Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art

Nature is an amoral, chthonian force indifferent to human ideals, and sex — as the point of contact between man and nature — is irreducibly daemonic, violent, and beyond the reach of social reform. Western culture and art are Apollonian defenses against this overwhelming natural force, not expressions of benign human sociality.

• Rousseauist feminism fundamentally misunderstands sex by reducing it to a social construct, when in fact aggression, rape, and sadism are expressions of nature’s amoral will-to-power that civilization can only partially contain, never eliminate.
  • Feminism, as heir to Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762), assumes aggression comes from social deprivation and that social reform can achieve harmony, but this contradicts the evidence of rape and sadism across all cultures and all of history.
  • Sade, the most unread major writer in western literature, offers a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau, following Hobbes in asserting that aggression comes from nature itself — what Nietzsche calls the will-to-power.
  • “The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning.” —Camille Paglia
• The chthonian — the dark, generative, destructive underside of nature associated with femaleness, earth, and biology — is the repressed foundation of western culture, which western art and religion perpetually attempt to evade through Apollonian form.
  • The Dionysian has become contaminated with vulgar pleasantries; the chthonian refers specifically to the blind grinding of subterranean force, the murk and ooze — the dehumanizing brutality of biology and geology that Apollo evades.
  • Western science and aesthetics are attempts to revise the horror of chthonian nature into imaginatively palatable form; every time we call nature beautiful, we are saying a prayer.
• Female biology binds women to chthonian nature in ways that male biology does not — menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth are not merely social experiences but archaic natural processes that resist the western ideal of autonomous selfhood.
  • Woman’s centrality in nature gives her a stability of identity — she does not have to become but only to be — while man must transform himself into an independent being, driving him toward cultural creation as escape.
  • The female body is a chthonian machine, indifferent to the spirit who inhabits it; every pregnant woman has body and self taken over by a force beyond her control — a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live.
• Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted.
• Male anatomy — with its emphasis on concentration, projection, linearity, and aim — is the physiological basis for the Apollonian achievements of western culture, including art, science, philosophy, and capitalism.
  • Man is sexually compartmentalized — condemned to a perpetual pattern of linearity, focus, aim, directedness — and this genital metaphor of concentration and projection is the paradigm for all cultural projection and conceptualization.
  • Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist — their eroticism is diffused throughout the body rather than concentrated in a single projective organ.
  • “The capitalist distribution network is one of the greatest male accomplishments in the history of culture — it is capitalism that has freed woman as a woman to sit at a desk writing.” —Camille Paglia
• Art originates as an Apollonian defense against chthonian nature — a ritualistic binding and reordering of reality — and is therefore inherently aggressive, amoral, and inseparable from the violence and sexuality it appears to transcend.
  • Art is a shutting in in order to shut out; it is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature — the first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness.
  • Nietzsche says almost everything we call higher culture is based on the spiritualization of cruelty; art makes order of nature’s cyclonic brutality, and literature’s endless murders and disasters are there for contemplative pleasure, not moral lesson.
  • Pornography and art are inseparable because there is voyeurism and voracity in all our sensations as seeing, feeling beings; Geoffrey Hartman rightly says great art is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography.
• Western culture’s war against paganism — from Judaism through Christianity to feminism — has never succeeded, because the chthonian daemonism of sex and nature perpetually resurfaces in art, pornography, and popular culture, which are the true heirs of pagan ritual.
  • Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media; with the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, Judeo-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam.
  • Cinema is the supreme Apollonian genre — the blazing lightbeam of the movie projector is our modern path of Apollonian transcendance — and the pagan cult of personality has reawakened to dominate all art and all thought.
• The femme fatale is not a patriarchal fiction but an accurate mythological extrapolation of female biological power — the permanent danger of dissolution and castration that male sexuality faces in contact with female nature.
  • The North American Indian myth of the vagina dentata is a gruesomely direct transcription of female power and male fear — metaphorically, every vagina has secret teeth, for the male exits as less than when he entered.
  • The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae — not a neurotic but a psychopath, with an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power.

The Birth of the Western Eye

Egypt invented the Apollonian western eye — the hard, clear, form-making gaze that liberates consciousness from chthonian nature — and the history of western art begins not in Greece but in the Egyptian synthesis of sky-cult formalism with earth-cult mystery. The contrast between the Venus of Willendorf and the bust of Nefertiti dramatizes the fundamental western movement from body to head, from chthonian immersion to Apollonian projection.

• Most ancient cosmogonies are overtly sexual and admit the primacy of procreative nature, but Judeo-Christian Genesis is a revolutionary male declaration of independence from ancient mother-cults, making creation rational, systematic, and patrilineal.
  • Egyptian Khepera gives birth by an act of masturbation — pouring seed into his own mouth — modeling the self-contained creativity of the Romantic androgyne that will recur throughout western art history.
  • The myth of matriarchy may have originated in our universal experience of mother power in infancy, but as history the idea is spurious — not a shred of evidence supports the existence of matriarchy anywhere in the world at any time.
• The Great Mother goddess — worshipped from prehistory through the Roman Empire under dozens of names — was never the benevolent peaceable deity promoted by feminist scholars, but a figure of violent, morally ambivalent chthonian power whose cults involved castration, self-mutilation, and ritual dismemberment.
  • The mother goddess gives life but takes it away — the sanitized pacifist goddess promoted by feminism is wishful thinking; from prehistory to the end of the Roman empire, the Great Mother never lost her barbarism.
  • The Great Mother’s eunuch priest was called ‘she’; in ceremonies at Syracuse, men were initiated in Demeter’s purple robe; in ancient Mexico, a woman representing the goddess was flayed and her skin put on by a male priest.
• The androgynous shaman — who crosses sexes in trance and ritual — is the archaic prototype of the artist; figures like Teiresias represent the fusion of male and female knowledge that produces the deepest cultural insight.
  • Spiritual enlightenment produces feminization of the male; in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Teiresias is the hero’s double — both are involuntary initiates into an uncanny range of sexual experience, and at play’s end Oedipus literally becomes Teiresias.
  • The shaman crosses sexes and commands space and time, going into trance and flying over distant lands or dying and being resurrected — the shaman is an archaic prototype of the artist who crosses sexes and commands space and time.
• The Apollonian eye is the brain’s great victory over the bloody open mouth of mother nature.
• The Venus of Willendorf represents earth-cult at its most extreme — eyeless, brainless, all body — symbolizing the formlessness of chthonian nature that western culture must overcome through Apollonian form-making.
  • The Venus of Willendorf is comically named, for she is unbeautiful by every standard — beauty has not yet emerged as a criterion for art, which in the Old Stone Age was magic, a ritual recreation of what-is-desired, not meant to be seen.
  • She has no feet and would topple over if placed on end; her arms are flat flippers, useless — unlike man, she can neither roam nor build; she is a mountain that can be climbed but can never move.
• Egypt invented the Apollonian eye and western glamour: by concentrating political power in the divine Pharaoh, Egypt created the mystique of hierarchical image-projection, the hard-contoured person as work of art, and the fusion of beauty with power that defines western personality.
  • The Nile cutting through the desert was the first straight line in western culture — Egypt discovered linearity, a phallic track of mind piercing the entanglements of nature; the thirty royal dynasties were the cascading river of history.
  • Egyptian art is glyptic, based on the incised edge which is the Apollonian element in western culture — the line drawn between nature and culture, the steely autograph of the western will.
  • Egypt invented elegance — which is reduction, simplification, condensation — and the source of Greek and Roman classicism, clarity, order, proportion, balance, is in Egypt.
• The bust of Nefertiti is the supreme example of the Apollonian transformation of female nature into hard, radiant, conceptual form — but its popularity is based on misunderstanding, since the actual bust is intolerably severe and the proper response is fear.
  • The bust is artistically and ritualistically complete as we have it, with its missing left eye: Nefertiti is an android, a manufactured being, a new gorgoneion — paralyzed and paralyzing, western ego under glass.
  • From Venus of Willendorf to Nefertiti: from body to face, touch to sight, love to judgment, nature to society — Nefertiti’s imperious jutting face is the cutting edge of western conceptualization and projection.
• The Egyptian veneration of cats was neither silly nor childish but a profound symbol of Egypt’s unique synthesis of chthonian and Apollonian principles — the cat’s dual nature as nocturnal predator and hieratic Apollonian poseur embodied the Egyptian genius.
  • The cat is eye-intense, fusing the Gorgon eye of appetite to the detached Apollonian eye of contemplation; it has a sense of pictorial composition and persona, adhering to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space.
  • The cat, fixing its swift predatory energy in poses of Apollonian stasis, was the first to enact the frozen moment of perceptual stillness that is high art.

Apollo and Dionysus

Apollo and Dionysus represent the two master principles of western culture — individuation, form, and the aggressive eye versus dissolution, liquidity, and chthonian identification — and the entire history of western art, thought, and politics is the unresolved drama of their combat. Greek culture’s great achievements arose from the tension between these principles, with classicism representing Apollo’s temporary victories over Dionysian nature.

• The Olympian gods, beginning with the shift from earth-cult to sky-cult, represent an Apollonian achievement of form and individuation over chthonian nature — they are objets d’art, symbolizing social order and the clarity of western mind.
  • Nietzsche calls Apollo the god of individuation and just boundaries — the Apollonian borderline separates demes, districts, ideas, persons; western individuation is Apollonian and the western ego is finite, articulated, visible.
  • Roger Hinks says Olympian religion is essentially a religion of the successful, comfortable, and healthy ruling-class — the Olympians are authoritarian and repressive, and what they repress is the monstrous gigantism of chthonian nature.
• Artemis — the armed virgin huntress — is one of the Greeks’ greatest Apollonian ideas, representing female power that has escaped chthonian nature through militant chastity, aggressive selfhood, and cold domination of space.
  • Artemis is velocity and splendor — woman imperiously eluding the world and definitions of men; her chastity is a metaphor for power, freedom, and audacity, descending from the Great Mother’s renewable virginity signifying independence from males.
  • As a character type, Artemis is an arrested adolescent — her figure is boyish, her breasts undeveloped; she cannot be psychologically, much less physically, invaded; she is incapable of relaxation or relenting.
  • Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story is the only true Artemis in western art after Spenser’s Belphoebe — she is woman darting away into western epic space, putting into divine perpetual motion the burden of woman’s chthonian body.
• Athena’s androgyny — expressed in her male armor, her transsexual disguises in Homer, and her birth from Zeus’ brow — represents the hermaphroditic nature of the practical mind (techne), which is the ability to invent, plan, conspire, cope, and survive.
  • The mind as techne, pragmatic design, was hermaphroditic for the ancients; Athena personifies only the waking ego, daylight energies — she literally is the shifting, shifty powers of human intelligence that can exploit situation and opportunity.
  • Athena appears as male in disguise more often than any other Greek god because she symbolizes resourceful, adaptive mind; sexually mobile Athena literally is the shifting, shifty powers of human intelligence.
• Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful.
• Dionysus rules the chthonian hygra physis — wet or liquid nature — and represents identification, empathy, dissolution of boundaries, and Protean metamorphosis, making him the principle directly opposed to Apollonian individuation and western personality.
  • I interpret Plutarch’s hygra physis as contained water, fluids which ooze, drip, or hang in tissues or fleshy sacs — the mature female body, which is a prison of gender; female experience is submerged in the world of fluids, dramatically demonstrated in menstruation, childbirth, and lactation.
  • Dionysus’ transvestism symbolizes his radical identification with mothers; he is the all-embracing totality of mother-cult — nothing disgusts him, since he contains everything that is; disgust is an Apollonian response, an aesthetic judgment.
• Dionysian sparagmos — ritual dismemberment and the eating of raw flesh — is the violent foundation of both Greek tragedy and Christian liturgy, revealing that western religion is built on the assimilation of daemonic natural forces rather than their transcendence.
  • At every Christian service, wafers and wine are changed into Christ’s body and blood — in Catholicism this is not symbolic but literal; transubstantiation is cannibalism, and the Dionysian sparagmos was an ecstasy of sexual excitation and superhuman strength.
  • Frazer’s analogy between Jesus and the dying gods is the most brilliant perception of The Golden Bough — the Christian ritual of death and redemption is a survival of pagan mystery religion, and the Pietà resembles the type of the sorrowful goddess with her dying lover.
• The Apollonian and Dionysian are fundamentally political as well as aesthetic principles: Apollo is aristocratic, monarchist, and reactionary — the One — while Dionysus is democratic, plural, and anarchic — the Many — producing the fundamental political oscillation of western history.
  • Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification; Dionysus is the empathic, sympathetic emotion transporting us into other people, other places, other times; Apollo is the hard, cold separatism of western personality and categorical thought.
  • Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus a vandal; every excess breeds its counterreaction, and so western culture swings from point to point on its complex cycle, pouring forth its lavish tributes of art, word, and deed.

Pagan Beauty

The beautiful boy — the supreme sexual persona of classical Athens — is western homosexuality’s greatest contribution to art: an Apollonian correction of chthonian female nature, freezing adolescent male beauty into an icon of pure perceptual form. The Aeschylean Oresteia and Euripidean Bacchae frame the arc of Athenian classicism as a movement from Apollo’s triumph over chthonian nature to Dionysus’ devastating return.

• Aeschylus’ Oresteia dramatizes the birth of civilization as a defeat of chthonian female power by Apollonian male reason, making Athens’ misogyny inseparable from its creative genius — classical high culture requires the suppression of female principle.
  • The Oresteia recapitulates history, moving from nature to society, from chaos to order, from emotion to reason, from revenge to justice, from female to male — Athena, unexpectedly endorsing male rule on the grounds that she is motherless, seals the Apollonian victory.
  • Athens became great not despite but because of its misogyny; male homosexuality played a similar catalytic role in Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan London — small bands of men attaining visionary heights in a few concentrated years of exaltation and defiance.
• Euripides’ Bacchae is a point-by-point demolition of the Oresteia, showing chthonian Dionysian nature overwhelming Apollonian civilization — and its uncanny parallels to the New Testament suggest that Christianity itself emerged from the same Dionysian matrix.
  • The Bacchae strangely prefigures the New Testament: four hundred years before Christ, Euripides depicts the conflict between armed authority and a popular cult — a long-haired nonconformist claiming to be the son of God arrives at the capital with a mob of scruffy disciples.
  • The Bacchae is our story — the Sixties generation may be the first since antiquity to have had so direct an experience of Dionysus; rock music is the naked power of Dionysus as Bromios, the Thunderer.
• The Greek beautiful boy — the kouros — is western art’s greatest sexual persona: an Apollonian idealization of male adolescence that escapes chthonian female nature by freezing living beauty into the hard clarity of sculptural form.
  • The beautiful boy was always beardless, frozen in time; at manhood he became a lover of boys himself — like the Christian saint, he was a martyr, victim of nature’s tyranny, his beauty caught full-flower by Apollonian sculpture.
  • The Athenian turn away from women toward boys was a brilliant act of conceptualization — unjust and ultimately self-thwarting, it was nevertheless a crucial movement in the formation of western culture and identity.
  • Freud saw the androgyny in the Greek adolescent: among the Greeks, where the most manly men were found among inverts, it was the boy’s physical resemblance to woman as well as his feminine psychic qualities — shyness, demureness, the need of instruction and help — that kindled the love of man.
• The beautiful boy represents a hopeless attempt to separate imagination from death and decay. He is form seceding from form-making.
• The Archaic kouros and Kritios Boy are the founding monuments of western art’s fusion of sex, power, and personality — from these homoerotic icons descends a direct line through Byzantine Christian art to Renaissance painting and the St. Sebastian theme.
  • The kouros records the first cult of personality in western history — it is an icon of the worship of beauty, a hierarchism self-generated rather than dynastic; divinity and stardom fall upon the beautiful boy.
  • There is a direct artistic line from Archaic Greek kouroi to the standing saints of Italian altarpieces and the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals — homoerotic iconicism goes full circle in the popular Italian theme of St. Sebastian, a beautiful seminude youth pierced by phallic arrows.
• The Medea of Euripides dramatizes the return of chthonian force against the Apollonian ideal of individuated form — the dissolution of the princess’s features beyond recognition is an elegy for Athenian high classicism and a prototype of Dionysian body-image collapse.
  • The passage combines admiration and physical revulsion — the princess’s meltdown of face and flesh dissolves the proprioceptive sense, the Apollonian unity of personality; Spengler says soul for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body.
  • Euripides makes two planes of reality collide: into the world of glittering Apollonian appearances springs a form-dissolving fountain of chthonian force, erupting from primeval chaos — the intelligible momentarily loses to the irrational.
• Roman culture inherited Greek Apollonianism but coarsened and statified it — making personality monumental, documentary, and propagandistic — while Roman decadence was produced by the collision of this hard Apollonian persona with the free-flowing sexuality of the Hellenistic world.
  • The Roman emperors — Nero, Caligula, Elagabalus — made living theater of sexual personae with absolute power: Elagabalus longed for womanhood, prostituted himself in Roman brothels, and asked physicians to contrive a woman’s vagina in his body.
  • Eye plus orgy equals decadence — the Roman decadent kept the observing Apollonian eye awake during Dionysian revel; without strong personality of the western kind, serious decadence is impossible.

Renaissance Form

The Italian Renaissance was an explosion of sexual personae powered by the rediscovery of Apollonian pagan form, transmitted through Donatello’s homoerotic bronze David to Botticelli’s luminous iconicism, Leonardo’s chiaroscuro femmes fatales, and Michelangelo’s titanic masculinity — each artist fighting the chthonian female principle with the sharp aggressive western eye. The beautiful boy is the Renaissance’s supreme contribution, fusing sex, power, and Apollonian light into the foundational icons of western culture.

• The Italian Renaissance was inaugurated by the Black Death’s shattering of medieval Christian social controls — by reducing persons to bodies, the plague unmoralized physicality and prepared it for pagan reidealization in art.
  • The Black Death worked in reverse from the Athenian plague, giving birth to the Renaissance by destroying the Middle Ages — Philip Ziegler says modern man was forged in the crucible of the Black Death.
  • Boccaccio’s Decameron, framed by plague, is the first work of Renaissance literature and an epic of cultural disintegration and renewal — its wellborn women being nursed by male servants and displaying their bodies freely signals the breakdown of Christian bodily taboo.
• Donatello’s bronze David — the first free-standing sculpture since the fall of Rome — is the founding homosexual icon of Renaissance art, a frozen wet dream of Apollonian beauty that establishes the beautiful boy as the supreme aesthetic ideal.
  • David’s contrapposto is languorously Hellenistic — the hand on hip and cocked knee create an air of sexual solicitation; the combination of child’s physique with female body language is perverse and pederastic, a formula Michelangelo will adopt.
  • The feathery wing of Goliath’s helmet climbs ticklishly up the inside of David’s thigh, pointing toward the genitals; the gushing blood, wing-topped, is a carnal cloud — the stream is the giant’s, and the artist’s, own desire.
• Botticelli’s Birth of Venus reimagines the chthonian fertility goddess as an Apollonian personality — clean, luminous, and crystalline — representing the temporary Apollonian victory over female nature that characterizes Florentine Renaissance art at its peak.
  • The Birth of Venus is a pagan altarpiece — the goddess’s monumentality and proud separatism come from sculpture; she is sex and love washed clean of mystery and danger, the freshest of breezes skipping across a shallow, Byzantinely sharp composition.
  • The Primavera, by contrast, is decadent — a black egg cracked open by The Birth of Venus; the dark grove is an emanation of Spring’s bulging womb at the picture’s center, and the energies are boxed, the figures separated by invisible barriers, each locked in an allegorical cell.
• The beautiful boy is homosexuality’s greatest contribution to western culture. Un-Christian and anti-Christian, he is an iconic formalization of the relation between the eye and reality.
• Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the premier sexual persona of western art — a Gorgon and apotropaion presiding over a desolate landscape, combining fleshy amplitude with emotional obliqueness and earthly devastation as a portrait of mother nature herself.
  • Leonardo used sfumato, a chthonian leakage, as his female principle — but this Dionysian mistiness worked against his high classicist ambition to subdue mother nature; the more he plays her game, the less he can paint, which explains the astonishing smallness of his finished output.
  • Mona Lisa looks through us and passively accepts our admiration as her due — Walter Pater is to call her a vampire; she radiates the solipsism of woman gloating over her own creation, and Leonardo has drawn mother nature from life.
• Michelangelo’s obsessive theme is the Apollonian glorification of maleness, but his art is perpetually threatened by the chthonian feminine principle — producing an uncanny oscillation between masculine monumentality and feminine surrender that is the source of his terribilità.
  • Michelangelo’s women — the Cumaean Sibyl, the Medici Chapel nudes — are viragos: a fusion of Great Mother and Amazon, large-breasted and sexually mature yet spiritually imprisoned and poisoned, with male biceps and ridged abdomens stuck with knobby breast-protuberances.
  • The Dying Slave is a sexual reversal of David — the combination of athletic male physique with female mood and body language is perverse, turning the milder flaunting of Donatello’s bronze David into decadent sexual cultism, an ecstasy of sadomasochistic bondage.
  • Oil painting and color, said Michelangelo, are for women and the lazy — his sharp-edged Apollonian style is the only way to beat back mother nature, and it is the hieratic signature of the western will.
• Cellini’s Perseus dramatizes the Renaissance artist as heroic self-creator who raises western personality to a pedestal — and the collective response of Florentines to its unveiling demonstrates the capacity of public art to unify social classes in a common pagan epiphany.
  • Cellini attacks by earth, air, water, and fire; the metal curdles and must be resurrected; finally, the artist — transfigured by creative ecstasy — defeats all obstacles and brings Perseus into the world in an explosion, a tremendous flash of flame like a thunderbolt.
  • At Perseus’ unveiling, the crowd sends up a shout of boundless enthusiasm; dozens of sonnets are nailed up; the Duke sits for hours in a hidden window listening to citizens acclaim the statue — it is impossible to imagine a modern art work provoking such a response.

Spenser and Apollo

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is the foundational text of English literary greatness because it imports the hard Apollonian line of Greco-Roman and Byzantine pictorialism into English poetry, creating a medium of sustained meditation on sex, power, and identity that shaped all subsequent English literature. By rejecting Chaucer’s humanist populism for aristocratic pagan iconicism, Spenser invented a visual language of armored personality, voyeurism, and decadent eroticism that secretly undermines the poem’s Protestant moral framework.

• Spenser founded English literary greatness by abandoning Chaucer’s medieval Christian humanism and importing the hard Apollonian line of Italian Renaissance art—particularly Botticelli’s Byzantine-derived incised contour—into English poetry, making The Faerie Queene the first world-class work of English literature.
  • Spenser’s quarrel with himself generated English literature’s ‘amazing complexity’: Romantic poetry’s chthonian daemonism is a flowering of The Faerie Queene’s secret repressions, passing from Coleridge to Poe to Baudelaire.
  • Spenser knew Botticelli through engravings, and a major sex scene in The Faerie Queene was modelled on Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, one of the earliest observations of Spenser criticism.
• In The Faerie Queene, Apollonian armored personality—expressed through knights’ burnished armor and heroines’ blazing light—functions as a moral and aesthetic principle of self-containment and identity that resists nature’s dissolving forces, making chastity equivalent to integrity of form.
  • St. Augustine calls continence ‘unity of self’; virtue in The Faerie Queene means holding to one’s visible shape, while only evil characters (Archimago, Duessa, Proteus) change shape.
  • Western armor is separatist, dividing self from nature, while Eastern armor uses organic shapes—Japanese samurai armor seems ‘pregnant, overgrown by vegetation,’ relapsing into female nature.
• Spenser’s armed Amazons Belphoebe and Britomart are the poem’s supreme sexual personae—Apollonian angels who shed blinding hierarchic light and assert phallic will through weapons, representing a new Renaissance cult of the liberated woman as an alternative to the Italian Renaissance’s beautiful boy.
  • Belphoebe’s entrance halts narrative for ten stanzas of minutely described appearance—the Apollonian eye is locked in place in ‘a privileged moment of hieratic stillness and silence, as if a frame of film were frozen before us.’
  • Britomart’s golden hair falling like ‘sunny beames’ bursting from a cloud makes her ‘Apollonian supernature, moon and sun, cold and hot… people look up and marvel. But they are seeing Babylonian and not Christian gods.’
• The voyeurism of The Faerie Queene, endangering the poem itself, arises from the problem of sensuous beauty, which can lead the soul toward good or evil.
• Britomart is the most sexually complex character in the poem, traversing the full spectrum from Apollonian androgyne to Great Mother, including quasi-lesbian encounters with Malecasta and Amoret, ultimately making her the true Aeneas of the poem who carries Trojan blood into the British royal line.
  • Britomart’s name is a Cretan title of the Great Mother (Britomartis), not—as one first thinks—Spenser’s fusion of ‘British’ and ‘martial.’
  • Spenser uses a transsexual trick of perspective twice, calling Britomart ‘he’ before revealing her sex, as part of his ‘prescient insight into the problematic nature of perception and identity.’
• The rape cycle of The Faerie Queene, drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses but intellectualized far beyond its source, is the poem’s most advanced rhetorical structure: rape functions as Spenser’s metaphor for biology itself—the surges of masculine aggression in Darwinian nature red in tooth and claw.
  • The rapist in Spenser is a man who lacks feminine refinement through social life and therefore pursues fleeing femininity with a headlong ferocity that is a hunger for self-completion—‘his lust is a semantic error, a self-misinterpretation, a confession of psychic inadequacy.’
  • Pure femininity is a vacuum into which masculine forces rush: Florimell’s unmixed femininity makes her unfit for quest, and her impoverished identity is so easily invaded that a witch-hag can fabricate a ‘False Florimell’ animated by a daemonic hermaphrodite spirit.
• The Bower of Bliss and Spenser’s femmes fatales represent the chthonian swamp of female nature—closed, womblike spaces where male heroic will is captured, feminized, and drained—requiring Sir Guyon’s violent destruction to reassert Apollonian solar order.
  • Acrasia as Circean vampire ’through his humid eyes did sucke his spright’ from the enervated Verdant—a scene modelled on Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, whose horizontal design ‘signifies the triumph of mother nature’s horizontals over the verticals of spiritual ascent.’
  • The rule of The Faerie Queene is ‘keep moving and stay out of the shade’: embowerment is sterile self-thwarting, a limbo of lush pleasures but stultifying passivity.
• Voyeurism is the dominant aesthetic mode of The Faerie Queene and of western art itself—the aggressive Apollonian eye that sees, controls, and implicitly violates is simultaneously Spenser’s moral problem and his greatest creative tool, making the poetically strongest material in the poem pornographic.
  • “G. Wilson Knight rightly calls the poem ‘perilously near decadence’: The Faerie Queene is itself one vast Bower of Bliss.” —G. Wilson Knight
  • Scholarship’s major error has been to identify the poem’s moralizing voice with the poet: The Faerie Queene is contrapuntal, with ‘an ethical voice and a wanton voice, dissolving the other into lust by its delicacy and splendor, its hypnotic appeals to the untamed pagan eye.’

Shakespeare and Dionysus

Shakespeare’s relationship to Spenser is one of initial discipleship followed by deliberate revolt—he parodies Spenser’s rape cycle in Titus Andronicus, then uses Dionysian metamorphosis, alchemical transformation, and the mercurial androgyne (Rosalind, Cleopatra) to escape Spenser’s Apollonian constraints while ultimately affirming, through comedy’s social consolidation and tragedy’s defeat of the uncontained, the Renaissance value of hierarchical order. The contrast between Spenser’s iconistic pictorialism and Shakespeare’s metamorphic dramaturgy defines two opposing principles of western artistic identity.

• Shakespeare escaped Spenser’s overwhelming influence by recognizing their fundamental opposition: Spenser is an Apollonian iconicist ruled by the eye who makes frozen tableaux, while Shakespeare is a Dionysian metamorphosist ruled by the ear who shows process, flux, and the irrational—a distinction embodied in their contrasting treatments of language and personality.
  • Shakespeare’s language ‘hovers at the very threshold of dreaming… shaped by the irrational’: Shakespearean characters are controlled by rather than controlling their speech, like Michelangelo’s Mannerist sculptures restive under night visitations.
  • “G. Wilson Knight: ‘In such poetry we are aware less of any surface than of a turbulent power, a heave and swell, from deeps beyond verbal definition; and, as the thing progresses, a gathering of power, a ninth wave of passion.’” —G. Wilson Knight
• Shakespeare’s concept of identity is alchemical: personality undergoes chemical breakdown and recomposition through dramatic action, and the great transvestite heroines—especially Rosalind—are the hermaphroditic Mercurius of Renaissance alchemy, embodying the perfected synthesis of male and female principles.
  • The alchemical process sought to transform the prima materia into the Philosopher’s Stone depicted as an androgyne or rebis (‘double thing’), both self-begetting and self-devouring like the uroboros—a structure Shakespeare enacts dramatically.
  • Rosalind is ‘a fiery and perfect Mercury extracted by Nature and Art’ (Paracelsus): she is both material and spiritual, mercurial and faithful, the catalyst who transmutes the play’s characters.
• Rosalind in As You Like It is Shakespeare’s greatest sexual persona and his answer to Spenser’s Amazons—she transforms Belphoebe and Britomart’s Apollonian armored virginity into kinetic social wit, inhabiting secular space and using language as her weapon, while her transvestite adventure expresses genuine bisexual potential that she ultimately overcomes to enter the larger social order.
  • Rosalind’s performance in drag is ‘high camp’: she fulfills Christopher Isherwood’s definition by mocking something—her love for Orlando—which she takes seriously, and her supreme moment is the wooing scene where ‘she pretends to be what she really is—Rosalind.’
  • Hugh Richmond was the first critic to freely admit Rosalind’s ‘capacity for bisexuality’: ‘She could go either way. One of the unnoticed themes of As You Like It is Rosalind’s temptation toward her outlaw male extreme and her overcoming of it to enter the larger social order.’
• Shakespeare is a metamorphosist and therefore closer to Dionysus than to Apollo. He shows process, not objects. Everything is in flux—thought, language, identity, action.
• The Elizabethan theatrical convention of boy actors in female roles gave Shakespeare’s transvestite comedies a layered homoerotic ritualism—a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl—that reproduced the archaic cultism of early Dionysian drama and made the comedies ‘shimmering spectacles of the mystery of gender.’
  • Greek actors wore wooden masks, Japanese Kabuki employed heavy makeup, but Elizabethan theater used beardless boys without masks—the boy had to be facially feminine enough to pass as a woman, giving productions ’erotic piquancy’ probably producing ‘claques of groupies, like those dogging the castrati of Italian opera.’
  • The epilogue to As You Like It demands audience recognition of theatrical transsexualism: ‘If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me’—‘a touch of male homosexual coquetry.’
• Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s most uncontrolled Dionysian androgyne—a creature of theatrical impersonation whose command of all emotional modes and both genders, combined with a Dionysian horoscope lacking the element of earth, makes her simultaneously the most magnificent and most doomed figure in Shakespeare’s work.
  • Cleopatra commands three elements—water, air, and fire—in Enobarbus’ barge speech, but earth is pointedly excluded; Caesar’s deputy at Actium is named Taurus (the first earth sign of the zodiac), and Caesar’s own birth sign was Capricorn—earth defeats the lovers’ watery volatility.
  • Before her suicide, Cleopatra says ‘Now from head to foot / I am marble-constant: now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine’—she finally acquires Roman fixity of will, becoming the complete Mercurius through the addition of death’s cold earth, enshrined on her ‘altar-like bier.’
• The contrast between Rosalind (the perfected Mercurius who relinquishes androgyny for social marriage) and Cleopatra (the incomplete Mercurius who achieves perfection only in death) demonstrates the Renaissance principle that perpetual self-transformation without social consolidation leads to spiritual death—and that Caesar’s Apollonian order must have the last word over Dionysian excess.
  • Antony and Cleopatra obliterate earth in the waters of emotion: ‘Let Rome in Tiber melt,’ ‘Sink Rome,’ ‘Melt Egypt into Nile’—and therefore cannot resist the steady, inexorable pressure of earth’s representative, Caesar.
  • My generation learned the hard way: ‘Antony and Cleopatra demonstrates that life cannot be lived as a series of perpetual self-transformations without violating social and ethical principles… going down in sexual disease and drug overdoses.’

Return of the Great Mother

Romanticism is a swing from the Apollonian Enlightenment toward Dionysus, bringing a return of the Great Mother and chthonian nature repressed since Aeschylus, and the two figures who define its sexual parameters are Rousseau—who feminizes the European male persona, worships nature as a benevolent mother, and unwittingly produces sadomasochistic subordination—and Sade, who answers Rousseau point by point to reveal that nature is amoral, violent, and cannibalistic, making sex identical with power and aggression.

• Romanticism represents a historical regression to the primeval archaic night-world defeated by Aeschylus’ Oresteia, misunderstanding the Dionysian as the pleasure principle when it is actually the gross continuum of pleasure-pain—a misreading that causes Romantic movements predicated on freedom to compulsively re-enslave themselves to more fixed imaginative orders.
  • The French Revolution, degenerating into the bloody Reign of Terror and ending in Napoleon, was the first failed Rousseauist experiment; Rousseau believes man naturally good while Freud’s aggressive egomaniacal infant is what we actually hear and see everywhere.
  • My theory: when political and religious authority weakens, hierarchy reasserts itself in sex, as the archaizing phenomenon of sadomasochism—‘Freedom makes new prisons. We cannot escape our life in these fascist bodies.’
• Rousseau feminizes the European male persona by making sensibility a prelude to Romanticism, creating a masochistic erotics of subordination to women (derived from his childhood beating by a woman of thirty), and his worship of nature as a benevolent mother generates all subsequent Romantic idealization—but sadomasochistic dominance and submission are inherent in Rousseauism from the start.
  • “‘To fall on my knees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures.’” —Rousseau
  • Rousseau calls his first patron Madame de Warens ‘Mamma’ and she calls him ‘Little one’; he says of his sexual initiation by her ‘I felt as if I had committed incest’—she ‘compells’ him to put on her dressing gown and he becomes a ’transvestite priest to a goddess.’
• Sade is the most important thinker absent from university curricula: he is a systematic satirist of Rousseau who prefigures Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud by demonstrating that nature is cruel and amoral, that force rather than love is the law of the universe, and that sex is identical with power—making his female libertines among the most potent women in literature.
  • “‘Cruelty is natural,’ Sade says in Philosophy in the Bedroom; in Justine he calls nature ‘our common mother’—‘No, there is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.’” —Sade
  • Sade’s heroines Madame de Clairwil and Juliette combine ‘Minerva’ with ‘Venus,’ matching male libertines in erudition and force—Clairwil’s keen glance is ’too fiery to withstand,’ and these women enact what Cleopatra only imagines.
• Sade is seeking a female equivalent to castration. How does one desex a woman without dismembering and therefore killing her?
• Sade’s libertines retain Apollonian intellect within Dionysian sexual excess—their elaborate social organization, formal architectural environments, and incessant philosophical discourse within orgies represent the Enlightenment’s Apollonian hierarchism persisting even as they abolish the great chain of being and sink man into nature’s continuum.
  • Whether the Sodality of the Friends of Crime or the School for Libertinage in 120 Days of Sodom, Sade’s libertines issue prospectuses and statutes, design formal environments, and herd victims into erotic classes—’like colonies of ants, they secrete systems.’
  • Sade’s female sex-criminals are Belles Dames Sans Merci who retain the clear Apollonian solar eye of western intellect, unlike the silent, nocturnal Romantic femmes fatales who will follow.
• Sade’s obsessive sodomy functions as a ritual of riddance—a male strategy to evade maternal power and block procreative nature—and his campaign against the mother culminates in the ritualistic assault upon Madame de Mistival at the end of Philosophy in the Bedroom, where her vagina and rectum are sewn shut with red thread symbolizing the arterial and umbilical.
  • Dolmancé proclaims ‘We owe absolutely nothing to our mothers’—and after Bloom’s study of male poetic strife, ‘it is impossible to read such a statement without hearing its real meaning: We owe absolutely everything to our mothers.’
  • “Jane Harrison: ‘Man cannot escape being born of woman, but he can, and if he is wise, will, as soon as he comes to manhood, perform ceremonies of riddance and purgation.’” —Jane Harrison
• Serial sex murder—like fetishism—is a perversion of male intelligence, a criminal abstraction that is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music, which is why there is no female Jack the Ripper just as there is no female Mozart: Sade’s female sex-criminals are fantasies granting women a conceptual power they do not exercise in reality.
  • ‘There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper’—Sade has ‘spectacularly enlarged female character,’ but the barbarism of Madame de Clairwil orgasmically rending victims limb from limb is the sign of her greater conceptual power.
  • Freud says ‘Women show little need to degrade the sexual object’—sex-crimes arise less from environmental conditioning than from a failure of socialization, and mutilating crimes by women are extremely rare.

Amazons, Mothers, Ghosts

From Goethe to the Gothic novel, German and English Romanticism generate a series of androgynous sexual personae—the feminized male, the mercurial transvestite, the sinister Great Mother—that dramatize the era’s destabilization of gender hierarchies and its compulsive return to archaic, chthonian forces repressed by the Enlightenment. Goethe’s Mignon, Kleist’s Penthesilea, and Gothic fiction collectively demonstrate that Romantic freedom produces new and more ferocious enslavements to nature’s barbaric sexual rhythms.

• Goethe’s Werther inaugurates the feminized Romantic male persona—a figure who refuses to grow up into adult masculinity, worships the earth mother, and whose suicide is both an autoerotic act and a ritualistic return to female nature—demonstrating how Rousseauist sensibility acts as an alchemic bath hermaphrodizing the European male in emotional fluidity.
  • Theodore Faithfull: ‘Dreams of self-destruction, and probably many cases of suicide, are desires or attempts on the part of narcissistic individuals to give themselves a new birth by sexually attacking themselves and thus bringing about self fertilization’—Werther-style suicide had an aggressive autoeroticism.
  • “Goethe said the novel came from ’the decision to let my inner self rule me at will’ and to let outside events ‘penetrate’—in Romantic creativity, the male waits in spiritual passivity, acted upon by internal and external forces.” —Goethe
• Mignon in Wilhelm Meister is the paradigmatic afflicted Mercurius—a gender-indeterminate transvestite adolescent who loses vital energy when she abandons male clothing, dances herself to death in Dionysian hyperactivity, and whose incestuous origins (brother-sister parentage) inaugurate the Romantic prestige of incest as a metaphor for supersaturation of identity.
  • Mignon ‘darted like lightning through the door’; she has palpitations and fits, a worsening ‘spasmodic vivacity’—she is ‘alarmingly frantic with gayety’; hair flying, she raves and capers like a ‘Maenad.’
  • In the manuscript of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe calls Mignon sometimes ‘she,’ sometimes ‘he’—a subtlety suppressed in earlier editions including Carlyle’s still-sold translation because it was thought an error.
• Goethe’s Mothers in Faust are the most imposing figure of the Great Mother in western literature—blind goddesses in a murky barren zone presiding over nature’s brute force of metamorphosis, functioning as the repressed pagan unconscious that male imagination must descend to in order to create, making every act of artistic inspiration a return to the female matrix.
  • The Mothers are Greek Fates combined with Plato’s eternal forms: ‘Formation, Transformation, / Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation’—Mephistopheles takes Faust to the omphalos of the universe, a female heart of darkness.
  • In key drawn to tripod, Goethe shows the ambivalent compulsions of intercourse: ‘Every male copulating with a woman returns to his origins in the womb’—Goethe postponed intercourse until he was forty, related to his self-imposed distance from his forceful mother.
• Without external restrictions, there can be no self-definition. The dissolution of hierarchical orders permitted personality to expand so suddenly that it went into a free fall of anxiety. Hence the self had to be chastened, its boundaries redefined, even by pain.
• Goethe’s theft of his mother’s red fur cloak to skate away from her on a frozen river—the week before he began writing Werther—was a ritual of self-origination and imaginative independence, a pagan theater of aggression by which the son wrests the vatic mantle from the mother and claims the Delphic power to give birth to himself.
  • K.R. Eissler: ‘It is most remarkable that the greatest German poet, one week before he set out to write his greatest novel, felt the impulse on the spur of the moment to exhibit himself to his mother and a large crowd dressed in a conspicuous piece of female clothing.’
  • “Harold Bloom: ‘A strong poet… must divine or invent himself, and so attempt the impossibility of originating himself’—Goethe on the frozen river forces a public ritual of self-origination, crossing a river and raping his motherland.” —Harold Bloom
• Kleist’s Penthesilea represents Late Romantic Decadence’s sadomasochistic sensationalism—the Amazon queen who dismembers Achilles and sinks her teeth into his chest literalizes the Romantic femme fatale’s absorption of male identity, while the play’s oscillating rhythms of dominance and submission demonstrate that the dissolution of Enlightenment hierarchies produced a free fall of anxiety requiring self-reduction through pain.
  • Penthesilea attacking Achilles’ chest ‘is not only desexing him but making him an Amazon, a version of herself’—she is ‘a sadistic erotic mastectomist,’ making man in her own image; the dying Achilles is now her twin, her Romantic sister-spirit.
  • Kleist’s suicide—by pistol in the mouth—expresses his martyrdom to Teutonic masculinity, and may suggest repressed homosexual desire: he persuaded a friend to join a double suicide pact, speaking erotically of ’the most glorious and sensual of deaths.’
• The Gothic novel—initiated by Ann Radcliffe and given its greatest impact by Matthew Lewis’ The Monk—represents English Romanticism’s Sadean counterreaction to Rousseau, withdrawing into chthonian darkness and medieval Catholic ritualism to release the pagan sex and violence that Protestant rationalism suppressed, making terror itself a passively feminizing, masochistically pleasurable mode.
  • The Monk’s final pages reveal that Matilda is a male demon, making the monk’s ecstatic sex with the ‘female’ monk homosexual and daemonic—and proving that ‘our own sexual perceptions have been seduced.’
  • Lucifer in The Monk appears as a dazzling naked ephebe with fiery long hair, crimson wings, a star on his forehead, and diamond bracelets—‘Romanticism returns to the Renaissance style of epiphanic sexual personae,’ this Apollonian androgyne recalling Spenser’s Byzantine Belphoebe.

Sex Bound and Unbound

William Blake is the British Sade who makes sex war the first theatrical conflict of English Romanticism: directly inspired by The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, Blake constructs a poetry of sexual grand opera in which the Great Mother is more violently and eloquently evoked than anywhere else in literature, while his insistence on the hard bounding line of Apollonian form expresses a desperate need for self-origination against the female matrix—a contradiction that makes his long poems simultaneously the most heroic and most futile attempt in western art to redeem sex from nature.

• Blake’s Songs of Innocence expose the authoritarianism latent in Rousseauist benevolence: ‘Infant Joy’ is a daemonizing poem that implicates the reader in sadism by evoking a Spenserian vacuum of helpless passivity into which the reader’s will rushes as rapist-voyeur, while the chimney-sweep poems reveal society’s exploitation of children as a form of vicious pederasty that desexes and prematurely ages its victims.
  • “Milton Kessler: ‘In Infant Joy there is a sense of the enormous proximity, the closeness and intimacy of the speaker. The child has no voice of its own yet. It is given an identity by some great coercive power. There are certain forms of sadistic tenderness more intimate than the psyche will allow.’” —Milton Kessler
  • “Erich Fromm: ‘For the authoritarian character there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful ones and the powerless ones’—sexual personae in Songs of Innocence are imagined as generations cannibalizing each other.” —Erich Fromm
• ‘The Sick Rose’ transforms the Spenserian Bower of Bliss into a parable of female sexual solipsism—the rose’s narcissistic self-completion in masturbatory pleasure is a perverse sterility that provokes sadistic phallic attack, demonstrating that female self-concealment and male aggression are mutually generating forces in a sick dialectic of nature.
  • Ingres’ The Turkish Bath is a visual parallel to Blake’s rose poem: ‘oddly round, a rose window or Madonna tondo turned pagan peephole, through which we spy the plump nude bodies of a dozen women amorously entwined, like lesbian flower petals… a snaky Medusa head, steamy with Asiatic lewdness.’
  • Blake’s masturbatory rose belongs to the tradition begun in Egypt where autoeroticism is a method of cosmogony; he sees a sexually private world as a prison cell, the sick rose making division ‘where there should be wholeness and unity in nature.’
• The Mental Traveller is Blake’s Sadean recognition of the insuperable problem of nature: the poem is a ritual of sexual cannibalism between male humanity and female nature in obsessive oscillating rhythms, demonstrating that the dissolution of Enlightenment hierarchies produces a perpetual sadomasochistic cycle from which there is no escape—making it the most powerful poetic treatment of the Great Mother’s dominance in western literature.
  • The poem’s systematic cataloguing of atrocities resembles the itemizations of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom; like Sade, Blake foreshadows Frazer’s anthropological syncretism—The Mental Traveller recreates the bloody rites of the Great Mother.
  • “Bloom says of The Mental Traveller: ‘All the males in the poem are one man, humanity, men and women together. All the females are nature, the confinements of the human’—the poem is a uroboros mimicking the circularity of natural process, each sex devouring the other.” —Harold Bloom
• Blake’s dreadful fate was to see the abyss from which most men shrink: the infantilism in all male heterosexuality.
• Blake’s insistence on the ‘hard and wirey’ bounding line—his most fundamental aesthetic and psychological principle—is a desperate Apollonian strategy of self-origination against the female matrix, resisting both the chthonian dissolution of nature and the Dionysian sfumato of chiaroscuro, while his hermaphrodites are horrific precisely because they violate the optical integrity of the ‘Human Form Divine.’
  • “‘The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling.’” —Blake
  • Blake calls Rubens’ coloring ‘most Contemptible’: ‘His Shadows are of a Filthy Brown somewhat of the Colour of Excrement’—hellish brownness is ’the belly and bowels of mother nature, the labyrinth where the Apollonian eye is lost.’
• Blake’s Spectres and Emanations in the prophetic poems are the Gothic novel’s ghosts transposed into allegorical psychology: the male Spectre represents rationalism and homosexual bonding that destroys psychic wholeness, while female Emanations must achieve the correct distance from the self—not imprisoned in solipsism but not fled into dominance—for spiritual health, making Blake’s system a moral condemnation of both narcissism and female autonomy.
  • The contest between male Spectre and female Emanation fits Shakespeare’s Othello: a conspiratorial Spectre (Iago), homoerotically obsessed, splits Othello from his Emanation (Desdemona)—Othello, cleaving to his Spectre instead of casting him off, destroys himself.
  • “‘In Eternity Woman is the Emanation of Man she has No Will of her own There is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will’—Blake’s treatment of women is full of ambivalences whose latent content breaks through his manifest claims of mastery.” —Blake
• Blake’s supreme desire to free sex from the tyrannical nature-mother is philosophically impossible because his two systems—Old Testament prophetic morality and Greek visual art—are irreconcilably contradictory: Apollonian form-making requires chastity, but Blake exalts eroticism; sexuality requires surrender to female nature, but Blake demands Apollonian independence from her, making his long poems heroic but futile western epic sagas.
  • The Daughters of Albion performing their grim ritual—gashing the howling male with a flint knife, drinking his blood, their bodies ‘glowing with beauty and cruelty’—is a great flight of sadomasochistic poetry in which ‘I feel very strongly Blake’s shiver of voluptuous identification with the humiliated victim.’
  • Virginia Woolf asks why men write so many books about women but women none about men—‘The answer is that from the beginning of time men have been struggling with the threat of woman’s dominance… No man has yet been born, even Jesus himself, who was not spun from a pitiful speck of plasma to a conscious being on the secret loom within a woman’s body.’

Marriage to Mother Nature

Wordsworth defines nature for nineteenth-century culture through a systematic suppression of the body and virile masculinity, embracing feminine receptivity and wise passiveness as modes of union with the mother goddess—but his refusal to acknowledge nature’s cruelty and sexuality produces a palpable repression that generates hallucinations of withered male solitaries and forces him to project his forbidden dread onto his colleague Coleridge. The bitter war between Wordsworth and Coleridge—nature without sex versus sex without nature—determines the entire subsequent course of nineteenth-century literature.

• Wordsworth’s first principle of ‘wise passiveness’ is a feminist sexual dissent—a withdrawal from the masculine sphere of action that revives the ritualism of Asiatic mother-cults whose priests castrated themselves for the goddess—and his poetry systematically excludes the adult man of active virility, requiring all males to undergo suffering or feminization before they can enter his imaginative world.
  • In The Recluse Wordsworth calls himself a ’nursling of the mountains’ tamed by female nature, who turns him from ‘Warrior’s Schemes’ and tells him ‘Be mild, and cleave to gentle things’—Enlightenment means androgyny.
  • In ‘The Waggoner’ a sailor appears ‘Limps (for I might have told before / That he was lame) across the floor’—Wordsworth is ‘so used to impairing his males physically or spiritually that he elides the sailor’s lameness at first entrance, leaving the affliction understood as a traumatic assumption of his poetic world.’
• Wordsworth’s imagination systematically dematerializes and desexes his most emotionally central female figures—Mary, Lucy, Dorothy—blurring them into numinous phantoms or seraphic angels, while his most emotionally remote characters (the aged male solitaries) receive hyperspecific physical detail, demonstrating that Wordsworthian ardor converts women into mirror images of the male self rather than distinct persons.
  • Dorothy appears in Tintern Abbey after eight lines in which her gender is unclear—‘only after eight long lines do we get any information about the friend’s sex or identity… We are asked to hear a voice and look into the eyes of a being of unfixed gender.’
  • “Bateson: ‘Wordsworth had experienced most of Margaret’s miseries. In a sense he was Margaret’—when Wordsworth’s identification with a suffering character is too extreme, empathy degenerates into sentimentality, which is actually self-pity, since the protagonists are self-projections.” —F.W. Bateson
• Wordsworth’s aged male solitaries—the old Cumberland beggar, the leech-gatherer—are his most powerful self-identifications, nightmare doubles whose physical contraction and withered specificity express his secret fear of what mother nature does to man: they are dry bones she has picked over, the residue of masculine identity reduced toward the vanishing point by nature’s indifferent process.
  • As in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Wordsworth’s male figures are simultaneously abandoned in dreadful isolation and assaulted by malicious waves of natural force—the poet ’throws his vision out like a harpoon drawing its line after it,’ casting about the solitary an aura of sympathy that paradoxically desiccates and crushes them.
  • ‘The liberated Rousseauist self fails to fill the space vacated by religion and society. It has shrunk from its role in the great theater of the Christian cosmos. The star has become only an extra.’
• The highest condition of Wordsworth’s spiritually evolved male is ‘singleness’—containing both sexes married within his own psyche—but this androgynous ideal, celebrated in the concluding books of The Prelude through the sister Dorothy as externalized anima, produces not liberation but immobility: Wordsworth’s poetry is pulled toward a voiceless, sexless union with mother nature that Coleridge will savage and expose.
  • G. Wilson Knight calls Wordsworth’s highest integration ‘an androgynous state,’ a ‘wholeness beyond normality’—but Shelley charged Wordsworth with being ‘a moral eunuch,’ ‘a male prude,’ ‘a solemn and unsexual man,’ ‘a male Molly.’
  • “Coleridge said ‘A great mind must be androgynous’—but his subliminally homoerotic claim that ‘of all men I ever knew, Wordsworth has the least femininity in his mind’ contradicts the evidence of the poetry itself.” —Coleridge

The Daemon as Lesbian Vampire: Coleridge

Coleridge’s great mystery poems — unlike Wordsworth’s nature poetry — confront the daemonic, chthonian reality of nature without flinching, culminating in Christabel, where the lesbian vampire Geraldine embodies pagan primeval power that obliterates Christian morality and reveals the true violent origins of poetic imagination.

• Coleridge’s stated poetic theory — imagination as the synthesis of opposites — is enacted in his dream poems, where Judeo-Christian moral categories dissolve in a daemonic alchemic bath that recombines sexual personae beyond orthodox gender, drawing on the underground western current of Hermeticism and alchemy rather than Christianity.
  • Coleridge’s ‘primary Imagination’ as the ‘infinite I AM’ displaces Jehovah and confers on the Romantic artist a self-divinizing cosmological authority, prefiguring Wilde’s cult of personality.
  • His secondary imagination ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,’ making the dream poems alchemic metamorphoses of psyche where sexual personae are liquefied and recast.
  • “Grant me a nature having two contrary forces.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Coleridge’s erotic relationship with Wordsworth is a sadomasochistic sexual feudalism in which Coleridge occupies the passive-feminine position, a dynamic that paradoxically enabled his greatest poetry by dissolving his superego’s moral censorship and releasing daemonic dream vision.
  • Listening to Wordsworth recite The Prelude, Coleridge depicts himself as a ’tranquil sea, / Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon’ — the passive feminine instrument played by a masculine force.
  • Wordsworth, dominated by Milton, dominates Coleridge in a cascade of hierarchical master-slave relationships; Coleridge is Danae impregnated by Zeus’s golden shower.
  • “He is all man.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Ancient Mariner is structured as a psychodrama of the ‘male heroine’ — a passive-suffering figure whose compulsive public self-display is a form of ritual sexual exhibitionism — but the poem collapses in its final sections when Coleridge retreats from daemonic vision into Christian sentiment that is poetically incoherent.
  • The Bridegroom, Wedding-Guest, and Mariner are all aspects of Coleridge: the Mariner’s seductive tale perpetually prevents the supplicant self from achieving the social virility of the Bridegroom, making the doorway of social integration the poem’s obsessive site of failure.
  • Life-in-Death — red-lipped, leprosy-skinned, blood-thickening — is the true heaven’s mother who answers Christian invocation, the chthonian vampire who obliterates Wordsworth’s benevolent nature.
  • “The poem is the morbidly self-obsessed account of a man who through his act has become the center of universal attention.” —Edward E. Bostetter
• Christabel is a pornographic parable of western sex and power. It is the English Faust. Domination and seduction are at the center of western knowing.
• Christabel is a daemonic pagan epiphany in which the lesbian vampire Geraldine — Coleridge’s supreme sexual persona — embodies the return of pre-Christian chthonian nature, systematically overthrowing the Christian framework the poet’s conscious mind tried to impose on the poem.
  • Geraldine gives birth to herself by the ‘infinite I AM’ of Coleridgean imagination; her strategies of seduction parallel Spenser’s duplicitous Duessa in The Faerie Queene, and her passage through the castle’s gates is a Trojan subterfuge simultaneously overthrowing male power and penetrating the virgin’s body.
  • When Byron recited memorized passages in Geneva, Shelley shrieked and rushed from the room, bathed in sweat, seeing eyes in the nipples of Mary Godwin — an instantaneous transmission of the poem’s amoral daemonic essence from one great poet to another.
  • Geraldine has had her ‘will’ of Christabel — a locution belonging exclusively to male experience, used nowhere else in major literature of a woman.
• Coleridge himself is Christabel — a transsexual self-transformation unique in literature — and his inability to finish the poem is structurally identical to Christabel’s spell-induced muteness, both expressing the poet’s fundamental incapacity to translate daemonic vision into socially acceptable language.
  • Geraldine pursuing Coleridge in recurring nightmares — ‘a most frightful Dream of a Woman whose features were blended with darkness catching hold of my right eye’ — confirms that the vampire is a figure from his own unconscious, and Christabel is ‘one side of his own nature.’
  • As Christabel struggling to speak is a prophetic self-portrait of Coleridge the poet, Geraldine’s spell is also the poet’s own anxiety of irresolution — ‘a consciousness of Power without Strength.’
  • “From my earliest recollection I have had a consciousness of Power without Strength.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• The Decadent Late Romantic line from Poe through Baudelaire, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Wilde descends directly from Coleridge’s mystery poems, making pagan Coleridge — not Protestant Wordsworth — the true begetter of nineteenth-century archetypal vision.
  • Wordsworth’s Protestant moralism was his barrier against the daemonic he had aroused; he was easily assimilated into bourgeois Victorian culture, while Coleridge’s vampires and chthonian horrors germinated into an entire tradition of Decadent imagination.
  • By his pregnant servitude to Wordsworth, Coleridge bore monstrous children who would destroy their father — meaning that all which is greatest in Coleridge is a negation of Wordsworth.

Speed and Space: Byron

Byron’s poetry and persona enact a distinctively secular, horizontal Romanticism of speed and mobility that skims the earth’s surface rather than aspiring to Shelleyan verticality, embodied in Don Juan’s androgynous picaresque and in Byron’s own charismatic sexual persona as a man of beauty whose hermaphroditic glamour anticipates Elvis Presley.

• Byron’s incest obsession — in Manfred, Cain, and The Bride of Abydos — represents not a moral transgression to be shunned but a Romantic empowerment: incest closes the uroboros circle of self-love, makes libido move out and back upon itself, and gives the poet the asocial dynastic exclusiveness of gods.
  • In Manfred, the sister-spirit Astarte dies from gazing into her brother’s heart as into a mirror; she is assimilated and consumed, leaving Manfred to suffer the engorgement of a Thyestes who has eaten his own flesh.
  • Rumor of Byron’s incest with Augusta Leigh added to his fame rather than diminishing it — incest as sexual dissent whose erotic value resides precisely in its impurity, a Sadean claim that a line must exist in order to cross it.
• Byron’s poetry achieves sexual metamorphosis in real time — most brilliantly in ‘Lara,’ where the swooning pageboy Kaled is revealed as a woman by the opening of his garments — inducing successive homosexual and heterosexual responses in the reader and continuing a Spenserian tradition of transvestite erotic surprise.
  • In Don Juan, Juan disguised as Juanna in the sultan’s harem becomes the object of lesbian lust among the harem women, defeating male virility’s usual narrative privileges through the Romantic device of transvestism.
  • Sardanapalus calls for his cuirass, baldric, helmet, spear — and mirror; he flings away his helmet because it doesn’t look good, exemplifying feminine narcissism overwhelming male martial identity.
• Don Juan’s dominant formal quality is breeziness — a self-motivating secular speed that skims earth’s surface between Apollonian sky and chthonian earth — a style Paglia identifies as the first appearance of modern speed in art, whose closest cultural equivalent is Fred Astaire.
  • Byron’s verse has liquid fluency without a braking midline caesura and no Pope-like orotundity; moods and objects tumble like smooth pebbles in a stream, giving a sensation of linearity that is the stylistic embodiment of his aristocratic mobility.
  • The American equivalent of Don Juan’s speed is driving flat-out on a highway, radio blaring — the open road as Byronic sublime, rock music as the poem’s emotional variety, the car as a Mercury-like extension of the self-motivating body.
• Byron and Elvis Presley are the same archetypal figure — the man of beauty, an Epicoene athlete of alabaster skin with dark oiled hair and feminine charm — whose hermaphroditic charisma generates mass erotic submission while internally self-impairing through what Paglia calls the secret art of feminine self-impairment.
  • Both Byron and Presley began in brooding menace and ended in late Orientalizing splendor — Napoleon in Byzantine jewels, Byron in Albanian silk turbans, Presley in Mithraic jewel-encrusted jumpsuits — all three transforming from assertions of youthful male will into ornate objets de culte.
  • Byron’s autopsy revealed an enlarged heart, degenerated liver and gall bladder, and obliterated skull sutures; Presley suffered an enlarged heart and degenerated colon — in both cases, tremendous physical energy fused with internal organic disorder, a feminine self-impairment.

Light and Heat: Shelley and Keats

Shelley and Keats expand the Romantic lyric to extraordinary lengths while trying to argue away the daemonism the first Romantic generation uncovered in sex and nature — Shelley through Apollonian seraphicization and androgynous incest-romance in Epipsychidion, Keats through a feminized receptivity and sensory richness that nonetheless conceals deep sexual anxiety toward women.

• Shelley’s Epipsychidion attempts the impossible reconciliation of chthonian regression to the womb with Apollonian seraphicization by projecting onto the androgynous Emilia Viviani a fictional sister-spirit whose incestuous twinship would enable a prenatal union predating social identity — but the poem collapses back into the chthonian when the archaic mother is inadvertently summoned.
  • Emilia was publicly rumored to be a hermaphrodite — ’that sweet marble monster of both sexes’ — and Shelley’s brilliant glamour could only have been inspired by extraordinary androgynous beauty; Paglia’s first reading of Epipsychidion made her certain Emilia looked like Hadrian’s Antinous.
  • The poem’s Apollonian climax — ‘Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound’ — does not depict normal sexual intercourse but a Ovidian fusion like Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: Emilia’s body disappears into the poet’s, gender is eradicated, and both are reborn as one person.
  • “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is a spiritual sex drama of vast proportions in which the poet, passive as an Aeolian lyre, is erotically joined to the masculine wind as ravisher — making the poem a tour de force of sex-crossing Romantic imagination that derives its greatness from the sensation of passive surrender to titanic power.
  • The poet is a passive inseminator: while the torpid seed of ‘dead thoughts’ is Shelley’s, the ejaculation is the wind’s — man is half-loved, half-raped by nature, poetry wrung from slaves on a long invisible leash.
  • Nietzsche’s observation that artists are ‘vampirized’ by their own talent — grudged the squandering of force one calls passion — applies to the Romantic creative compulsiveness expressed by the Aeolian lyre metaphor, where achievement drives from the unknown part of self.
• Keats’s theory of ‘Negative Capability’ — the capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritably reaching after fact and reason — is a philosophy of feminized receptivity identical to Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness,’ making the poet a Dionysian shaman who dissolves his masculine western identity to become a feminine receptacle for nature’s multiplicity.
  • Keats tells Bailey he cannot be easy in women’s company because their identity ‘begins to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated’ — the chameleon poet’s feminine receptivity makes him dangerously susceptible to over-identification with women, not unable to identify with them as Bate claims.
  • The passage in The Eve of St. Agnes where Porphyro feeds the sleeping Madeleine — ‘candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; / With jellies soother than the creamy curd’ — is mouth-embowering: its oozing vowels compel salivation, replicating in the reader’s skull the poem’s embowered bed-scene of male nurturance.
• Keats’s Hyperion sequence is halted at exactly the point where the passive male poet would have to transform into potent manhood, because as a Romantic poem it cannot cross that sexual barrier — and Moneta’s towering sepulchral femininity has so overwhelmed Saturn poetically that when he finally tries to act, the poem breaks off.
  • Mnemosyne inseminates the passive Apollo with a torrent of knowledge poured into the ‘wide hollows’ of his brain — a classic moment of Romantic sex-reversal where a dominatrix fecundates the poet’s vaginal skull, which Yeats sexually normalizes for ‘Leda and the Swan.’
  • Like Christabel, Hyperion is inspired by the poet’s vision of sexual subordination to a supernatural female hierarch, and Keats cannot finish it for the same reason Coleridge cannot finish Christabel: the hermaphroditic psychodrama is complete and will brook no sequel.

Cults of Sex and Beauty: Balzac

Balzac inaugurates the Decadent tradition with fictional androgynes who embody the shift from High Romantic energy to Late Romantic stasis and aestheticism — from the castrato Zambinella as the first Decadent art object, through the murderous lesbian marquise of The Girl with the Golden Eyes, to the Swedenborgan angel Seraphita — mapping the moral geography of Decadence between an inferno of sexual enslavement and a paradiso of seraphic transcendence.

• Sarrasine establishes the template of Decadent aestheticism by making a male castrato the premiere sexual persona: Zambinella is the first Decadent art object — an artificial sex produced by biology manipulated for art — whose sterile glamour destroys the sculptor who loves it and propagates itself only through other art works.
  • The story’s ritual pattern is an Actaeon myth: Sarrasine, a stranger blundering into a domain of pagan mystery, is slain by the jealous cardinal-hierarch for having seen something forbidden — profaning the religious mystery of the castrato’s nongender.
  • Zambinella’s succession of incarnations — statue, marble copy, painting, Girodet’s Endymion — makes the sterile castrato a technological androgyne propagating itself through inorganic seed, like Vergil’s Trojan Horse teeming with soldiers.
• The Girl with the Golden Eyes culminates in one of French literature’s defining Decadent scenes — the blood-soaked boudoir where the lesbian marquise has butchered Paquita — which Paglia reads as a chthonian rupture of the feminine aesthetic enclosure and a prophetic template for Hitchcock’s Psycho.
  • The marquise appears first as a foot, then as part of a foot, an instep, then the muscles of an instep — Havelock Ellis’s Decadent principle that ’the whole is subordinated to the parts’ — and Balzac’s camera-like eye panning from the devastated boudoir upward to the panting, blood-covered murderess is prophetic of cinematic technique.
  • De Marsay and the marquise recognize each other as fraternal twins of Lord Dudley/Byron; their collaborative sex-experience with Paquita is a displaced incest — they flood her with superior force and meet in her body, the same pattern as Norman Bates’s transvestite murder of the woman whose shower replicates Paquita’s boudoir.
• Seraphita is the moral opposite of The Girl with the Golden Eyes — an Apollonian Paradiso to the other’s Inferno — in which Swedenborg’s mysticism enables Balzac to create the most elaborate seraphicization in literature, sustaining a hermaphrodite whose gender wavers line by line as different characters perceive him/her differently.
  • Seraphita solves the problem of her two admirers’ competing gender-projections by declaring them ‘one being’ and commanding them to marry each other, performing a daring perceptual experiment that reassembles herself in human form — a replay of Epipsychidion creating its own incestuous twin.
  • Balzac’s manipulations of gender in Seraphita are the most complex in literature, exploiting Romance-language grammatical ambiguity — French can avoid committing to gendered pronouns — while English must always choose his or her.
• Balzac’s major androgynes — the effeminate De Marsay, girlish Eugène de Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré enslaved by Vautrin, the chthonian Cousin Bette — are self-portraits whose male versions represent aristocratic fantasy and female versions represent the author’s actual muscular tenacity and theory of sexual renunciation as artistic power.
  • Cousin Bette, the ‘Byzantine Virgin’ with ’erect hieratic carriage’ walking like ‘granite, basalt, porphyry,’ is a chthonian virgin whose hardness of personality comes strangely combined with primitive natural force — a black diamond whose celibacy gives her ‘diabolical strength or the black magic of the Will.’
  • Balzac remained celibate for most of the years of work on the gargantuan Human Comedy, embodying in his own life the theory that sexual renunciation is necessary for artistic and intellectual achievement — the same theory he gives Cousin Bette as her secret power.

Cults of Sex and Beauty: Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans

Gautier invents aestheticism as a mode of perceptual control over the chthonian — ritualizing the aggressive western eye through a voyeuristic connoisseurship that treats persons as art objects — while Baudelaire daemonizes Gautier’s breeziness into a hieratic confrontation with the vampire-nature of sex, and Huysmans drives the aesthete’s enclosure to its logical extreme in Des Esseintes’ unsuccessful attempt to construct a purely artificial world from which the female and natural are expelled.

• Mademoiselle de Maupin establishes aestheticism’s foundational equation of sexual ambiguity with the worship of beauty through D’Albert’s Platonic quest for ideal form — fulfilled in the transvestite Maupin as living hermaphrodite art object — while its preface, the first manifesto of aestheticism, asserts that beauty alone is art’s mission and morality is irrelevant.
  • D’Albert performs As You Like It with Maupin in the Rosalind role in women’s clothes: she appears in a doorway in floods of white light, transfiguring the literary moment into an epiphany of hermaphrodite authority, her Apollonian glamour Gautier’s version of Shakespeare’s ghostly Hymen.
  • Maupin ends not in Renaissance marriage but in an autoerotic elopement — after tasting heterosexuality and homosexuality in a single night, she disappears at dawn, commanding her two admirers to mate with each other in her name, preserving her androgyny beyond the narrative frame.
• Gautier invents the Decadent aesthetic eye — erotic, aggressive, and knowledgeable but maintaining an absolute distance between observer and object — through a voyeuristic ritualism exemplified in A Night with Cleopatra’s oppressive, plot-halting descriptive catalogs that treat persons as art objects and reduce the human to its atomized parts.
  • Cleopatra’s complaint that Egypt ‘destroys and crushes me,’ its sky ‘a huge tombstone, a dome of a necropolis,’ establishes Decadent closure: nature is no longer the gate of the Romantic infinite but a bronze dome sealing up space, a world of hostile stone rather than fertility.
  • The Mummy’s Foot — a parable of Decadent aestheticism in which a severed foot declares its independence from its owner — enacts Havelock Ellis’s principle that ’the whole is subordinated to the parts,’ taken to its logical extreme: the art object’s autonomous imaginative authority.
• Baudelaire’s lesbian poems — especially ‘Delphine and Hippolyte’ — are not expressions of sexual libertarianism but complex psychic mechanisms by which the poet, through a sex-crossing imaginative gender-change, identifies himself with the passive female partner, intensifying his characteristic erotic subordination to dominant women and giving lesbianism a metaphysical grandeur as defiance of procreative nature.
  • Baudelaire gives Jeanne Duval the name of a notorious Roman lesbian and laments that he cannot become Proserpine in ’the hell of your bed’ — he regrets he cannot do in real life what he achieves in ‘Delphine and Hippolyte’: turn himself into a woman to seize the attention of a lesbian dominatrix.
  • “The supreme voluptuous delight of love lies in the certainty of doing evil.” —Charles Baudelaire
• A Rebours drives Decadent enclosure to its logical extreme in Des Esseintes’ failed attempt to construct a purely artificial world excluding nature, culminating in Chapter Eight’s horrifying dream-vision of the female body as a diseased carnivorous plant with a vagina dentata — confirming that the Decadent aestheticism of sharply defined art objects is the most comprehensive system of aversion to female chthonian nature devised by western culture.
  • The Amorphophalli — real plants whose name means ‘misshapen penises’ — springing up to stab at the nightmare woman’s belly are her self-generated male organs, while the Nidularium’s swordblades ringing her vulval ‘bloody depths’ reproduce the vagina dentata myth: female genitalia perceived simultaneously as flower, wound, and carnivorous plant.
  • The male homosexual who rebels against female bodily liquidity — ‘humid horror of a body which no washing can purify’ — creates in Des Esseintes’ mansion a ritual cult of sharply defined objets d’art as the most comprehensive system of aversion to the marshy organicism of female nature.

Romantic Shadows: Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is a Romantic prose-poem — not a social novel — in which Emily Brontë performs a transsexual self-transformation into her Byronic hero Heathcliff, projecting her own half-masculine identity across gender to create a figure of daemonic natural force whose incestuous love for Catherine enacts the Romantic coalescence of doubles while systematically revising Wordsworth’s nature into Coleridgean chthonian horror.

• The social novel is generically hostile to the androgyne because it subjects personality to the discipline of limitation and dispersion — as seen in Middlemarch’s truncated androgynes Rosamond and Ladislaw, Emma’s hermaphroditic autocrat socially corrected by marriage, and the nineteenth-century French novel’s adolescent male as arrested development — while Wuthering Heights succeeds as Romantic prose-poem precisely because it obeys Romantic rather than social-novel laws.
  • Jane Austen’s Emma illustrates the social novel’s equation of androgyny with selfish privatism: ‘What really defeats her is the ordered form and truth of the plot which, from start to finish, meets her at every turn as it maintains its beautiful and inevitable course’ — the novel itself rises up as a humanizing force against charismatic personality.
  • Becky Sharp’s rare visits to her neglected son, during which she glitters with jewels and high fashion like Spenser’s Belphoebe in the forest, demonstrate that Apollonian glamour always occurs at the expense of the ethical — a moral the social novel enforces through Thackeray’s lament over the child ‘worshipping a stone.’
• Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is Romantic solipsistic incest — inflamed rather than checked by their fraternal twinship — in which carnal intercourse is not desired because Romantic union is a conflation of soul-images, mirrored self-love, and the novel’s sadomasochistic violence expresses the primitive ritual energies of daemonic nature.
  • The cluttered family romance of Wuthering Heights — multiple generations sharing or echoing names, irresistibly called back to their origins — creates a surging matrix of genetically homologous identities where Heathcliff and Catherine’s desire to collapse into one another produces allegorical repletion: a gigantic spirit-body preventing other characters from attaining normal size.
  • The geography follows Antony and Cleopatra: Thrushcross Grange is Caesar’s Rome, static and respectable, while Wuthering Heights is Cleopatra’s Egypt, raw natural energy and uncontrolled metamorphosis — and Brontë’s most significant departure from High Romanticism is creating a nature without a mother, primarily force rather than nurturance.
• Lockwood’s dream of Catherine’s ghost — in which he rubs her wrist on broken glass until blood soaks the bedclothes — is the psychologically most central moment in the novel, revealing that the benign traveller harbors primitive sadism and that the ghost adopts a rusing persona of frail child to win entry, as Geraldine pretended to faint to win entry to Christabel’s castle.
  • Lockwood understands the ghost’s desire more accurately than modern readers: ‘If the little fiend had got in at the window, she probably would have strangled me!’ — archaic ancestor worship is really ancestor propitiation, a warding off, and a ghost wants entry to drink the blood of the living.
  • The ghost’s arm is a fir-bough because wild Catherine has been reabsorbed into nature as a speaking tree from Dante’s wood of suicides — and Lockwood runs her wrist across jagged glass because he is sawing a branch, the dream-logic of daemonic regression.
• Heathcliff is Emily Brontë herself — performing a transsexual self-transformation into a naturalized Byron — which explains both his seminal weakness (he is a woman with a man’s energy but without a man’s potency) and the novel’s formal innovations: the distancing narrative frames are layers of intercession between a real and fictive self at vast imaginative remove from its own gender.
  • Charlotte Brontë calls her dead sister ‘stronger than a man, simpler than a child,’ with ‘a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero’; haworth townsfolk said Emily was ‘more like a boy than a girl,’ her family nickname was ’the Major,’ and Monsieur Héger said ‘She should have been a man.’
  • Maria Brontë, the precocious eldest sister who died when Emily was seven and whom Branwell claimed to hear crying outside the windows at night, became through sexual metathesis the incestuous Romantic sister-spirit to Emily’s male poetic genius — Maria is Catherine, Emily is Heathcliff, and Byron’s Manfred mourning Astarte is the template.

Romantic Shadows: Swinburne and Pater

Swinburne creates English Late Romanticism by fusing French Decadence with Coleridgean daemonism to produce a poetry of ritual female dominance, while Pater perfects Romantic solipsism through an aestheticist prose that attempts—and ultimately fails—to dissolve the oppressive chthonian mother through Apollonian connoisseurship.

• Swinburne restores paganism and sexual frankness to English literature by combining Sade, Gautier, and Baudelaire, creating a Hollywood-scale poetry of daemonic female superstardom exemplified by Dolores and Faustine.
  • Swinburne’s Dolores is a blasphemous Anti-Mary, systematically inverting the Litany of the Blessed Mother: ‘Medieval Mary, the chaste walled garden, becomes the plundered bower of an urban brothel.’
  • Faustine, repeated forty-one times as a malignant refrain, enacts ritual repetition-compulsion—each stanza a Sisyphean decline back to a single female center, primary and corrupt.
  • Swinburne’s masochism had a metaphysical meaning: his recreational whippings were connected to his poetic cosmology, which restores the Great Mother to power.
• Swinburne’s Anactoria is his greatest poem and a supreme work of the century because it gives Sappho hermaphroditic Promethean power, fusing lesbian sadism with a manifesto of poetic immortality that vampirically devours the reader’s life-energy.
  • In Anactoria, Sappho’s love-talk is suffused with death imagery: she would press her lips ‘To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast’ and consume Anactoria’s body in a literalization of cannibalistic union.
  • Sappho’s declaration ‘I Sappho shall not die’ is directed at the reader: the breath with which we read Anactoria is the breath Sappho will snatch from us, making poetic immortality a vampiric invasion of posterity.
  • Swinburne actually identifies himself with the passive Anactoria, not with Sappho; Anactoria’s body as ‘a lyre of many faultless agonies’ is an allegory of his own creative process, pain-music wrung from him by a female hierarch.
• Atalanta in Calydon rewrites the Oresteia in Late Romantic terms, with Apollonian Atalanta and chthonian Althaea trapping Meleager in a fatal double bind, the male heroine’s protracted death scene dramatizing Swinburne’s masochistic fantasy of ecstatic subordination.
  • “Althaea’s proclamation upon killing her son—‘Thou, old earth, / That has made man and unmade; thou whose mouth / Looks red from the eaten fruits of thine own womb’—is one of the most frightful images in nineteenth-century poetry, fusing Eucharist with Thyestean banquet.” —Althaea
  • Meleager’s dying request that Atalanta cover him with her veil and lie upon him enacts consummation-by-suffocation: the deathbed is the only bed in Late Romanticism.
• Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance founds English aestheticism by using Heracleitean fluidity and a deactivated prose style to neutralize moral and social limitations on art, substituting passive connoisseurship for masculine action.
  • Pater abolishes morality by sabotaging the verb: his prose is full of passive or static constructions, with ‘is’ as his favorite verb, enacting a condition of perfect seeing-and-being rather than doing.
  • “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” —Walter Pater
  • “Max Beerbohm recalled his student reaction: ‘Even then I was angry that he should treat English as a dead language, bored by that sedulous ritual wherewith he laid out every sentence as in a shroud.’” —Max Beerbohm
• Pater’s rhapsody on the Mona Lisa is both invocation and exorcism of mother nature: the passage is the one eruption of daemonic chthonian force in his writing, which he ritually contains in a temenos of purple prose while remaining paralyzed before her Gorgon eye.
  • Pater describes Mona Lisa as ‘older than the rocks among which she sits,’ a vampire who has swept together ’ten thousand experiences’ across centuries—simultaneously Leda, St. Anne, and Cleopatra.
  • Yeats printed the Mona Lisa passage as the first poem in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), calling it something that ‘dominated a generation,’ then revised it by making Leda raped by a masculine Zeus—freeing himself from Pater’s parthenogenetic mother.

Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art

Decadent art from Rossetti through Beardsley constitutes a ritualistic pagan style obsessed with female hierarchic power, Apollonian objectification, and the daemonization of nature, forming a coherent tradition that modernism suppressed but that is better understood as the apotheosis of western Late Romanticism.

• Pre-Raphaelite painting is covertly Decadent because its Apollonian sharpness of detail and unnatural stillness produce fixation and closure rather than energy, with Rossetti’s obsessive single female face—derived from Elizabeth Siddal—becoming the definitive sexual persona of all Decadent art.
  • William Holman Hunt observed Rossetti’s compulsion to convert every sitter’s face to ‘his favourite ideal type,’ a monomania his friend Ford Madox Brown confirmed in a diary entry.
  • Rossetti’s repetition of the same face in triplets and quadruplets—in Rosa Triplex, The Bower Meadow, Astarte Syriaca—dramatizes Decadent too-muchness of Romantic identity and the masochistic self-haunting of a sister-spirit.
• Burne-Jones’ transsexual world of one incestuously self-propagating Siddal-faced being generated Art Nouveau, whose serpentine arabesques are an abstract version of daemonic nature’s vines trapping and strangling the masculine—a Late Romantic Apollonian style petrifying nature’s perpetual motion.
  • In The Doom Fulfilled, Perseus is Laocoön in the grip of coiling nature: the brassy serpent is a scroll of Art Nouveau ironwork, proving that Art Nouveau’s running vines are an abstract version of daemonic nature come to aggressive life.
  • Art Nouveau rooms and buildings undulate with curvy rhythms that are sexual subversions of western will, which since Egypt has based public monuments on the stable foursquare directionals of the male chest.
• Gustave Moreau’s lapidary Decadent Symbolism makes the femme fatale—Judith, Salomé, Helen—the supreme theme of western art, using hermaphrodite symbolism and Byzantine jeweled surfaces to show the triumph of the visionary and feminine over the moral and masculine.
  • In The Poet and Nature, a titanic mother nature grips the androgynous boy-poet’s head ’like a bowling ball,’ both killing and inspiring him—a dreadful allegory set in the chthonian swamp of primeval marsh.
  • In Jupiter and Semele, the massive bearded father-god becomes a ‘bedizened Hindu effeminate, cross-eyed in solipsistic ecstasy,’ dripping jewels—Semele’s horror at recognizing woman’s irrelevance to so perfect a divine hermaphroditism.
• Beardsley is the supreme Decadent artist because his sharp black-and-white line—inherited from Blake via Burne-Jones—constitutes a monastic pornography that reduces mother nature’s volumes to unfruitful abstraction, with his grotesque maternal figures exposing his flat graphic style as a purgation of oppressive female mass.
  • Beardsley’s self-portrait from The Yellow Book shows the boy-artist swallowed in a towering black canopy scattered with embroidered roses: the tent is the black body of maternal nature, adorned with decapitated blossoms and bound with tasseled umbilical ropes.
  • His recurring pear-shaped males with bulging hips and thighs recall the Venus of Willendorf—as if the Great Mother has fused with her son/lover, the son adopting her silhouette in sympathetic identification like Cybele’s castrated priests.

The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the fullest study of the Decadent erotic principle—the transformation of person into objet d’art—in which Wilde shows the beautiful boy’s narcissistic charisma daemonizing those who worship him, while the painting’s revenge enacts a savage animism whereby art destroys its human model.

• Dorian Gray is the first beautiful boy in western art to develop an inner life, which he immediately detaches by projecting his soul onto his portrait, enacting the ancient primitive belief that the soul can be deposited in an external object—and dying when that object is destroyed.
  • Lord Henry’s serpentine monologue infects Dorian with self-consciousness for the first time, creating the self-division that produces the Faustian compact: ‘I would give my soul’ for the picture to grow old while he remains young.
  • Frazer notes the savage thinks of life as a ‘concrete material thing capable of being seen and handled, kept in a box or jar,’ affecting the man by ‘sympathy or action at a distance’—exactly what Dorian’s portrait does.
• Dorian’s charisma is pure pagan magic—glamour in the Scottish sense of a ‘haze in the air’—operating through visible beauty alone to induce mass cathexis and paralysis of moral will, making him a Late Romantic variant of the Aztec sacrificial youth whose privileges end at the temple steps.
  • Charisma in classical antiquity meant exactly what it does in pagan mass media: Athena gives charisma to Achilles by shedding ‘a golden mist around his head,’ and Xenophon says the beauty of a victorious athlete ‘compelled everyone to look at him.’
  • Frazer describes an Aztec ritual in which a beautiful youth chosen as divine double was ‘bejewelled’ and feted for a year, then butchered on temple steps with his heart torn out—Dorian is the same scapegoat, killed at the feet of his idol.
• Lord Henry’s seduction of Dorian is a Late Romantic act of male vampirism in which Pater’s passive contemplative doctrine is twisted toward praxis, with Henry projecting his temperament into Dorian ‘as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume’ until Dorian becomes Henry’s exact hermaphroditic clone.
  • Henry plays upon Dorian, ’lips girlishly parted, as if he were a stringed instrument’—Dorian is the last great Romantic wind-harp, stroked and probed by amoral words in a male boudoir of Late Romantic chamber music.
  • The transformation is complete when Wilde attaches the word ’languidly’ to Dorian, Henry’s emblematic epithet from his first appearance: an act of homosexual generation has occurred, dominant Henry spawning the remade Dorian from his cold ivory brow.
• Wilde’s catastrophic affair with Lord Alfred Douglas literalized the novel’s prophecy that the beautiful boy is a destroyer—Douglas’s childish goading led to the libel suit, conviction, and imprisonment that ended Wilde’s career, a shamanistic materialization of his own artistic ideas.
  • “Wilde wrote from prison: ‘The basis of character is will-power, and my will-power became absolutely subject to yours’—the beautiful boy’s autism and moral obliviousness perfectly matches the novel’s portrait of Dorian.” —Wilde
  • Wilde did not meet Douglas until after Dorian Gray was published; Douglas was conceived a priori, and Wilde’s first encounter was a Platonic fulfillment—the fatal error was copulating with his representational ideal, unlike the abstinent Socrates with Alcibiades.

The English Epicene: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest achieves the outer limit of Apollonian high comedy by transforming the English epicene—jointly created by Carroll and Wilde—into an art form in which the androgyne of manners uses language as a weapon of hierarchic self-sequestration, purifying Wilde’s earlier Decadent works of their chthonian dangers while secretly transmitting British hierarchism across time and culture.

• The androgyne of manners—Lord Henry, Gwendolen, Cecily, Algernon, and Jack—inhabits the salon as an abstract circle where personality becomes a sexually undifferentiated formal mask, and Wildean epigrams are Apollonian objets d’art that cut language off from its Dionysian roots.
  • The Wildean epigram is a hieroglyphic inscription, restoring the epigramma to its original representational character—a triumph of rhetorical self-containment with a ‘hieroglyphic exactitude and cold rhetorical stoniness.’
  • Gwendolen’s utterances—‘I am never wrong,’ ‘I intend to develop in many directions,’ ‘I intend to crush them’—are delivered with ‘slow, resonant measure,’ their phonology monochromatic, their personality distributed throughout the syntax like a dense silvery fluid.
• Lewis Carroll’s foundational role in the English epicene is to disconnect manners from humane values, preserving their hierarchical force while making them mathematically absurd—a key move enabling Wilde to create high comedy that is amoral, hierarchical, and formally absolute.
  • Carroll’s ‘Hints for Etiquette’ (1849) and the Alice books treat rules of conduct not as artificial conventions to be mocked but as tradition-consecrated a priori principles admired for mathematical beauty—his comedy arises from a natively English love of formality.
  • Carroll was ‘a compulsive indexer,’ his life ‘mapped out in squares like Alice’s landscape,’ with a documented aversion to boys ‘almost amounting to terror’—his spiritual identity thoroughly feminine, a key to the epicene style he transmitted.
• The tea-table clash between Gwendolen and Cecily is the center of Wilde’s entire oeuvre: a Japanese tea ceremony yielding to naked Achillean strife, in which manners become the medium of ritual advance and retreat and the hidden theme is Blake’s ‘female will’ pursuing power, not romance.
  • Gwendolen and Cecily have simultaneous thoughts and chant in uncannily synchronized sentences—Romantic twinning fused into a single hierarchic personality—making the symmetry between them as important as any plot element.
  • Veblen calls manners ‘symbolical and conventionalised survivals representing former acts of dominance or of personal service’: the escalating tea-table hostilities make the hierarchical structure of manners leap into visibility—another Wildean materialization.
• Earnest ritually purifies Dorian Gray and Salomé by transmuting their daemonic sexual dangers into Apollonian comedy: the threatening double becomes a long-lost brother in joyous coalescence, and the chthonian vampire Salomé becomes the crystalline androgyne Gwendolen, ruling the salon of sunlight rather than the dark womb-world.
  • Wilde’s fall in 1895 enacted Lady Bracknell’s railway platform prophecy with horrific literalness: at Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, he stood for half an hour surrounded by a jeering mob—a shamanistic power to bring his own ideas into being.
  • In prison, the Apollonian Wilde underwent a revolution of principles, embracing suffering as the ‘supreme emotion’ and declaring ‘The Earth is mother to us all’—flipping back into Wordsworth, his lifelong antagonist, proving Coleridge is the only way to defeat Wordsworth.

American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville

American Romanticism is fundamentally Decadent Late Romanticism because the banishment of the maternal principle from Protestant cosmology created a symbolic vacuum into which English Romanticism poured its daemonic sexual archetypes, producing in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville a literature of Gothic entombment, hermaphroditic regression, and violent male resistance to female chthonian power.

• Poe is the American heir of Coleridge, rewriting Christabel and the Ancient Mariner as heterosexual psychodramas in which the male narrator is repeatedly overwhelmed by vampire women who are nature’s sexual personae—omnipotent mother figures erupting from the chthonian darkness of the Protestant unconscious.
  • Ligeia’s climax is a Coleridgean daemonic epiphany: ‘huge masses of long and dishevelled hair … blacker than the wings of the midnight’ burst forth, followed by Geraldine’s hypnotic ‘cold, dead eyes’—Ligeia is mother nature defying God’s law of mortality.
  • Berenice’s teeth—‘here, and there, and everywhere … long, narrow, and excessively white’—are a Decadent partition, seceding from the whole and invading the narrator’s brain, a Late Romantic strategy of perceptual control reducing the world to one totemic symbol.
• Poe’s tales are pagan odes of invocation in Late Romantic form: their extreme brevity strips narrative to expose hierarchic sexual frameworks in cold clarity, while his closed spaces—the pit, the bridal chamber, the tarn—are always vaguely anatomical living rooms, female internality made architectural.
  • The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym ends with the narrator rushing into the embrace of a cataract, a titan rising skin-white as snow—the nature mother hermaphroditically shrouded, into whom Pym is reabsorbed as the frail soul-boat plunges into the birth canal.
  • The Masque of the Red Death ends with total annihilation because its hero’s vaunting masculinity excludes women entirely from his mad revels, provoking the most catastrophic punishing reversal: ‘And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.’
• Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is not a social novel but a Late Romantic dream poem in which the divinized Hester Prynne restores the Catholic Madonna to Puritan New England, while the sadomasochistic bond between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth is the real erotic center—a homoerotic marriage of daemonic mentalization.
  • Hawthorne’s addition of a ‘w’ to the family name Hathorne after his early twenties prefigures the scarlet letter itself: the w is for woman, hermaphroditizing his patrimony, just as he restores the mother to the Puritan seventeenth century in the novel.
  • The climactic platform scene is not moral responsibility but matrilineage: the minister accepts ‘a surge of new life’ by joining the electric chain of femaleness, declaring in effect ‘I too am born of woman!’
• Moby-Dick is generated by sexual protest against the paralyzing bliss of female stasis glimpsed in ‘The Grand Armada’: Melville strenuously masculinizes both the whale and the weaver-god to keep them from turning female, while Billy Budd inverts Tartarus of Maids by substituting Apollonian male beauty for the grotesque machinery of female procreation.
  • The sequence of chapters from ‘Grand Armada’ through spermaceti-squeezing through the whale’s ‘grandissimus’ penis is a deliberate inversion: in less than fifty pages, Melville converts maternal dominion into male control of the loom of vegetable nature.
  • Billy Budd has ‘a lingering adolescent expression,’ smooth feminine complexion, and sky-colored eyes—an Apollo of the Saxon strain whose single defect resembles ’the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne’s minor tales,’ i.e., The Birthmark.
  • “D. H. Lawrence says Melville’s sea voyages were flights from ‘HOME and MOTHER’: ‘The two things that were his damnation.’” —D. H. Lawrence

American Decadents: Emerson, Whitman, James

Emerson’s failed Romanticism, Whitman’s Dionysian plenitude, and James’s Decadent late style represent three strategies for coping with the Protestant suppression of the maternal in American culture—Emerson is blocked by the absence of an American mother imago, Whitman succeeds by becoming the Great Mother, and James encases the daemonic in the dense female miasma of his late style.

• Emerson’s transparent eyeball is a Decadent self-portrait betraying his failure as a Romantic poet: the detached retina is a swollen Late Romantic member enacting voyeuristic seeing without doing, while his Puritan inheritance prevents the hermaphroditic activation of the sexual archetypal that would liberate his imagination.
  • Emerson’s eyeball has two contradictory properties—orotundity and translucence—that perfectly describe his prose: the eyeball is ponderous as a dirigible his afflatus is not quite able to lift, locked in uterine self-sufficiency like Goethe’s Homunculus.
  • The eyeball was added as a later afterthought to the original journal passage—a self-betraying pattern also found in Melville—marking it as a Decadent perversity, a part exalted over the whole in isolated looking.
• Whitman achieves what Emerson could not by becoming the Great Mother in his poetry: Leaves of Grass is the most perfectly Dionysian work in literature, an epic catalog of self-fecundation that synthesizes democratic multitudes into the capacious sac of the androgyne as Khepera, the masturbatory Egyptian First Mover.
  • Whitman’s real eroticism is homosexual and voyeuristic, not the heterosexual prowess he advertises: his fantasy of the mashed fireman with breast-bone broken is a homosexual defloration followed by a Late Romantic pietà in which Whitman is ritually slain son of the all-mother.
  • The Sleepers is a nocturnal patrol through the city of the dead in which Whitman, passing his hands ‘soothingly to and fro a few inches’ from sleeping bodies, spreads mankind before him in abject subordination—a vampire who walks by night, closing the eyes of his objects.
• Henry James is a Decadent Late Romantic whose late style is a chthonian miasma—a female swamp of generation materialized in syntax—that both defends against and channels the daemonic forces that erupted openly in The Turn of the Screw, while his grotesque metaphors are Decadent tropes of moral-sexual ambiguity functioning as apotropaia to distract the reader from a transvestized authorial center.
  • James’s late style systematically excludes the reader through a buzzing background scrim of qualification: the turgid prose is a medium of domination, reproducing the density of ambiguous circumstance in which characters are caught and conditioning the reader to Decadent submission.
  • The Turn of the Screw’s ghosts—Quint on the crenellated tower fixing the governess with ‘a bold hard stare,’ Jessel across the lake with ‘a kind of fury of intention’—are nodes of visibility in a cult of the western eye, hieratic personae in a tradition running from Coleridge through Hawthorne to James.
  • “Rebecca West observed that James ‘set about constructing a story the size of a hen-house’ with ‘sentences vast as the granite blocks of the Pyramids,’ noting that his great sentences ‘sprawl over the pages of The Golden Bowl … with such an effect of rank vegetable growth.’” —Rebecca West

Amherst’s Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is the greatest of women poets precisely because she is a sadomasochistic visionary and hermaphroditic Romantic genius whose poetry constitutes a sustained Sadean assault on the body, nature, and God, systematically suppressed by genteel criticism that cannot reconcile her mawkish feminine personae with her barbaric, daemonic ones. Her dual Sadean and Wordsworthian modes form a closed sexual system in which femininity is deployed as a weapon of self-masculinization, allowing her to expel chthonian femaleness from her cosmos and achieve the solipsistic Romantic grandeur otherwise available only to male poets.

• American Romanticism is fundamentally Decadent Late Romanticism, and Mark Twain’s Wordsworthian pastoralism in works like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn represents a retrograde fantasy completely out of sync with the internal development of major American literature, which had already moved into dark, sexual Late Romantic territory decades earlier.
  • Twain’s dislike of the witty Jane Austen betrays his unconscious rejection of the innate hierarchism of Late Romanticism; his folksiness and pastoralism are as counterfeit as Marie Antoinette’s masquerades as a shepherdess.
  • The Lewis Carroll of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with its mystery, cruelty, and blatant aggressions, is the true poet of childhood — not Twain, whose boy-stories are songs of innocence sixty years past their time.
• Dickinson has been comprehensively misread: sentimentalized in her renascence, later celebrated for modernist stylistic complexity, but still not recognized for the horrifying, ruthless Sadean violence that constitutes the core of her poetic imagination, making her the female Sade whose poems are prison dreams of a self-incarcerated sadomasochistic imaginist.
  • Criticism ignores the bulk of mawkish lyrics in her collected works and fails to integrate her high and low styles, tempering or suppressing the horrifying and ruthless in her.
  • When juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire rather than confined to American Studies departments, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent; she inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene.
• Dickinson’s primary stylistic quality is high condensation and riddling ellipsis in which Protestant hymn-measure is violently deformed, words rammed into lines with such force that syntax shatters, producing a poetry like Poe’s shrinking torture chamber — a womb-tomb of Decadent closure that reflects her Sadean treatment of the body.
  • Her Sadean metaphors treat the brain as a physical object subjected to splinters, dislocations, amputations, and escapes — as in ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’ — drawing on Poe’s skull-like House of Usher and the Tell-Tale Heart.
  • The body in her poetry is subjected to a catalog of impalements, piercings, scorchings, and ruptures — gimlets among the nerve, slivers in the lung, bungs out of arteries, staples through feet — composing an encyclopedic Yankee addition to the sum total of imaginable human tortures.
• Dickinson’s sadomasochistic metaphors are overdetermined — conflations of multiple meanings drawn simultaneously from Metaphysical poetry, Spenserian eroticism, Catholic martyrology, and pagan mythology — making her lurid concretizations a mode of Late Romantic materiality in which things become persons and persons things.
  • Her iconography of suffering sexualizes Catholic martyrdom: stapled feet echo Oedipus’ pierced ankles and Christ nailed with his criminal companions; the heart on a plate echoes Spenser’s Amoret; rubies pelting the speaker are wounds making her bleed like the Red Death.
  • Her metaphors use literal carpentry — nails, rivets, hasps of steel soldering corpse-lips shut — to produce a constructivist sculpture of death that recalls Frankenstein’s monster and positions the skull as a manufactured object.
• Dickinson has two representational modes — the Sadean and the Wordsworthian — that together form a closed system: the sentimental feminine poems (birds, butterflies, Christian faith) are not weaknesses but deliberate counterweights that make the sadistic poems more devastating by contrast, functioning as neotenic fictions of undefended consciousness that invite the voracity her Sadean personae unleash.
  • Singsong rhythms and neat rhymes are always spurious in Dickinson, signifying naive credulity in the speaker; her cheerful bride-of-Christ poems invariably end in death rather than resurrection, with God proliferating at every gate to block rather than welcome humanity.
  • Read any of her bird and butterfly poems while keeping her sadistic lyrics in mind, and they are magically transformed: her Wordsworthian verses show a virgin odalisque titillated by the pressure of erotic menace around her.
• Dickinson achieves a hermaphroditic self-transformation through masculine royal titles (czar, earl, duke, prince), boy personae, and phallic self-projections — most completely in ‘My Life had stood a Loaded Gun’ — that represent a Brontëan swerve from gender enabling her to expel chthonian femaleness from nature and achieve the solipsistic Romantic grandeur of male genius.
  • The loaded-gun poem synthesizes multiple sources — Aaron’s rod turned serpent, Excalibur, Spenser’s Talus, Jane Eyre ruling the blinded Rochester — to project the poet into a hermaphroditic totem of phallic force that is potent yet dependent, active yet reactive.
  • The companion worm poem reverses the sexual point of view: in her feminine Wordsworthian persona, Dickinson encounters her own escaped masculine principle as a terrifying phallic serpent she must flee, the Coleridgean sedition that Wordsworth can never suppress.
• Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist.
• Dickinson’s Sadean nature poetry transforms Wordsworth’s benevolent landscape into an inferno of predation, blood, and catastrophe — autumn is mass murder, sunsets are coagulated blood, frost is a blonde assassin, the sea is a seducer-drowner — because she has received Wordsworth through Emerson, whose American flight from the female strips chthonian femaleness from nature and leaves only masculine forces of destruction.
  • Her snake poems — ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ and the worm poem — are ritual encounters with the primitive and uncanny, the archaic serpent bearing ’the invisible slime of the swamp of human origins’ that nullifies evolution and swallows individual beings.
  • Nature’s dynamism in Dickinson is an excruciating seesaw governed by sadomasochistic extremes: ‘A Wounded Deer leaps highest’; pleasure and pain are yoked ‘In keen and quivering ratio’; God is a marauding hand and burglar who defaults on his contract with humanity.
• Dickinson’s corpse poems, condolence letters, and necrophilia constitute a Decadent voyeurism in which she is a rare female sexual fetishist who turns men into inert objects to control the Romantic problem of solipsistic freedom, ritually fixing the distance between self and world by freezing it with her Medusan eye.
  • She values corpses as artifacts because personality has passed from Dionysian mutability into Apollonian perfection; her intimate fondling of corpses is patently autoerotic — ‘Forgive me, if to stroke thy frost / Outvisions Paradise!’ — and her erotic claim is activated only by suffering and death.
  • Her letters of condolence are a sadomasochistic congress that sharpen rather than relieve grief, congratulating one friend whose house burned down (‘Disaster endears beyond Fortune’) and rapturously theatricalizing a drowning victim’s death as if critiquing a charade performance.
• Dickinson’s vampirism of the artist — documented by Higginson’s report that she ‘drained my nerve power’ without touching him — is the social expression of the same sadomasochistic hierarchism that governs her poetry: her elaborate self-presentations as frail, small, and childlike are calculated aggressive maneuvers of a ferocious hierarch practicing adroit mime of misery.
  • Her description of herself to Higginson as ‘small, like the Wren’ with ’eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves’ is a triumph of the masochistic, guilt-inducing trope: she wrote every word in perfect consciousness of her secret greatness and power, like Cleopatra breathing ‘I am pale, Charmian’ before striking.
  • Her withdrawal strategies — refusing photographs, receiving visitors from behind screens, sending poems and condolence letters while remaining invisible — are tactical: she drives up her market value by spiritual hoarding and taxes her friends by withholding herself, her appearances being delayed ejaculations meant to bring her audience to a peak of frenzy.
• Dickinson’s thirty-five-year relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson constitutes, by every standard except the genital, a love affair that recapitulates the movement from High Romanticism to Decadence — beginning in girlish Wordsworthianism and ending in dark, charged ambivalence — and her homoerotic tendencies are integral to her masculine poetic identity.
  • The most disturbing surviving message to Susan — ‘Where my Hands are cut, Her fingers will be found inside’ — combines doubting Thomas’s probing of Christ’s wounds with the Christabel-vampire’s penetration, presenting an unmistakable hallucinatory sexuality of female fingers buried through a slit in another woman’s flesh.
  • Sappho and the homosexual-tending Dickinson stand alone above women poets because poetry’s mystical energies require the sexual subordination of petitioners to the Muse, and their erotic access to the feminine hierarch — denied to heterosexual women and male homosexuals alike — is the source of their supreme achievement.
• Dickinson’s prophetic vision of intergalactic nothingness and her ice-world poetry represent a stunning modern advance made possible by her Brontëan swerve from gender: by refusing to accept femaleness in herself or nature and substituting cold mutilation for disease as her dominant metaphor, she becomes the first artist to envision science fiction’s glacial wastes — a landscape from which maternal procreation has been blasted — anticipating Kafka and modern existential absurdity.
  • In ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,’ she takes a position of visionary distance from which human life seems a speck in the cosmos, with Doges and diadems dropping ‘Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow’ — all the colors of Venice vanishing into eternity — decades before comparable visions in Wallace Stevens or H.G. Wells.
  • There is no disease in her poetry because disease is a female miasma; instead there are only mutilations — accidents of hard objects colliding in a Newtonian universe of cold purity — and the blood she sheds is lustral, a self-detoxifying bath with never any disgust, only horror.
• Dickinson and Whitman, apparently dissimilar, are Late Romantic confederates who are both self-ruling hermaphrodites, homosexual voyeurs gaming at sexual all-inclusiveness, and perverse cannibals of others’ identities — Whitman through gluttonous self-engorgement, Dickinson through ritualistic death-connoisseurship — whose work together constitutes the fullest expression of American Decadent Romanticism.
  • There is inherent irony in female Romantic genius: Romanticism is a sex-crossing mode that adds femaleness to maleness, and femaleness added to femaleness is a Romantic redundancy; Brontë and Dickinson succeed as Romantics because they are women of masculine will who tend toward sadism.
  • Dickinson’s sadism is not anger — the a posteriori response to social injustice — but hostility, an a priori Achillean intolerance for the existence of others, the female version of Romantic solipsism; without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry.