Camille Paglia

His heroines never have a true anagnorisis because the moral fault is never in themselves, only in outside conspirators. Dionysian sparagmos was an ecstasy of sexual excitation and superhuman strength. He occupied a presexual or suprasexual dimension, the Greek aesthetic ideal. Omophagy, ritual eating of raw flesh, is the assimilation and internalization of godhead. There is no braking midline caesura, nor is there Pope's massy orotundity. Dionysus, with his Maenadic night-rites, is the body as internal womb-space, tunneled for eating and procreating. The ephebic androgyny of the high classic Apollo turned into effeminacy in Hellenistic art. In “A Carcass,” embryogeny is reversed. Death, forcing the beloved to imitate the animal's deconstruction, will make her surrender gender, identity, and coherence. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power. Therefore, despite its political patriarchy, Athens cannot be considered—horrid word—a phallocracy. He spurns “neuters and geldings” in favor of “men and women fully equipt.” This is not biography but psychography. Ignored by her own time, Dickinson was sentimentalized in her renascence. Walking in nature, we see, identify, name, recognize. This recognition is our apotropaion, that is, our warding off of fear. The smiling kouros is the first fully free-standing sculpture in art. Love and hate, male and female, lobster salad and champagne: this is Byron's object-world in genial rolling flux. Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. Its mummiform torso is covered with bull testicles or breasts in canine profusion. However, the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today's boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. The Amazonomachia, or Amazon contest, symbolized the struggle of civilization against barbarism. By his hubristic defiance of time, Dorian wanders into an infrahuman realm where he is at the mercy of pitiless daemonic agents. She has dropped it by autotomy, like the tail or claw of a fleeing lizard, lobster, or starfish. Jane Austen's Emma (1816) illustrates the social novel's association of androgyny with selfish privatism. Rousseauist responsiveness and nurturance automatically flip over into their opposites. The rest of Don Juan is a series of sexcapades across Asia and Europe. Baudelaire is uninterested in boy-girls or transvestites. His androgynes must be voluptuously female in body contour. The virgin is released from the mucoid swamp by a water-nymph from under “the glassy cool, translucent wave,” an Apollonian realm of purity, clarity, and vision. Its asymmetrical design, half curved, half rectangular, reflects the marquise's divided nature: female organicism joined to male geometry, a psychic hermaphroditism. Apollo with a potato peeler, she flays the Marsyas of humanity, exposing raw nerve. Man is a red-ribboned écorché in her laboratory. The contrapposto flexes one buttock and relaxes the other. The donnée is from Boccaccio's Decameron, where a party of Florentine gentry flee to the countryside to escape the Black Death. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Like Byron's seraglio, the boudoir is a matriarchate guarded by eunuchs […]. The beautiful boy has flowing or richly textured hyacinthine hair, the only luxuriance in this chastity. The Sadean orgiast is intellectual and contortionist, a Laocoön entwined by his proliferating desires. Any eely creature that manages to blow itself up from “Pink, lank and warm” to a long wiener doing the hula tends to seize the imagination of us moderns. The gorgoneion or "bodiless head of fright" antedates by many centuries the Gorgon with a woman's body. This condition, hypospadias, may be examined ad stuporem in the hundreds of photographs of Hugh Hampton Young's pioneering text, Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism, and Related Adrenal Diseases (1937). Athenian culture flourished in externalities, the open air of the agora and the nudity of the palestra. These negatives are a paraleipsis: what cannot be done to the soul can be done to the body. They could not vote, attend the theater, or walk in the stoa talking philosophy. The castrate voice had a strange power not duplicated by soprano or countertenor. This is Melville's real heaven, an all-male platoon, each with his hand in someone's pocket. The circle jerk is another Romantic uroboros. Khepera eating his own seed is a model of Romantic creativity, where the self is isolated and sexually dual. Khepera bent over himself is a uroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, a magic circle of regeneration and rebirth. The uroboros is the prehistoric track of natural cycle, from which Judaism and Hellenism make a conceptual break. Thus we see that Wilde's witticisms contain a wealth of unsuspected meaning. Even his apparently nonsensical boutades are Late Romantic gestures. Males hoping for acceptance must undergo a perilous rite de passage. His virginal modesty is a modern abulia. Room by room, Sarrasine advances to the cella of the hermaphrodite god, veiled like Spenser's Venus.