psychologically) to the ancient Dionysian era of savage Great Mother fertility goddesses and human sacrifice. Thus, Paglia names Chapter 8 "Return of the Great Mother."

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For people interested in the chronology of Rousseau, Sade, Romanticism, and Decadence: Rousseau was writing in 1750-1780, and Sade was writing in 1785-1800. High and Late Romanticism exists roughly during the period 1750-1830. It is followed by the Decadent period, which starts in 1830 according to Paglia (p. 231). 

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Note that the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 contains High Romantic ideas like "all men are created equal" (no hierarchies) and that people are born with "unalienable rights" such as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Wikipedia says, "Jefferson derived the Declaration of Independence from Rousseau as well as from Locke and Montesquieu. [...]The success of the American Revolution raised the prestige of Rousseau's philosophy." (See the Wikipedia article "Jean-Jacques Rousseau") However, Rousseau's ideas also led to the French Revolution of 1789, which was a failure; the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror and ultimately resulted in a military coup and a return to monarchy. Sade lived through the French Revolution, and the failure of the French Revolution influenced Sade's writings and vindicated Sade's view that an excess of freedom can lead to anarchy and chaos.

 

[Note 3]

Sade's sadistic, murderous libertines appear in both sexes, but Paglia focuses mainly on the female libertines in particular. So I have listed the libertines as a group in the female portion of the list. Also, the sexual tableaus and sadomasochism of the libertines are highly Dionysian (full of sparagmos and disorder) as befits Romantic literature, but the personalities of the libertines themselves are described in Apollonian terms. Paglia says of their Apollonian features: "The libertines establish their own rigorous structures, the natural hierarchy of strong and weak, master and slave. [...] These things in Sade come from the Apollonian Enlightenment. [...] Personality in Sade is hard and impermeable—that is, Apollonian. [...] In Sade, Apollonian personality is plunged into Dionysian sewage but emerges clean and intact" (p. 237). "In Sade as in Blake, energy is male. Hence Sade’s great heroines are masculinized by their criminal vitality" (p. 239). "Sade’s libertines retain Apollonian intellect in nature’s surging Dionysian flux" (p. 239). And so on.

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Sade's libertines will become the general model for women in Romantic and Decadent literature. In other words, Dionysian male heroes exhibit passive, feminine, and often masochistic features; and they attract (or are attracted to) strong, punishing Apollonian mother figures, usually Androgynes, Apollonians, or Femmes fatales [see Footnote 1].

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However, Paglia specifically says that Sade's female libertines are not femmes fatales: Paglia says, "The Romantic femmes fatales will be silent, nocturnal, lit by their own daemonic animal eye. But Sade’s women, inveterate talkers, retain the clear Apollonian solar eye of western intellect." (p. 247). In other words, Sade's libertines are simply too analytical and prosaic in their sadistic pursuits; they don't exhibit the true poisonousness of femmes fatales. They don't have that craziness of daemonic Dionysianism that animates true femmes fatales. So I have put Sade's libertines in the female section under the Apollonian category rather than the Extreme Apollonian category.

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In the last paragraph of Chapter 8, Paglia foreshadows where she will be going with the idea of Decadence in future chapters; she talks about how the Apollonian libertines of Sade will be transformed into the Femme fatales of Decadence: "Baudelaire and Swinburne stress their debt to Sade, who prefigures Decadent sensibility in several ways. He finds beauty in the horrible and revolting. Like the Roman emperors, he juxtaposes artificiality and sophistication with chthonian barbarism. His libertines are 'indifferent to everything simple and commonplace,' a Decadent phrase. The libertines are always self-immured, a Decadent claustrophobia. We will find a parallel in the imprisoned spaces of the Gothic novel, which reach the Decadence through Poe. Sade’s corpse-strewn sexual arenas resemble the Gothic morgue. These heaps of rotting matter are the accumulated objects of nature and society which I see oppressing Romantic imagination." (p. 247)

 

[Note 4]

Paglia spends a lot of time dissecting the relationship between the sadist and the masochist (which she puts in the context of relations between the rapist and the victim). She seems to make three main points:

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--Point a) Sex isn't necessarily about love. It can be about love, if you socialize people to see it that way. But if you strip sex of socialization and get back to pure nature, then sex is simply about animal lust: A couple of cats are in heat, they go at it, and then they wander away bored once their needs are satisfied. Paglia says: "Dog-style heterosexual copulation, a staple of current pornography, represents the animality and impersonality of sex-experience. When face is averted from face, emotion and society are annihilated" (p. 246). The kind of intercourse where the man mounts a woman from behind is considered animalistic because of its anonymity and focus on physicality rather than bonding. But in fact that kind of sex is the way of nature. So if humans prefer the bonding of face-to-face intercourse, that is probably due to socialization.

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Expanding on the theme of lust: Paglia goes on to say that if you put aside socialization and simply want raw lust, then imagination is better than love: "Like Blake, Sade exalts Romantic imagination, the source of wish and therefore fulfillment: 'The imagination’s fire must set the furnace of the senses alight.' Free imagination is able 'to forge, to weave, to create new fantasies.' Juliette declares, 'The imagination is the only cradle where pleasures are born.' Without it, 'all that remains is the physical act, dull, gross, and brutish.' Sade’s biggest erogenous zone is the mind. His works, like Genet’s, are autoerotic prison dreams creating a perverse universe of new sensations and sexes. Sade is the cosmogonic Khepera, eternally renewing his lust. Masturbation is his motivating principle" (p. 243). Of course, when imagination is driving sex, then anything and everything becomes sexual: "To be sexually aroused by something eccentric, insignificant, or disgusting is a victory of imagination" (p. 239).

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--Point b) Rape is a product of Apollonianism carried to the extreme. Rape is a product of the "aggressive Western eye," that is, it's a product of Apollonian focus, concentration, and analysis. Paglia says, "In Sade, the aggressive Apollonian eye never loses its power. [...] Sade isolates the aggression in the western scientific mind. And he demonstrates (my constant theme) the sexual character of western seeing." (p. 242) As such, the Apollonianism of rape tends to put it in the realm of a male activity. Paglia hastens to add that women can be Apollonian too, which means that women can be rapists as well; that's the story behind Sade's female libertines who rape both men and women. But in general, sex crimes tend to be a male activity. Paglia says, "Anyone can see, just by reading the newspaper, that men commit sex-crimes and women do not. [...] Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper" (p. 247). In other words, Paglia is saying that the focus and drive of Apollonianism (the "aggressive Western eye") is responsible for civilization's greatest accomplishments; but when carried to the extreme or misdirected into the "daemonic," Apollonianism also becomes responsible for civilization's greatest crimes and abuses.

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--Point c) Men don't rape solely because they want to dominate women. As Paglia puts it: "The feminist idea that sexual violence is caused by the social denigration of women is disproved by the many cases of homosexual torture and rape-murder of boys by the dozen" (p. 246-247) Of course, misogyny and devaluation of women can be a part of the equation when men attack women; Paglia talks at length about Sade's own misogyny and fear of women [see Footnote 2]. For example: "Though he honors his great female libertines, Sade detests procreative woman. Pregnant women are tortured, forced to abort, or crushed together on iron wheels. [...] Mutilation of female genitals, reported to this day throughout the world, descends from ancient perceptions of the uncanniness of female fertility. [...] Such things arise not from social prejudice but from legitimate fear of woman’s alliance with chthonian nature." (p. 244-245) Nonetheless, misogyny alone is not enough to explain all of the various crimes and excesses of Apollonianism, as demonstrated by the quote about homosexual rapes and murders of boys. 

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So what does cause the excesses and crimes of Apollonianism? At the very end of the chapter Paglia says: "Sex-crimes arise less from environmental conditioning than from a failure of socialization." (p. 247) She doesn't elaborate on that statement, but it's clear enough what it means from the material that came earlier in the chapter: Men have excess Apollonianism (focus, sex drive, the "aggressive Western eye") due to surging testosterone, and their drives need to be channelled properly into socially approved challenges and objectives. Because if left to their own devices and without proper guidance, their drives can go amiss: They can be carried to the extreme and misdirected into the "daemonic." Apollonian focus and imagination can be perverted into sadomasochism, violence, and crime if no one is around to suggest otherwise.

 

Just to finish up: In Note 3 I said that Paglia doesn't consider Sade's libertines to be true femmes fatales, so I put them in the female Apollonian category. But Paglia's discussions of the phenomenon of rape in society in general are more male-oriented and more about the extremes of sex crimes. So I'll put an entry about Sade's "philosophy of sadism and rape" under the Extreme Apollonian category on the male side.

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Footnotes

[Footnote 1]

As I mentioned in the notes for Chapter 6, the relationship between the Decadent male and the femme fatale is an analogue of the enantiodromia-like relationship between the female Dionysian "damsel in distress" and the male Apollonian rapist. Also, I said here that Dionysian male heroes exhibit passive, feminine, and often masochistic features; and they attract (or are attracted to) strong, punishing Apollonian mother figures, usually Androgynes, Apollonians, or Femmes fatales. For an illustration of this dynamic, see the music video of "Little Hell" by Ankathie Koi and Powernerd Paddy on YouTube: Ms. Koi plays a female Mercurius Androgyne (bubbly, playful, energetic) with a taste for castration; Paddy is her passive male target. Link to music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lh4XFfhbe0k

 

[Footnote 2]

The misogyny of the rapist is probably related to the rapist's own Dionysian side appearing to him in "daemonic form." It's the result of one-sidedness and movement out toward the extremes of either Dionysianism or Apollonianism: The more we strive toward one extreme, the more we are haunted by the opposite extreme in "daemonic" form (as a fear or temptation). As Paglia puts it: "Like Blake, Sade brings the Great Mother into being as an act of hostility. The campaign against Madame de Mistival begins with Dolmancé’s proclamation, 'We owe absolutely nothing to our mothers.' After Harold Bloom’s study of male poetic strife in The Anxiety of Influence, it is impossible to read such a statement without hearing its real meaning: 'We owe absolutely everything to our mothers.' Sade’s works ritualize sex on a gigantic scale. If a ritual relieves anxiety, Sade’s sadomasochistic inventions are modes of distancing by which male imagination tries to free itself from female origins." (p. 246)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted August 19, 2024