Sexual Personae

"Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson", a survey of sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts, is Camille Paglia's first book.

Portraying Western culture as a struggle between masculine, phallic, sky-religion on the one hand, and feminine, chthonic, earth-religion on the other, Paglia seeks to show that Christianity did not destroy paganism, but rather that paganism was driven into the underground of Western culture, to later emerge in Renaissance art, Romanticism, and contemporary popular culture, especially Hollywood.

Per the doctrine of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo represents the ordering principle, while Dionysus represents chaos and disordering. She uses copious examples from literature and art to argue that the primary conflict in Western culture has always been between these forces.

Paglia applies this analysis to many works of Western art and literature including: Pre-historic art, Egyptian art, Ancient Greek sculpture, Donatello, Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Spenser's "The Faerie Queene", Shakespeare's "As You Like It" and "Antony and Cleopatra", Rousseau, Marquis de Sade, Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship", Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Byron's "Don Juan", Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Brontë's "Wuthering Heights", Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James, The Pre-Raphaelites, Ingres, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "The Picture of Dorian Grey", and Emily Dickinson. [cite book |first=Camille. |last=Paglia |year=1990 |title=Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |publisher=Yale University Press |location=London & New Haven |id= ISBN 0-300-04396-1 |pages= pp. vii-viii]

From the first chapter, "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art"::Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements." [cite book |first=Camille. |last=Paglia |year=1990 |title=Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |publisher=Yale University Press |location=London & New Haven |id= ISBN 0-300-04396-1 |pages= pp. 1]

:The Bible has come under fire for making woman the fall guy in man's cosmic drama. But in casting a male conspirator, the serpent, as God's enemy, Genesis hedges and does not take its misogyny far enough. The Bible defensively swerves from God's true opponent, chthonian nature. The serpent is not outside Eve but in her. She is the garden "and" the serpent. [cite book |first=Camille. |last=Paglia |year=1990 |title=Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |publisher=Yale University Press |location=London & New Haven |id= ISBN 0-300-04396-1 |pages= pp. 11]

From the last chapter, "Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson":

:Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility." [cite book |first=Camille. |last=Paglia |year=1990 |title=Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson |publisher=Yale University Press |location=London & New Haven |id= ISBN 0-300-04396-1 |pages= pp. 673]

In 1991, The New York Times described the book and author in the following terms::Dr. Paglia, the author of the provocative book "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson," a critical analysis of sexuality in Western art that is also a on the underlying premises of feminism and liberalism, has enraged feminists and academics with her scathing observations. [Nadine Brozan, " [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEEDD143BF935A2575AC0A967958260 CHRONICLE] " September 16, 1991 New York Times]

Notes

Bibliographical information

*"Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson" (1990, Yale University Press, 718 pp.)