Customer Reviews

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

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Paglia has gotten so much press in recent years, due to her self-transformation from obscure academic into media pundit, that it's easy to sniff at the awe-inspiring strengths of her first and greatest book. There is something in "Sexual Personae" to annoy and upset everyone - but Paglia irritates because her brilliant mind neatly and decisively rips apart received ideas. By asserting the truth of certain basic oppositions - Apollo/Dionysos, Christian/Pagan, male/female - Paglia creates a thinking-space where we can see how art and literature have flourished in the tense zone between these poles. You cannot help but admire the range and depth of her erudition and interests, particularly in an age where American intellectuals say more and more about less and less. Paglia's prose is clear, dramatic, and of an adamantine brilliance that, in its better passages (the introduction, "Renaissance Art," and "Pagan Beauty," come to mind) stuns yo! u with its insights. I applaud her defense of the male imagination's sexual peculiarities, always kept on a short leash in Puritan America, and greatly look forward to the second volume. This book should be required reading in freshman composition courses. Reading this book changed my view of reality permanently. Paglia says many thing which I had always sensed, but could never put into words. The firestorm of opposition which her ideas have generated merely indicates her strength as a thinker. You owe it to yourself to read this book!

Camille is brilliant, and this book proves it. But this book also proves that Camille is bombastic, occasionally offensive, and tedious. There are parts of this book which sparkle and excite, but there are parts which make me question my decision to shell out the $$ for it in the first place.

In her analysis of everything (which is essentially what this book is), Camille makes absolutely brilliant links between diverse art & artists. She is at her best when she discusses the Dionysian & Apollonian nature of cultural movements, and her clarification of these duelling forces is incisive and thrilling. You wonder about the intellectual acrobatics she is performing in her scholarship, but you are happily amazed at the conclusion of the performance. It is an appealing notion to explain the world of art & culture in these grand, sweeping terms, and even the most anti-Paglia reader has to give her credit where credit is due for making persuasive arguments.

However, the book is tragically bogged down by Camille's cult-of-personality approach to her subject. Her constant pre-emptve strikes at critics are weak, and her own dubious politics are showcased occasionally, serving only to discredit her. She is also frequently impossible to follow, and when you are done with the book, after you get over the glow of her fabulous intellect, you have to wonder if she is just playing some sort of trick...because you have emerged with enough witty, esoteric cocktail party conversation to fill a lifetime (guaranteed to impress everyone at that alum function at your alma mater!) BUT you are still not quite sure what the point was. Which is a real shame.

Nonetheless, I recommend this highly. It is intellectual aerobics, and it is too easy to criticize Camille without ever reading her work. This remarkable book is something which I will never forget, and I have taken a great number of cohesive thoughts about culture from this text and mulled them over, coming to a personal conclusion of my own. It requires an investment of time & effort to get to know this book, but I do feel that it is worthwhile.

A book this outstanding is rare, as I can see from the customer reviews many have perceived. Paglia's book, which I read when I was 17, crystallized my thoughts on art, sexuality, and human nature: like her I was a freakish female fan of Oscar Wilde, the gay male sensibility, and decadence. I had truly been searching for this book since I was 13 years old and got my first adult public library card, and thereby discovered the endlessly fascinating world of literature and art--the existence of which I'd never suspected. I'll never forget sitting down with this book during Grade 12 Spring Break; my mother and little sisters were away visiting relatives, so I had the house to myself during the day and I sat in the dining room from the time my step-father left for work at about 7 am to the time he returned about 5 pm, reading. It was by far the longest and most difficult book I had ever read, and I took time over it because as other customer reviewers have pointed out, Paglia addresses such profound, disturbing ideas in such original, provocative ways that I did no less than go over my whole life in my head from my earliest memories to test Paglia's ideas. Needless to say, Paglia won more often than not: the myth of original sin is a better explanation of art and human nature than the myth of social constructionism.

If you are truly open to ideas and you love art, don't read this book unless you want your life completely changed for better or worse. Almost ten years later I find myself completely intellectually alienated from both peers and most professors in my university English program because I continue to fight UNCOMPROMISINGLY for art and independent thought (not to mention intellectual rigour and standards and good prose!), thanks to Paglia's inspiration. But it makes it worthwhile when I come on amazon.com and see that others have felt the same way I do. For you others, if you're looking for other *special* works of criticism (neither the run-of-the-mill merely accurate kind nor postmodern drivel), I recommend George Toles's A House Made of Light: Essays in the Art of Film and Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. If you read them after Paglia you'll have some balance, too, since Toles and Cavell emphasize the link between art and morality, while treating the subject with the complexity it deserves.

Paglia's "Sexual Personae" is a massive work of Olympian learning; the most important book of the last 3 decades and certainly one of the greatest literary tomes of the century. This book in itself is utterly more valuable than a complete undergraduate education at one of our most prestigious universities.

"Sexual Personae" embodies the kind of hard-thinking discussions of art and philosophy so direly needed as the 20th century comes to a close. Paglia forces us to see the embedded truth in old sexual stereotypes, easily cuts through the muddled sentimentalism of current poststructuralist jargon, and implores us to take stock of ourselves in an ascetic, self-responsible and disciplined way using wit, wisdom, and aesthetics as tools of self-knowledge in a turbulent age of decadent Empire.

Paglia sees human history through art with an all-knowing, unapologetic eye to the point of sophisticated fatigue. She revives the ancient Greek concept of the Apollo/Dionysus continuum, she is honest about human social and sexual catharsis, and for all the talk about Paganism these days Paglia forces us to come to terms with the concept in a way that removes its [beautiful and horrifying] dualities from the sterile, solipsistic MickeyMouse playground on which it has been snidely and carelessly tossed by lazy new-age boomer "intellectuals"--so blindly at the expense of the well-being of the next generation of philosophical thinkers.

In many ways, "Sexual Personae" is a kind of intellectual call-to-arms for Generation X. Paglia is brave, shows that she cares, and is willing to take abuse and get tough in order to get the job done. It is the Bible of the 1990's, and an indespensible book for knowing ourselves and our world.

"Sexual Personae" is the type of galvanizing book that attracts much attention. Camille Paglia is the type of person who seeks attention. Because of her proclivities for media-grabbing, her shock-jock personality, her manic presentation, and some of her more mediocre popular writings, many people have formed an opinion of Dr. Paglia. "Sexual Personae" unfortunately suffers as one of those volumes many have commented on but few have actually read. It is unfairly equated with Paglia's other activity.

As one who has in fact read the book, twice by this point, I can say that it is well written, well considered, and an intellectually strong work. Paglia has obviously pondered her premises extensively, and has sought liberal exposure to a wide array of supporting materials through the years. This is a stunning masterwork and deserves to be read for its own sake rather than as a tool for politically polarized zealots to draw lines in the sand.

Her hypothesis stimulates thought. She looks at gender roles and relations between the sexes as primary forces in cultural history specifically, in human history in general. Paglia uses interesting tools such as the Apollo-Dionysus tension and the intellect-impulse continuum to examine the evidence she has assembled. She places Art Nouveau in a new prominence in Western culture. I believe that there is actually not so much in this book that reasonable people would find objectionable, for it is the kind of overview and survey that considers many facets of human life and is not as inclined to polemic as one might expect if they saw the author on the television.

Paglia's perspective and hypotheses are well served by her unique, highly engaging writing style. Short sentences burst with vitality and fresh ideas. Her outlook is singular and she is unafraid of, nay even drawn to, re-examining conventions. I would recommend that everyone who has bashed or celebrated Paglia pick up the book. It is likely to surprise both camps. It is best read straight through, but being a tour-de-force of daunting size, it can also be approached by seeking parts that address topics of interest. It is a considerable accomplishment, and I suspect the regard it is given will increase as the author's pop culture reputation fades.

Imagine some monstrous 600-page addenda to *The Birth of Tragedy*, deploying the Apollo vs. Dionysus doublet ad vertiginem, putting the proleptic insights of Pater, Jung, and Frazer to work in new and frightful ways, invoking a faux-Gorgonic eye to peer into the heart of culture High and Low, from empyrean edifice to paganized Pop void, and you'll have a distant impression of this cocky, gumptious, explosive treatise, a book that takes so many risks its grating weaknesses never quite catch up to its prodigal greatness. You just gotta read this.

*Sexual Personae* starts out strong. Its promises are manifold. By the time Paglia is done ravishing us with her visionary Egyptology and impudent synoptic judgements on the failures of feminism to give us an authentic sexual politics, the reader feels primed and whetted for the perilous night journey ahead. For the next 550 pages, however, our expectations are both whippingly indulged and (sigh) left flaccid, limp, and befuddled. Mistress Camille begins to flounder beneath the weight of her gushing, declamatory syntax, pounding and thrashing us with repetition and overemphasis, the voice of an S/M dominatrix sliding mushily into self-parody.

As John Updike soberly put it, "It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Her percussive style -- one short declarative sentence after another -- eventually wearies the reader; her diction functions not so much to elicit the secrets of books as to hammer them into submission.... The weary reader longs for the mercy of a qualification, a doubt, a hesitation; there is little sense, in her uncompanionable prose, of exploration occuring before our eyes, of tentative motions of thought reflected in a complex syntax." Paglia throws around the word "chthonic" like Heidegger pimping "Dasein." The Nietzschean parabolic of Apollo vs. Dionysus is often stretched thinner than Calista Flockhart fed through a saltwater taffy dispenser. But when Paglia is good, she's good. When fiery intellectual hubris finds its phantom gemini in the anguished erotic gravity of high art and literature (even when this gravity seems a willful projection of the critic's own manic preconceptions), the book simply rocks.

Paglia's energy and brilliance open up fresh horizons of speculation, at times verging on the ridiculous (why, even crankish) but always delivered in a high operatic style, with a strident sense of humor. Even so, her formulations can seem oddly reductive, everything draining out into the proverbial "chthonic swamp" of (all together now) Sex and Death. "One author after another is made to confess to sexual crossover, androgyny, and sadomasochism" (Updike, 607). For better or worse, her Nietzschean cold-water brutality keeps things grounded in the Freudian mother-earth we thought we'd deconstructed into oblivion, returning us to a dark, punishing realm of synoptic deities who tear men's lives to shreds without batting an eyelash, sending the phallic ego on greased skids to Hell while maintaining their crystalline serenity. Like the dark heart of a jewel, the gods refract all light as we transients of the flesh go down to feed the worm.

Some of Paglia's paragraphs are (more or less) "chthonic" mush, an attempt to forcefeed her pet metaphors of sexual neurosis down the throats of younger readers eager for snappy punchlines and all the deferential sloganizing of feckless guru-worship. But just as often her quicksilver intellect hits us pleasurably below the belt, leaving the reader shaken and transfigured by a powerful, exotic cinema of the spirit, forcing us to rethink our whole battery of preconceptions on every artist and work under discussion. A powerful disciple of both Walter Pater and Harold Bloom (her Yale mentor), Paglia's sass and impertinence takes "critical personality" to new, er...depths? But while Bloom prefers the logocentric Bible to cinematic Homer, Paglia's prose is an awakening to the image-hungry pagan energies of the Graeco-daemonic visionaire, putting her in some strange middle ground between coquettish-but-cruel Art History professor and savvy-if-overconfident culture critic determined to put Euripides and Edmund Spenser in the same conceptual schema as Keith Richards and Madonna.

*Sexual Personae* churns and rumbles with this sort of audacity, shifting breakneck from meticulous, careful scholarship to wild conjecture and enthralling hearsay (often in the same paragraph) without so much as a by-your-leave, transfused with a fluid comedic irony that kept this reader chuckling softly to himself throughout. Paglia takes no prisoners. Her egotism is as caustic as it is unrepentant, as bludgeoning as it is cranky, as penetrating as it is monomanical. She polarizes her audience. At her strongest and most original, you either love her or hate her. I won't even try to compete with the wonderful media caricatures that have fulminated in the wake of her celebrity. This philosophic maneater knows all too well the sexual persona she has created for herself, the lesbian-vampire renegade academic deploying pungent barbs of wit from her sniper's nest at the University of Arts in Philadelphia. And when she hits her mark, that goon squad of poseurs, bureaucrats, pomo fiends, and power-obsessed Foucauldian politickers that saturate Academe seem to wilt into irrelevance when propped toe-to-toe against her loud, dismissive, polemical swath.

Despite its many hokey allegations, its fatuous overreadings, its easy-to-parody voice, its argumentative forcefeeding, and its jarring repetitions and overblown pretentions, *Sexual Personae* is a book I recommend to virtually everyone I meet. Just to see their reaction. To provoke a new, headier form of dialogue, a post-Freudian genital vernacular sashaying its way past crotchety feminist tightwads who cheerfully ignore human biology by trying to eunuchize that hoary "patriarchal" beast of art-producing obsessiveness. And, hopefully, a good cathartic guffaw every few pages or so. Not of condescension, but rather pure sensual joy of steamy, immoderate, intellectual conversation. For beneath it all, Paglia is a fork-tongued raconteur and comedienne of the Oscar Wilde school for tarts, an irresistable stud-leather vixen bringing the bullwhip of her sass down on our goosepimpled backsides.

So don't be a prig. Go get some.

I'm a female college student (gasp! horrors!) and I feel like I've spent my life searching for Sexual Personae. After howsomever many years learning about self and other and the trappings of multiculturalism, this book is a dream. It's the first piece of "feminist" (?) writing to address me in any real way. Why, despite our increased political equality do women continue to behave as inferior to men? Why do we loathe and enslave ourselves despite societal gains? Until we figure out the *real* answers to these questions we can't expect to move forward. Paglia knows the answers, and she presents them unflinchingly in all their horrible, naked cruelty. But her intelligence and wit are so strikingly Apollonian, it proves that women can escape their own Cthonthian nature should they choose to. Believe it or not, her book is heartening and optimistic; it presents a genuine challenge to women. No female will be comfortable wearily blaming society for her ills after she finishes this book.

Way back when Susan Sontag was still an important critic, she said, "In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." Well, here it is.

The basic thesis of this book is simple, though its consequences are far-ranging. She maintains that aesthetic principles are rooted in the artist's perception of and ideas about nature, sex, and women, (which are inextricable because, as she says, "sex is a subset of nature," and women have always been identified as a kind of avatar of nature). Men are nature's exiles and subjects, and therefore have had to create science and art as protections against it. But art also serves as an important link to nature; much of it serves in a religious capacity. She maintains that the Pagan cults of earth-worship were not exterminated by Judeo-Christian monotheism, but were rather transmuted into aesthetics. This pagan strain in art is what she traces, from classical antiquity in Greece and Rome to its rebirth amid Christianity's domain in the Renaissance, and again in the so-called Age of Reason, where we know it as Romanticism. Paglia believes we are still in the Romantic age (and not the Postmodern), though we know it mainly in popular culture, especially Hollywood films and rock music. (Movie stars are frequently referenced, and she notoriously compares Lord Byron to Elvis Presley.) She also convincingly demonstrated that some of the most revered works of art are chock full of perversity, a fact to which we remain blind, even in our sophisticated, cynical age. Moralism, both conservative and liberal, is not only a constraining influence on the arts, but causes us to misunderstand them.

Needless to say, these ideas are not popular in the academic world. The brilliant first chapter is called "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art" and it overturns the bulk of modernist and postmodern ideas about each of those.

What I love about Paglia is that she does not process art in a purely intellectual way, which is a temptation (or deficiency) for the critic, and would be suicide for an artist. She is keenly attuned to the spiritual aspect of art, and can articulate the experience of it with a lucidity that is frequently awesome. Paglia reasserts the primacy of aesthetics in an academic milieu which understands nothing except through ideology (called, in academe, "theory"). She also combines both Romantic and Classic sensibilities. She is clearly sympathetic to Romanticism, but much of Sexual Personae details the ways in which the Romantic desire for infinite freedom is inevitably thwarted by the reality of nature.

Paglia's criticism is at her best here in her chapter on Emily Dickenson, whom she calls "Madame de Sade", and who seems to have been misunderstood even by her admirers for over a hundred years. This is the book's final chapter, and it is so incisive and revelatory that it makes "deconstructive" criticism look like bloated, impotent sophistry.

First Off: There's no way I'm going to cram into a thousand words everything I feel I need to say about this book. Thus, I'll stick to what I regard as the bare bones of its import. The first thing you have to realize is just how much Paglia owes to her mentor, Harold Bloom. I would strongly advise any potential readers of this book to read both The Visionary Company and The Western Canon before embarking into this scintillating morass, however unrealistic an expectation that may be.
This book, despite all the lip service given to the "Appolonian," is deluged with the Chthonian, and the reader will come away from this tome besplattered with the mud and slime of the swampy Chtonian Nature of the world than anything else. Mind you, there's nothing contradictory in this result. It is indeed just what the much-praised Appolinian artist does, according to Paglia: Reveal the Chthonian with a voyeuristic, Spencerian eye. This Paglia does with an elan and flair unmatched in critical writing.

But beware! Paglia, like Bloom, is reductionist. Bloom's ultimate take on more or less the same subject matter with which Paglia treats is Gnosticism, thus ultimately spiritual. Bloom sees a sort of warfare going on between the earthly and chthonian and the spiritual. He resolves this in Gnosticism, an heretical sect that flourished in the early centuries A.D. and maintained that this world is evil, created by a "demiurge" and that the visions of poets like Shelley are nothing less than emanations from another realm. For Paglia, all this is sexual, and Bloom would not deny a sexual element in all of it, but he goes a bit further in explaining it. Prime example: Paglia's "womb/tomb" of the Chthonian is simply a given. In Bloom, it is the prison of our Fall fom the Gnostic other realm. It fits into a cosmology.

There's a very weird realization that comes over the reader (at least this reader) when we come to the Coleridge section on his poem "Christabel" and the vampire Geraldine and continues creeping over him or her until the final chapter on Emily Dickinson. I know no other way of saying this than that Paglia BECOMES Geraldine to the reader. - I agree with her that Emily Dickinson is an extremely powerful and misunderstood poet and, indeed, have spent several ultimately worthwhile hours poring over her short poems to discover the sexual/spiritual depths. But, sorry Camille, Dickinson is just not another Sade altogether. But in the way Paglia presents her, with Sadean snippets of her poetry, the reader who is unfamiliar with the rest of Dickinson's work cannot fail to come away with this conviction. - For the record: I think part of Dickinson's persona is sadomachistic, but it is only a piece of a complex puzzle.

What we are witnessing and in danger of becoming engulfed in (It happened to me.) is Paglia' own mythopoecism. At some point between Christabel and Dickinson, Paglia becomes the subject of her work. We fall in love with her (I did.); but in the way that Christabel does with Geraldine. She lures us into her own imaginative fixation on the Chthonian womb/tomb of the female, and we identify HER with IT.

In conclusion, READ THIS BOOK, if only for the transformative effect it will have on you. In the last page of the book, Paglia says of Emily Dickinson that "She is frightening!" Yes, Camille,.....YOU ARE!

Camille Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE is a huge book in every sense. It makes me want to read and reread a great many books, examine and re-examine a great number of sculptures and paintings. There are in it interpretations of particular works with which I disagree, and others on which I am not qualified to judge, but the big themes in it - the continuity of paganism, the approaches to sex and nature - are a valuable contribution. One of the more valuable ideas I got out of this book was the notion of nature as the unpredictable or uncontrollable. Understanding nature in this way does-in the usual distinction between nature and nurture, one of our more annoying never-to-be-answered "disputes." The cultural can be thought of as what I can predict, control, know. The natural is, then, not just storms, weather, meteors but also to various degrees Kafkan bureaucracies, friends and relatives, social trends, my future self. How some combination of genes, nutrition, parenting, television, choices of career and friends, and so on, will have created the person I will be in ten more years is not an illegitimate question. But its possible answers do not divide usefully into two categories (or three, if we [attempt unsuccessfully to] add to "nature" and "nurture" the category of "free will"), and its answer can never be complete. It is a compelling line of thought for another reason, namely that it touches - however clumsily - on the question of what we can control and what we cannot.

Paglia is a subtle and intelligent writer, and hasty simplifications of her positions are liable to be wrong. For example, she deplores avoidance of concentration on biographical information about a work's author, but she also frequently overrules an author's judgment of his or her work.

Still, there is a position that seems pretty clearly present in Paglia with which I'd like to quarrel. At the very least it is a position that Paglia can have expected her readers to find and that she has not renounced. The idea that I have in mind is that of nature as a permanent force or set of forces resulting in specific events. I'm undecided as to how much, if at all, Paglia overstates some of her readings of sexual themes in Western art. But I am certain that she overstates her belief in the immutability of female and male "nature" or behavior. I am certain that her interpretations do not conflict with but add to various interpretations she believes she's disproven (though, others I think she has indeed disproven). And I have no doubt that she underestimates the importance of cultural tradition in discouraging the creation of more and greater female creators.

Paglia uses "male" and "female" as categories of behaviors that any person can - to some degree, at least - adopt, and yet she thinks of them as pre-existing culture. She will state one conclusion and then preface her assertion of the opposite with the words "Mythologically, however ...." These points are usually good ones, but they describe a culture that is changing, not a permanent realm of Myth. Paglia thinks that lack of freedom and opportunity has had little to do with preventing the arising of more great women artists, but she does not comment on the importance of artistic tradition to an artist and how it may have been and still be difficult for women to jump into traditions dominated by men. Bloom is an influence on Paglia and influence is a theme of her book, yet she ignores it here. To her mind female artists have had to masculinize themselves not in order to enter a masculine tradition but in order to enter any artistic tradition that there might have been.

I am attracted to what Paglia sees as the honesty of depicting violence and cruelty in human life, even in childhood, because I largely agree with her. But there is also a great deal of gentleness and compassion which it is no less honest to depict (and, importantly, thereby to encourage). Countless readers are bound to come away from Paglia thinking that she has proven that certain violent sadistic tendencies are INEVITABLE and PERMANENT and (therefore) proper. This is bunk, and I hold out hope that Paglia knows as much. This kind of thinking results in our greatest social hopes being for "just wars," not peace, for state executions that do not allow the victim's face to reveal agony, rather than a ban on capital punishment, for the play-acting of rape and murder rather than excitement over peace and love. This is the thinking that produces cultural products that encourage violence on the fallacious grounds that viewing violent movies will "get the violence out of kids' systems," rather than - as is clearly the case - put the violence in kids' systems. Paglia's SEXUAL PERSONAE are in part what are usually called sex-objects, and thinking about people as people or as sex-objects is a choice one can make. I suspect that Paglia disagrees with me about which way of thinking is more important.

Like most great thinkers, Paglia overestimates her accomplishment. She has picked out a new strain in Western history. She has not shown us the true face of humanity.

What she has done, though, is fantastic, and my main hope is that we do not UNDER-estimate her accomplishment or relegate her to the department of lesbian studies or "cult status" among witches, pagans, wiggans, etc.