Sexual personae Art and decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Paglia believes that "sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world." She follows Hobbes, Sade, Nietzsche, and Freud in her antifeminist view of (sexual) nature--not culture--as the ultimate determinant of human history and relationships. Society is needed to keep that potentially destructive nature in check; undefeated, however, pagan eroticism still flourishes in Western culture. This large, often aphoristic volume traces pagan, sometimes mythological, archetypes from antiquity through the 19th century. An introductory chapter expounds Paglia's thesis that Western aesthetics has been Apollonian (sky god)--male, rational; and has repressed its Dionysian (earth god)--female, emotional polarity. Major chapters deal with Italian Renaissance art ("an explosion of sexual personae" in its rebirth of pagan forms), Spenser, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Goethe, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, the Bronte sisters, Swinburne, Pater, late 19th-century decadent art, Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, James, and Dickinson. Paglia's perceptions are interdisciplinary; a large dose of psychological anthropology is mixed with her literary and cultural criticism. An expansive and daring mind is at work here, stating connections where none had previously been seen. In such a large, densely written work the possibilities for both errors and insights are considerable. Well indexed, with impressive bibliographical notes. Recommended mainly for postdoctoral interdisciplinary scholars. -D. S. Gochberg, Michigan State University

Armed with ""the point of view of Sade,"" Paglia (Humanities/Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts) charts a vast theory of western culture and its Decadent undertow, detonating sacrosanct contemporary thought and doctrine at every turn. Paglia argues that western art is a splendid, man-made display of the mind, set up to counter the abyss of ""violence and lust"" that Sade rightly feared in Mother Nature. ""Art is a ritualistic binding,"" she writes, ""of the perpetual motion machine that is nature."" Women, by their procreative powers, embody nature's bloody, undefined, Draconian force. This biological destiny (not the feminists' patriarchy) has chained them to the cultural sidelines while driving men to recast them into the icy, hard-edged, ""sexually unapproachable"" beauty of Nefertiti. Paganism, in Paglia's view, gave the West its ""pictorialism,"" an ""aggressive eye"" reveling in amoral images of sex and violence. Certain ""sexual personae"" have held sway over western imagination--the Greeks' ""beautiful boy"" who reappears in the Renaissance as Donatello's David and then as Dorian Gray, or the ""vampire"" (Medusa, the Mona Lisa, the ""femme fatale"" of Dietrich and Bacall). In 24 chapters, Paglia traces her themes through countless figures in art and literature, among them Botticelli, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Byron, Baudelaire, Emily Bronte, Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelites, Whitman, James, and Emily Dickinson, the Decadent imagist of amputation and death, ""Amherst's Madame de Sade."" Combative, shock-loving, unpruned, and fascinating, this treatise goes too far, strains its definitions, and jams too much into dazzling generalities. But, buttressed by troves of research and acute observation, again and again Paglia persuades us to reconsider. ""Pagan"" in its own pictorialism, sprawl, and unstopped prose, her unusual book creates its brilliant effect from an explosive fusing of scholarship and theater. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.