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Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Paperback – Illustrated, August 20, 1991
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Is Emily Dickinson “the female Sade”? Is Donatello’s David a bit of pedophile pornography? What is the secret kinship between Byron and Elvis Presley, between Medusa and Madonna? How do liberals and feminists—as well as conservatives—fatally misread human nature? This audacious and omnivorously learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since Egyptians invented beauty—making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature.
With 47 photographs.
- Reading age1 year and up
- Print length718 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions5.14 x 1.47 x 7.97 inches
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateAugust 20, 1991
- ISBN-109780679735793
- ISBN-13978-0679735793
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Sexual Personae [is] an enormous sensation of a book, in all the better senses of ‘sensation.’ There is no book comparable in scope, stance, design or insight.” —Harold Bloom
“The ability to infuriate both antagonists in an ideological struggle is often a sign of a first-rate book.... [Paglia] is a conspicuously gifted writer ... and an admirably close reader with a hard core of common sense.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Paglia marshals a vast array of ... cultural materials with an authorial voice derived from sixties acid-rock lead guitar.... Close to poetry.” —Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces
“This book is a red comet in a smog-filled sky.... Brilliant.” —The Nation
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Product details
- ASIN : 0679735798
- Publisher : Vintage (August 20, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 718 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780679735793
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679735793
- Reading age : 1 year and up
- Item Weight : 1.51 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.14 x 1.47 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #71,533 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #150 in General Gender Studies
- #168 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #193 in Art History (Books)
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Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2018
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As I see it, Paglia wants to unearth and analyze the principal archetypes in western visual arts and literature, which requires her to explain religion, society, and even human nature while she's at it. Her methodology, as she puts it, is to link James (Golden Bough) Frazier with Freud; what I think this means is to combine the concept of ancient fertility cults - the earth mother - with Freud's notion of the id, which reflected our deepest, most animalistic urges, and our attempts to contain it by both religion and reason.
According to Paglia, the most basic of these notions is the dark nature/earth mother versus the civilizing force that fights against it. Nature, in this view, is chaotic and destructive as well as fruitful and fertile, traditionally identified with the female; women are powerful givers of life, mysterious in their sexuality and urges, necessary for propagation of the species but also dangerous. The best early exemplar of this, she says, is the Venus of Willendorf, a female form devoid of individuality and rounded as a sign of fertility. She is from a period (30K BCE) before man began to believe he could gain control over nature with such constructions as religion, society, technology and culture, which she argues are all illusions of control over nature and fundamentally male, with straight lines and abstractions about the world, later expressed in art. For her counter-example, she takes the Egyptian bust of Nefertiti, which is highly individual and presents an abstraction of perfect beauty. This is the clearest contrast she presents, in a chapter that is brilliant and concise. In Greece, she continues, these notions are best expressed as Dionysian and Apollonian, the former an androgynous sower of chaos and ecstatic joy and violence, the latter a keeper of order in the universe, a healing god who brings light, with a virgin twin sister (Artemis) who manages the forest and the hunt.
These notions, Paglia asserts, underlie all of the greatest western art, a defiant act of will against the darker side of nature and death. With that, she goes through western culture to the 19C, interpreting the interplay of the Dionysian and Apollonian, interpreting the various societies and cultures in which they arose. It can be very fun, but also illuminating if you are interested in history, the visual arts and literature. Indeed she attempts to pull together such a vast amount of work and history that I am in awe of her ambition.
While there is a great deal of insight in what she says, which makes the book worth the price of admission (and the effort to get through it), I often found myself bewildered at her references or disagreeing with her conclusions and generalizations. That makes the book an uneven reading experience. It isn't helped by her prose either. An example, picked at random: "But Swinburne's eroticism comes from the symmetrical heraldry of female androgynes, who pin the male in a fatal double bind." Many passages are worse.
Most significantly, I found a lot of her reasoning like Freud's later works, where he purports to explain the meaning of certain symbols in art and religion. While his clinical work made a seminal contribution to the understanding of the human mind and the treatment of its maladies, his more general works strike me as, well, off the wall. For example, his essay on religion asserts that its illusions and belief systems represent a neurosis of human society. Even I, a hard core atheist, think there is more to the religious experience than that, much of it positive. Yet Paglia is confident she has found the deepest, most definitive meanings of many works of art in a similar manner. I just can't get there: I think truly great art can be interpreted in multiple ways by different people and in different times, i.e. there is no correct interpretation.
That being said, I hugely enjoyed that book and enthusiastically recommend it as an intellectual adventure worth taking.
The various dualities Dionysian / Apollonian, pagan / Judeo-Christian, female / male, nature / nurture and within nature (of which she has a dark view) itself as malevolent / benevolent are well portrayed and give rise to thought. Her discussion of the androgynous nature of different characters in literary works (e.g. those in Goethe) as well as the 'enormous power' of the mother/woman is well carried. In her analysis of various writers her argument is often repeated; perhaps to have taken fewer examples from each would have been adequate, then again she is presenting a view of various (mainly English) writers which is perhaps quite different from the standard literary critique and therefore worthy of explication.
As the book progresses, Paglia evocatively guides her audience through a pointed tour of art and sexuality, tracking it from pre-modern history through the 20th century. Her thesis, when reduced to its base elements, is that art and human sexuality are inextricable, and she makes persuasive arguments for her positions.
If for no other reason, "Sexual Personae" is worth reading on the grounds of its brilliant distillation of art history—but Paglia's incisive commentary that undergirds it adds new dimensions that are worth thinking about.
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I have to state that several 'female friends' who claim to be feminists seem to find the fact that I am reading Camille Paglia horrifying.
I really do not understand why. Just spurs my interest.

