Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 16 of Sexual Personae

See my main essay on Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae for an explanation of the presentation of the following material. Page numbers reflect the paperback edition of Sexual Personae.[1]

Link to main essay: Notes on Sexual Personae

​

Male

• ExDion: (none)

• Dion: (none)

• Andr: Gautier's male characters [note 1] (pp. 408 ff.); Baudelaire's male characters [note 2] (pp. 421 ff.); Des Esseinte in Huysmans' A Rebours [note 3] (pp. 430 ff.); Masoch's and Rachilde's male characters [note 4] (pp. 436 ff.)

• Apol: (none)

• ExApol: (none)

Female

• ExDion: Hippolyte in Baudelaire's poem “Damned Women: Delphine and Hippolyte” [note 2] (pp. 425-428)

• Dion: (none)

• Andr: Gautier's female characters [note 1] (pp. 408 ff.); Baudelaire's female characters [note 2] (pp. 421 ff.); Masoch's and Rachilde's female characters [note 4] (pp. 436 ff.)

• Apol: (none)

• Apol: (none)

• ExApol: (none)

Notes

[Note 1]

In my notes for Chapter 15 I defined the difference between High Romanticism and Late Romanticism as follows: If a culture or artistic genre lasts long enough, it tends to go through two main phases: An earlier "high" or "classic" period versus a later "low" or "late" period. In the case of Romanticism, the genre is subdivided into High Romanticism versus Late Romanticism; and Late Romanticism is a synonym for Decadence. Paglia says that High Romanticism started with Rousseau around 1750 and lasted to 1830, while Decadent Late Romanticism began around 1830 with Balzac.

Like Balzac, who was covered in Chapter 15, Théophile Gautier is a Decadent Late Romantic. Paglia's analysis of Gautier discusses a lot of the same issues and themes as in the previous chapter on Balzac.

The androgyne

In my notes for Chapter 15 I suggested that the transition from High Romanticism to Late Romanticism/Decadence results in a move away from the Dionysian male and in favor of an embrace of androgynes as main characters. This occurs in Chapter 16 as well. Analyzing Gautier's novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (published 1835), Paglia says, "A male androgyne, the aesthete D’Albert, is destined to be obsessed by a great female androgyne." (p. 409) D'Albert is a typical male androgyne, self-sufficient and self-contained; he has no need of a female partner. But he is struck by the beauty of Maupin, a woman who cross-dresses as a man: "Condescending toward real women because of their fleshly imperfections, D’Albert is stunned by Mademoiselle de Maupin, who breaks all rules. She is disguised as a cavalier, so beautiful to him that he thinks he is turning homosexual. For the first time, he experiences electrifying erotic submission to a living person, fulfillment of his aesthetic prophecy. The same thing happens to Balzac’s Sarrasine." (p. 411)

Stilling of anxiety

In my notes for Chapter 15 I suggested that the shift toward androgyny and decadence seems to spring from a desire to still the anxiety that accompanies High Romanticism. The androgyne of Decadent Late Romanticism is self-complete and self-contained. He lives in a bubble that divorces him from the cares of the world; he only needs to fear when some obsession breaks that bubble and causes him to engage emotionally with the people around him. 

In Chapter 16 Gautier similarly stills his own anxiety by separating himself from the world and then keeping the world at a distance. Paglia explains Gautier's transition from High Romanticism to Decadent Late Romanticism as follows: "High Romanticism, thinking imagination alone can sustain the universe, is riven with anxieties. An excess of phenomena, no longer ordered by society or religion, floods consciousness. Late Romantic imagination contracts in fatigue, protecting itself by motifs of closure. The world collapses into a heap of objects, honored by the Decadence for their morbid decay. Gautier invents aestheticism as a mode of perceptual control. [...] A fixed aesthetic distance stems the obliterating influx of phenomena. In Gautier, to see means to keep at a distance." (pp. 420-421)

Aestheticism

As the previous quote suggests, aestheticism was a central component of Gautier's version of Decadent Late Romanticism. To repeat: "Gautier invents aestheticism as a mode of perceptual control. [...] A fixed aesthetic distance stems the obliterating influx of phenomena."

In my notes for Chapter 15 I said that the Decadent Late Romantic androgyne creates a "cult of beauty." Overwhelmed by an overfull world, he separates himself off in his own self-complete bubble. From there he surveys the world with Apollonian discrimination and seizes upon individual things or people that grab his attention and cause him to obsess over them. Androgynes separate out and cordon off objects of attraction for analysis, effectively putting those objects in a bubble of "closure." Isolated in this manner, attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their great beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne.

In Chapter 16 Gautier turns this focus on beauty into a formal theory of aestheticism, which Paglia expounds at length. Paglia notes that Gautier himself started out as an artist; the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin starts off with "the infamous preface, first manifesto of aestheticism. Gautier attacks bourgeois values and asserts art has neither social utility nor moral content. Beauty alone is art’s mission." (p. 409) Paglia notes that this emphasis on beauty alone displaces and shoulders out any other way of regarding things and people: "Mademoiselle de Maupin demonstrates how the aesthete’s infatuation with the visible is at the expense of the invisible or ethical. The aesthete is an immoralist. [...] D’Albert makes the high Greek claim, 'What is physically beautiful is good, all that is ugly is evil.' The Apollonian is always cruel. Only Dionysus gives empathy." (p. 410)

Western eye = unrepressed Apollonianism

In my notes for Chapter 15 I compared how the High Romantic and Decadent Late Romantic treat their Apollonian side:

• High Romantic: The typical High Romantic is a Dionysian male who welcomes the disorder and chaos of the Great Mother. (The Dionysian is associated with the Feminine influence, that is, disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth.) The High Romantic Dionysian male therefore rejects and represses his Apollonian side, and the repressed Apollonian side returns as daemonic projections of fears and temptations that haunt the Dionysian male and create anxiety.

• Decadent Late Romantic: The androgyne, on the other hand, has his Apollonian and Dionysian sides in balance. (The Apollonian is associated with the Masculine influence, that is, order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky.) The androgyne is Dionysian like the High Romantic insofar as he tends to be passive and effeminate; but at the same time the androgyne consciously embraces his Apollonian side and uses its focus and structure to analyze the world around him: He exercises his analytical "western eye." Because his Apollonian side isn't repressed, there is no daemonic projection, guilt, or anxiety.

In Chapter 16 Paglia suggests that Gautier was a self-avowed Apollonian and lauded Apollonian Greece and Rome versus a modern Christianity that he found too Dionysian. Paglia says that this results in "Gautier’s dialectic of pagan visualization vs. misty Christian emotionalism" [...] "The Greek eye, sculpting the world with high Apollonian articulation, opposes the clouds of Christian inwardness, northern Europe’s gloomy fogs." (p. 412).

Paglia goes on to note that Gautier deviated from his own preference for Apollonian clarity by admiring the indeterminateness of the hermaphrodite, which demonstrates that Gautier is decadent rather than a full-fledged Apollonian. But the decadent androgyne still has access to his Apollonian side, and Gautier's residual Apollonianism appears as the "aggressive Western eye," which engages in voyeurism, fetishism, and obsession. Paglia says, "The Late Romantic eye is a tyrant, and the act of seeing is erotically inflamed. [...] The power of sight is sexual and aggressive. To see is to possess; to be seen is to be raped." (p. 420) Elsewhere Paglia says, "The passive person turned art work is invaded and possessed by the aggressive western eye. The eye has all rights, the object none. As in Sade, the dominant knower makes enormous hierarchic claims. Western seeing, I maintain, is innately fascistic and amoral." (p. 412)

But through it all the Decadent androgyne keeps his distance, attempting to maintain his bubble of solipsism and detachment. Paglia describes Gautier's voyeurism as follows: "The sensuous is scrupulously observed but never possessed. Aesthetic distance is ingeniously preserved between eye and object." (p. 411) Elsewhere she says, "Here again is Gautier’s ritualized voyeurism, that series of attentive observers, of which we are the last in line. He creates the Late Romantic eye, erotic, aggressive, and knowledgeable but ever-distant." (p. 415)

Closure

In my notes for Chapter 15 I said that the Decadent androgyne stills anxiety by making himself as free of attachments as possible. He accomplishes this by receding from the Dionysian chaos of the world and locking himself away in his bubble of self-containment and self-sufficiency. In order to avoid interaction with the world around him he ends up living passively, confined to a very narrow range of action. In other words, the androgyne frees himself from anxiety, but that freedom comes at a cost: Living in a solipsistic bubble can turn his world into a prison.

In Chapter 16 Paglia says that Gautier's novel Mademoiselle de Maupin represents the first half of this description (receding from the world and locking oneself away). Paglia says that the androgyne Maupin "has an accursed beauty alienating her from both sexes. She must remain alone, Romantically autonomous." (p. 414) "Maupin makes a choice for self rather than community and preserves her androgyny beyond the narrative frame. She marries herself, withdrawing her energy from society and reinvesting it in her own imagination. The abrupt finale is unique: an autoerotic elopement." (p. 415) Paglia explains this self-containment as follows: "Gautier correctly shows hermaphroditism as asocial, because autarchic. His physically and spiritually perfect heroine secedes from human relationships and collective values. Sex itself is dispensed with. Vanishing into the distance, Maupin defiantly returns to that chastity symbolizing her uncompromising definitiveness of personality." (p. 417)

At the end, though, Paglia says that the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin is High Romantic rather than Decadent Late Romantic. She says that the novel doesn't achieve that sense of "the world as a prison" that marks true Decadence. The characters still demonstrate energy, love, and freedom to choose. Paglia says, "Maupin’s recoil from sex is Decadent, though the novel is High Romantic in tone. There is no Decadent closure, for example. The heroine can still ride off into the woods at the end of the story." (p. 415) 

But Gautier's later short story A Night with Cleopatra changes all that by exploring themes of Decadent closure. Paglia says, "Gautier’s artistic development capsulizes the shift from High to Late Romanticism. His story A Night with Cleopatra follows Mademoiselle de Maupin by only three years, yet there has been a stunning transformation in style and sexual personae. The aesthete Gautier has become a Decadent." (p. 417)

A Night with Cleopatra captures that sense of the Decadent androgyne's imprisonment as a result of her withdrawal from the world. Cleopatra is an androgyne and the ruler of a nation, but she is trapped in a tiny circle of withdrawal and sequestration. "This is one of the supreme examples of Decadent closure. The sky is no longer the gate of the Romantic infinite but a bronze dome sealing up space. The world is a desert, seared by the glaring, hostile sun. Architecture is menacing and surreal, anticipating Baudelaire’s night Paris. Movement is impossible, yet everyone is exhausted because the object-world presses so heavily. Making 'a mighty effort' in her 'enormous fatigue,' Cleopatra manages to walk thirty steps to her bath. [...] Thus Maupin’s airy High Romantic nature has become louring Late Romantic nature. The androgyne shifts modes: enslaved by nature, Cleopatra becomes a Sadean sexual enslaver." (p. 418)

Cleopatra withdraws from the world in order to still anxiety. Paglia says, "An excess of phenomena, no longer ordered by society or religion, floods consciousness. Late Romantic imagination contracts in fatigue, protecting itself by motifs of closure." But in this state of disconnection from the world around her, Cleopatra feels imprisoned. The Decadent androgyne, bored and at loose ends, seeks distraction in strong impressions or amusements: "The world collapses into a heap of objects, honored by the Decadence for their morbid decay." (p. 420) That can be dangerous in an all-powerful ruler.  Amused by the attentions of a male admirer, Cleopatra seeks entertainment by offering him a night of sex at the cost of his death the next morning. The victim, a passive Romantic male worshiping at the altar of the murderous Great Mother in the person of Cleopatra, welcomes the trade-off. Paglia says, "Cleopatra, bored and dangerous, is the first exotic heterosexual femme fatale of the Decadence." (p. 417)

To sum up the material on Gautier:

The High Romantic authors of Chapters 8-14 of Sexual Personae portrayed Dionysian males who revel in the freedom of Romanticism; but the Dionysian overfullness of their world traps them in anxiety, which they counter with passivity and self-punishment. In contrast, the Decadent Late Romantic authors Balzac (Chapter 15) and Gautier (Chapter 16) withdraw from the world into androgyne self-completeness. As androgynes they are disdainful of the common world and feel no anxiety toward it.

Thus the Decadent authors survey the world with the Apollonian western eye: Pinning things in place, backing off, and observing everything as art object--devoid of meaning but aesthetically pleasing just in terms of appearance and exoticness. The downside of self-completion and artistic voyeurism is Decadent closure: Life in a self-made prison of sorts where the androgyne backs off and observes the world passively and without empathy or connection, awaiting something to come along and stir him or her, be it a great beauty or a great ugliness.

[Note 2]

Paglia explores the same themes in Charles Baudelaire's poetry: The androgyne, the Apollonian western eye, and so on. But two themes stand out due to the particular spin that Baudelaire put on them: "Dandyism" as a form of decadent aestheticism, and Baudelaire's views on sex, which could be called a type of "sexual closure."

"Dandyism" as a form of decadent aestheticism

As I said above, decadent aestheticism occurs when attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne. Baudelaire applies this standard to himself as well as to the rest of the world: If things are only valued for their ability to be attractive (or attract attention in some other manner), then the same rule applies to the the decadent poet as well. Thus the poet becomes a "dandy." Paglia says, "Baudelaire’s prose contains a theory of the ideal male persona. The Painter of Modern Life (1863) makes the dandy the epitome of personal style. [...] Baudelaire calls dandyism a Romantic 'cult of the self' arising from 'the burning need' to create 'a personal originality.'” (p. 428)

Paglia says, "Distinction is aboveness and apartness. The dandy’s vocation is elegance, incarnating the Platonic 'idea of beauty' in his own person." (p. 429) But I also noted above that the decadent focus on beauty alone tends to make the aesthete an immoralist. When only beauty, wealth, and fame are valued, then everything else is subordinate or simply ignored. Paglia says, "Baudelaire’s new Decadent tone is haughty and hieratic." (p. 421) Elsewhere she says, "Dandyism is 'a new kind of aristocracy,' a 'haughty and exclusive' sect resisting 'the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels everything.' Late Romanticism is arrogantly elitist [...] Baudelaire loathes the new mass culture, which he identifies with mediocrity." (p. 428)

The Decadent Late Romantic aesthete increasingly becomes an elitist sensualist, obsessed with finding and isolating for his own enjoyment things that are beautiful, extreme, or outrageous. Anything else is simply beneath his notice; the self-complete and withdrawn androgyne is repelled by the anxiety-inducing Dionysian disorder of the commonplace things of life.

Baudelaire's "sexual closure"

In the case of Gautier, above, closure relieves anxiety. The androgyne avoids the Dionysian chaos of the world by locking himself away in his bubble of self-containment and self-sufficiency. But it comes at a cost: Living in a solipsistic bubble can turn one's world into a prison. 

In Baudelaire's case, Paglia notes this same attitude with regard to love and sex. Baudelaire often begins with a pleasant or affectionate scene of airy freedom; but the poem increasingly obsesses upon some disgusting or frightening aspect, until both the poet and the reader are "imprisoned" by the poet's fascination with the grotesque. In other words, the subject of love and sex is an object of fascination for Baudelaire, but it is also a source of alarm and anxiety for him. In decadent androgyne fashion he obsesses about the subject but at the same time he keeps it at a comfortable distance by describing his encounters with the opposite sex as undesirable and even horrifying. Paglia says, "For Baudelaire, sex is limitation, not liberation. Desire, normally a spur to masculine action, makes the male passive toward his mother-born body. He is betrayed by the body, delivered into female hands through sexual weakness." (p. 421)

In order to work out this tension between fascination and fear, Paglia says that Baudelaire's women "are stripped of their sexual and procreative functions [...] Baudelaire’s female personae are hermaphroditic because of their blank indifference to the human. Sterility and emotional torpidity in a heavy-breasted woman constitute my category of androgyne as virago." (p. 422)

At the same time Baudelaire's women are "voluptuously female in body contour." This gives them power and "hieratic assertion." Paglia says, "Nature’s power is wielded by pitiless vampires, the most numerous personae of Baudelaire’s poetry. [...] Baudelaire’s women are rigid and uncompanionable. [...] Baudelaire’s women are intimidating. The 'impure woman' is a 'blind and deaf machine, fertile in cruelties,' 'drinker of the blood of the world.' [...] She is a 'monster enormous, frightful.'" (p. 421-422)

In Baudelaire's world of decadent sexual closure, "Decadence always swerves from sexual experience. Intercourse is far from his thoughts" (p. 424). Self-complete androgynes regard each other from a distance with a mix of fascination and disgust. Paglia says that Baudelaire's poems are "ritualistic confrontations with the horror of sex and nature" (p. 421), and she calls this obsessive aspect of Baudelaire's poetry a form of "Late Romantic enslavement." (p. 424) 

Horror and fascination act together: "The Decadent swerve from sexual experience is identical with the Decadent creation of a world of glittering art objects. Both are responses to the horror of the female liquid realm." (p. 430) It's decadent aestheticism again: Sex and love have no meaning. Attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their beauty (or ugliness), which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne.

In the poem “Metamorphoses of the Vampire,” the poet sleeps with a woman; afterwards, "Sucking the marrow from her victim’s bones, she turns into a bag of pus and a rattling skeleton screeching in his bed. The vampire is ever-changing mother nature, whose embrace is rape and ecstasy, death and decay." (p. 422)

In “A Voyage to Cythera,” the poet goes sailing on a beautiful sunny day and sees the island of Cythera, traditionally dedicated to the goddess of love Aphrodite. But instead of a lush island with a temple and a priestess, the poet sees a barren isle with a man's body hanging from a gallows. The poet describes at length the physical condition of the body resulting from the depredations of wild animals: castrated with its belly cut open and its intestines hanging out. The poet associates himself with that lone, desecrated body and fumes at the image as an "allegory" of life and love. Paglia notes that "'To make a voyage to Cythera' was French slang for sexual intercourse." (p. 423) 

In the poem "A Carcass," the poet reminds his lover of a carcass rotting in the sun that they encountered earlier that day on their morning stroll. He reminds her that she too will one day be rotten and decomposing. He reassures her at the end that he will still preserve the memory of her beauty when she is rotting in the grave. But Paglia draws the opposite conclusion and says that the focus of the poem is on the rot, the stink, the bloat, the flies, etc. The poet is fascinated by the association of the rotting carcass with sex: “Legs in the air, like a lewd woman, / Burning and oozing poisons...”; the description of the carcass goes on at some length, in great detail. Paglia says, "It is this primitive spectacle of degeneration that arouses the poet--an a priori necrophilia. The proud beloved will be raped by dominatrix mother nature, the jealous fanged bitch waiting in the shadows." (p. 425)

In Baudelaire's poem “Delphine and Hippolyte,” the lesbian Delphine has just seduced the virgin Hippolyte. Hippolyte is feeling regrets in the aftermath of the lovemaking, and to calm Hippolyte's doubts Delphine makes the case for sexual freedom over religious regrets. But just as Hippolyte throws in her lot with Delphine and lesbianism, the poet suddenly shows up and at length (over the space of the last five stanzas) condemns the two women to eternal damnation and torment. Paglia makes the case that Baudelaire is playing off the tension between Delphine eloquently selling Hippolyte on lesbianism and Christian condemnation of homosexuality. Paglia says that Baudelaire is sincere in his moral condemnation of the practice; but at the same time the immorality of the practice also makes it fascinating to him. Paglia says, "Christianity may be the antagonist, but it is also Christianity that gives lesbianism its moral or rather immoral stature. Baudelaire says, 'The supreme voluptuous delight of love lies in the certainty of doing evil.' Like Sade, he needs the fixities of organized religion to give his outrages an ethical significance and therefore erotic charge. He constantly seeks, as Colin Wilson notes, the gratuitous violation of taboo." (p. 426) 

Hippolyte is the only character in this batch of poems who isn't an androgyne. Her femininity, seduction, victimhood, and eventual acceptance of lesbianism helps to make her final condemnation that much more spectacular. Love turns into eternal damnation.  Paglia even suggests that Baudelaire imagined himself as Hippolyte in the writing of “Delphine and Hippolyte." She says, "'Delphine and Hippolyte' is highly unusual for Baudelaire in having an entirely feminine woman, victim of lesbian seduction. Who is Hippolyte? I say she is Baudelaire himself" (p. 427). 

Baudelaire wrote a number of "lesbian poems" even though he morally condemned lesbianism. To Baudelaire, lesbianism is a violation of nature, a mark of the grotesque, like rotting carcasses and bodies hanging from the gallows. As such, it draws his attention and admiration. Moral considerations are essentially a non-issue for the decadent aesthete; morality only matters insofar is it puts certain subjects outside the bounds of polite society, thereby increasing their attractiveness in the view of the otherwise self-complete androgyne aesthete. Where Gautier was obsessed by great beauty, Baudelaire is fascinated by great ugliness and sin. Either state lifts objects and people out of the commonplace and turns them into possible objects of decadent aesthetic contemplation.

[Note 3]

The main theme in the novel A Rebours (often translated as "Against the Grain" or "Against Nature") by Joris-Karl Huysmans is decadent aestheticism and its use of the Apollonian western eye.

The main character Des Esseintes is a typical self-contained and self-complete androgyne. He has money and title enough to belong to the best society, but he is unable to fit in with that society and finds it a bore. To alleviate his boredom he takes up a life of partying, sexual adventurism, and questionable social experiments, such as trying to corrupt a boy and turn him to a life of crime. But the excesses of hard living cause his health to suffer, which becomes one more proof that modern life is too crude for his delicate androgyne sensibilities. Ultimately Des Esseintes withdraws entirely from society, cuts off all contact from family and friends, and shuts himself up in a comfortable house outside town. This withdrawal from the world becomes an expression of nihilism and solipsism: If Des Esseintes can't fit into the world, then he will create his own self-complete androgyne bubble and live according to his own instincts. Paglia says, "Romantic solipsism contracts to its ultimate Decadent closure. Renouncing social relationships, Des Esseintes withdraws into the self-embowered world of his ornate mansion. Surrounded by curios and art works, he is like a Pharaoh entombed with his possessions. He is both priest and idol of his own cult." (p. 431)

Walled off from the rest of the world in this manner, Des Esseintes throws himself into a number of aesthetic interests, exploring them one by one and theorizing about them in order to better understand them. And in fact the novel A Rebours does explore principles of aestheticism and fine art across a number of different interests, such as house design and decor, gems and precious stones, flowers, perfumes and scents, etc. The author Huysmans even invents a new language of sorts to capture fine distinctions in sensibility and to define why one object should be objectively deemed more or less beautiful than another. This aspect of the novel has made A Rebours something of a bible of decadent aesthetics since its publication in 1884.

However Des Esseintes' existing health problems continue to plague him, and he finds himself put off of each new enthusiasm or pursuit by petty distractions or bouts of illness. Part of his problem is that the nihilism that drove him from the outside world continues to haunt him in his androgyne bubble of withdrawal, sapping all him of energy and interest even in the things he loves most.

As I said above in the context of Gautier, the aesthete is largely driven by the Apollonian western eye. He discriminates between the ordinary, which is of no interest to him, and the extraordinary--those individual objects or people that grab his attention and cause him to obsess over them. Isolated in this manner, attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their great beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne.

However, decadent aestheticism is a lot of work. When analyzing something as ephemeral and arbitrary as beauty, it's easy to get bogged down in details. Des Esseintes sifts through the minutia of his beautiful belongings, and after a while it all starts looking the same; he eventually loses interest. Paglia says, "Des Esseintes’ aesthetic ambition is to discriminate, to use Pater’s word, every thing and every experience. This scholarly process secures the identity of objects against nature. Ironically, in A Rebours discrimination collapses back into nondifferentiation. All the aesthete’s exotic fragrances begin to smell disgustingly alike." (p. 435)

Thus Des Esseintes' nihilism and disinterest in the outer world seeps in and overtakes him even in his favorite pursuits. He keeps breaking off work on his projects; he goes through bouts of exhaustion and lassitude where he reminisces about his childhood in a Jesuit boarding school, probably the last time he felt some kind of connection with the world. Thus even in his walled-off state, his world--his comfort zone--continues to shrink, and he continues to be dogged by neurosis and anxiety.

In the meantime, the things that he has excluded from his life are never really gone. They are just repressed and bubble beneath the surface. It's Jungian enantiodromia: The more we strive toward one extreme, the more we are haunted by the opposite extreme in "daemonic" form (as a fear or temptation). After some attempts in the past to find an appropriate sexual partner in a couple masculine-appearing women, he has largely given up on women altogether as a distraction and waste of time. Paglia says that he embraces his Apollonian side to the point of repressing his Dionysian side: "Huysmans has no anima or projected female spirit. [...] Des Esseintes’ lavish mansion may be Huysmans’ attempt to construct a male house, a mental space excluding the female. But the repressed always returns with redoubled force." (p. 431-2) The result is Des Esseinte's famous dream in Chapter 8 of A Rebours, which Paglia describes at length on pages 432-434 of Sexual Personae. Paglia says that he dreams about a series of "weird female androgynes," leading up to a "daemonic female of chthonian nature."

To sum up: Paglia examines A Rebours in terms of two main interrelated themes: Aestheticism & closure. By withdrawing from the world and retreating into decadent closure, Des Esseintes can work full-time on his aesthetic pursuits. Des Esseintes ostensibly retreats from the world in part due to health issues resulting from too much rich living. But Des Esseintes notes that he has always felt alienated from society, and he feels relief when he can finally arrange to lock himself away in his house and have no more contact with other humans. In other words, it seems that Des Esseintes' alienation and withdrawal from the world is once again a defense against anxiety about an overfull Dionysian world, as Paglia proposed in the case of other Decadent Late Romantic authors.

But Des Esseintes' withdrawal from the world turns into self-absorption, neuroticism, and overwork. Any and every new petty disruption or intrusion by the world or by his health issues causes his comfort zone to shrink even further and he collapses in on himself in frustration and despondency. Eventually, Des Esseintes' neuroticism and depression cause his health to suffer to the point that his life is threatened, and his doctor insists that he must come out of seclusion and rejoin the world. Des Esseintes rages at having to re-immerse himself in a society that he despises, but he has to acknowledge that further solitude is effectively a death sentence for him, and the book ends there. The lesson seems to be that the world is naturally abrasive, especially to those with fine or delicate sensibilities; but we need to engage with it and actively push against it in order to keep from collapsing in on ourselves in anxiety, frustration and passivity.

There is obviously an autobiographical component to the book. The author Huysmans started his writing career as a social novelist and a friend of Emile Zola. But Huysmans grew tired of the sentimental treatments of the social novelists; A Rebours represented his rebellion against the social novelists, a desire to capture life as it is actually experienced. Huysmans portrays the escapades of the character Des Esseintes with indulgence and even humor, in the process capturing and portraying an early decadent mindset with great precision.

[Note 4]

At the end of Chapter 16 Paglia mentions two additional decadent authors: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs (1870), and Rachilde--the pen name of novelist and playwright Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, author of Monsieur Venus (1884). Paglia says that the common theme between the two of them is that of "Decadent enslavement and closure." (p. 436)

Comparing the two authors Paglia says, "In Venus in Furs, sadism is induced from a normal woman by a masochistic male. In Monsieur Vénus, masochism is induced from a delicate male by a sadistic woman." (p. 437) Once again, this can be interpreted in terms of the theme of androgyne self-completion and withdrawal: In each case the main character is dabbling in cross-sexual experimentation in order to create a closed circle that suits their sexual obsessions. However, the withdrawal and closure is taken to the point of enslavement of the partner. In the second book in particular, the sadistic Raoule causes her lover to be killed and then creates a wax dummy of him with real hair, teeth, and fingernails. 

Paglia describes the ending as follows: "Monsieur Venus ends in a shocking spectacle of Decadent closure. In a secret chamber, Raoule builds a shrine to her dead lover. A wax and rubber effigy lies in state on the bed, a Venus seashell. Hair, lashes, teeth, and nails are all real, 'torn from a corpse,' as endorsed by Poe. In sometimes male, sometimes female dress, Raoule kisses the statue’s mouth, which moves by 'a hidden spring.' Decadent objectification, begun by the High Romantic turn toward art, reaches its final grotesque point. A person has literally become a thing. The beautiful boy as Adonis, who enters the novel hung with garlands of satin roses, is turned into the androgyne as manufactured object, a frigid android. [...] Raoule de Vénérande, at the height of the Decadence, walls up her sanctuary even more willfully. She remains alone, married to herself and a work of sexual sculpture. All other objects of the visible world, annihilated by their Decadent profusion, have sunk to nothingness." (p. 438)

Again, the moral seems to be that the androgyne's desire for withdrawal, self-completion, and closure can turn into a bit of a slippery slope. It's the pursuit of an obsession without limits. To repeat what Paglia said in the context of Gautier: "Mademoiselle de Maupin demonstrates how the aesthete’s infatuation with the visible is at the expense of the invisible or ethical. The aesthete is an immoralist. [...] D’Albert makes the high Greek claim, 'What is physically beautiful is good, all that is ugly is evil.' The Apollonian is always cruel. Only Dionysus gives empathy." (p. 410)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted March 5, 2025