Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 18 of Sexual Personae

[Note 1]

After the High Romanticism of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in Chapter 17, Swinburne and Pater represent a return to Decadent Late Romanticism. (See my notes for Chapter 15 of Sexual Personae where I spelled out the transition from High Romanticism to Decadent Late Romanticism.)

 

Decadence and closure

To review the basics of Decadence:

 

In my notes for Chapter 9 I described the onset of Decadence as follows: Society was mostly hierarchical and Apollonian in the past. But in modern times democratic reforms have resulted in greater freedom and a shift toward Dionysianism. As society becomes more free, Romantics increasingly turn away from the strictness and rules of Apollonianism; they indulge the freedoms and permissiveness of Dionysianism instead, repressing Apollonianism in the process. However, extremes of Dionysian freedom eventually turn into a free fall of chaos resulting in anxiety due to the loss of order, stability, and predictability. Repressed Apollonianism returns in daemonic form as a fear/temptation/craving for closure, boundaries, and hierarchy.

 

The early High Romantics dealt with their anxiety two main ways. Some of them simply denied there was a problem and refused to see the complexities and ambiguities of life, devoting themselves instead to a circumscribed, sentimental, whitewashed view of life and love; others faced their anxiety head-on and portrayed the world and society as dark, angry, and threatening, and they coped as best they could.

 

The Decadent Late Romantic, on the other hand, quiets his anxiety by making himself as free of attachments as possible: He retreats from the Dionysian chaos of the world and locks himself away in a bubble of self-containment and self-sufficiency. Decadent themes tend to reflect the self-containment of androgyny. Paglia says that the androgyne is a closed circle, self-contained. Androgynes have no need to seek their other half in marriage or in society at large; they are their own "other half." In Chapter 18 Paglia says repeatedly that all Swinburne's characters, both male and female, are androgynes.

 

In order to avoid anxiety, the androgyne avoids interaction with the world around him. The androgyne ends up living passively, confined to a very narrow range of action. This becomes Decadent closure: Living in a self-contained bubble can turn into a prison. In other words, the androgyne frees himself from anxiety, but that freedom comes at the price of passivity, solipsism, and self-imprisonment.

 

So the androgyne backs off and observes the world passively and without empathy or connection, waiting for something to come along and stir him or her. With no needs or desires beyond himself, the interest of the androgyne is only stirred by the exceptional: Great beauty, great ugliness, or some other expression of exceptionalism or hierarchy (high rank or privilege).

 

Chapter 18 revisits a couple of themes typically associated with Decadence:

 

Female characters as cruel, punitive figures

Swinburne's own particular Decadent obsession consists of an attraction to cruel or punitive mother figures. It's a variation on the High Romantic attraction to strong female partners. Paglia says of Swinburne's first two poems, "Dolores and Faustine are titanic projections of female hierarchic authority." (p. 465) Describing Swinburne's poems separately, Paglia says:

• Concerning Dolores: "Swinburne’s 'fierce and luxurious' Dolores is Our Lady of Pain not because she suffers but because she brings suffering to male victims. She is 'our Lady of Torture,' whose 'prophet, preacher, and poet' is the Marquis de Sade. [...S]he is an eternal principle of evil and disorder, defiling history." (p. 462)

• Concerning Faustine: "Faustine is the vampire who cannot die. [...] Faustine is nature’s womb and tomb, the playground of sex war. [...M]others, sons, and lovers clash like gladiators, their mismatched genitals the tools of shredding and capture." (p. 463)

• Concerning Laus Veneris: "[T]he sexual world is female terrain where man lies chained. [...] Medusan Venus has hissing serpent-hair. She sheds her lovers’ blood to irrigate the seasons." (p. 465)

• Concerning The Triumph of Time: "Swinburne’s favorite metaphor of female dominance is the nature-mother as man-engulfing sea. [...] Swinburne eroticizes death-by-drowning" (pp. 470-471)

• Concerning Anactoria: "Sappho’s love-talk is suffused with death imagery: 'I would my love could kill thee.' She longs to impose 'amourous agonies' and 'superflux of pain.' [...] Love in Anactoria makes painfully palpable the estranged distance between identities, a gap bridged by cannibalism. Sappho conquers division by inflicting pain and then murdering and devouring the beloved, literally assimilating her identity..." (pp. 473-474).

 

These female characters are "women of a certain age," in other words mother figures, which adds an incestuous tone to Swinburne's attraction. Paglia says of the character Faustine, "Like all his Decadent centerfolds, she is not nymph but dowager, a Belle Dame Sans Merci of ripe midlife heft." (p. 463) And Swinburne refers to Dolores as “my sister, my spouse, and my mother," prompting Paglia to note that Swinburne is "adding the mother to the incest-romance." (p. 462)

 

The incestuous attraction between mother and son becomes the centerpiece of the poem Atalanta in Calydon. Meleager finds himself caught in a tug-of-war between the bond of family love and loyalty owed to his mother Althaea and his affection for his love interest Atalanta. Althaea decides the outcome of the contest by murdering her son outright. Paglia says, "When she kills her son by flinging the brand into the fire, Althaea makes an audacious proclamation of maternal priority: 'Fate is made mine for ever; he is my son / My bedfellow, my brother.' [...] In Swinburne, husband and child are one, marked for death. Romantic incest collapses human relationships into primeval unity. [...] Earth is Sadean nature, her mouth red from feasting on her own children" (p. 468).

 

At the same time, Swinburne presents these maternal figures as barren, solipsist, and uninterested in love or childbearing. Paglia says, "The 'splendid and sterile Dolores' enjoys 'barren delights,' 'things monstrous and fruitless.' [...] Swinburne’s Dolores frustrates the procreative..." (p. 462) Dolores, Faustine, and Sappho engage in lesbianism, which was admired by Victorian-era Decadent writers for its unnaturalness and immorality.

 

In a variation on this theme, Paglia mentions that Swinburne wrote a number of "Hermaphrodite poems" where dual-sexed androgynes are so self-contained that they seem largely incapable of sex at all. Paglia says:

• Concerning "Fragoletta": "Fragoletta is a perverse adolescent, mute, passive, and sensually blank. She has the languid petulance of an autistic child. Her debilitation belongs to civilization in its apathetic late phase." (p. 478)

• Concerning "Hermaphroditus": "Swinburne’s Hermaphrodite poems suffer a Late Romantic introversion or self-stifling. [...] Multiple sexual possibilities cancel each other out, and being lies paralyzed." (pp. 478-479)

​

Male characters as passive and effeminate

In the High Romantic and Decadent Late Romantic universe, the obverse of the cruel or punitive female character is the "male heroine," that is, the passive and effeminate male character living in thrall to the strong female character. Paglia says that in the midst of all the aforementioned powerful female characters, "Swinburne’s few transient males merely illustrate a sensual embowered passivity." (p. 465)

 

For example, with regard to the poem Atalanta in Calydon Paglia says of the male character Meleager that "action melts into erotic passivity. Meleager is scissored between lines of female force. [...] Woman’s advance means man’s regression. [...] Thus Atalanta in Calydon subordinates its hero to Apollonian and chthonian androgynes, cornering him in a sexual cul-de-sac." (pp. 466-467) 

 

The climax of Atalanta in Calydon is Meleager's slow death from the injury inflicted by his mother. Paglia characterizes it as self-indulgent pathos on Swinburne's part: "Swinburne daydreams his pathetic death, a displaced sex act or necrophiliac self-wounding." Paglia says, "Swinburne’s secret script is the ecstasy of the male heroine, a central Romantic androgyne. Martyred Meleager is at exquisite stage center, rimmed by that erotic ring of eyes first appearing in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner." (p. 469)

 

Similarly, Paglia says that in the poem Anactoria Swinburne engages in "sexual metathesis" and projects himself into the character of Anactoria, making himself the "passive receptor of Sappho’s savage advances." Paglia says, "When Sappho [...] leaps from one sadistic fancy to the next, the vividness and vigor of language arise from the fact that it is Swinburne’s own body that is being mentally manipulated by the dominatrix." (p. 477)

 

And in fact, Swinburne's creative output reflected his own real-life sexual tastes: Paglia notes that Swinburne was a masochist who visited brothels for the purpose of being whipped by the women there. Paglia says, "The theme of male subordination to female authority is more consciously developed in Swinburne than in any other major artist." (p. 472) 

 

Decadent sadomasochism

As described above, Swinburne was attracted to mother figures. But to indulge an incestuous fantasy of that sort risked pulling him out of his solipsist androgyne bubble and subjecting him to the guilt and self-punishment typical of the earlier High Romantic authors (see my notes on Chapter 14 concerning Shelley). To indulge his fantasies and still retain his androgyne composure, Swinburne puts sex into the framework of masochism: It provides daemonic Apollonian hierarchy and structure, and it shifts the burden of punishing him (to quell any anxiety and guilt) onto the object of desire.

 

In the case of the Marquis de Sade writing in the 1780s and 1790s, sadomasochism was about enhancing sexual excitement; but Sade was a High Romantic and worked out his guilt and self-punishment issues in other ways (such as spending almost his whole adult life in jail). As for the Decadent Late Romantic Swinburne writing almost 100 years later, sadomasochism wasn't sexual but rather ascetic in nature. Paglia describes this aspect more than once: 

• "In Swinburne as in Baudelaire, sex is not pleasure but torment." (p. 462)

• "But Swinburne is without phallic aspiration." (p. 471)

• "For Swinburne, sexual experience is spiritual striving and religious illumination. Because it is pain rather than pleasure, his sex is overtly ascetic. The body is tested to the limit of endurance and the dominatrix satisfied only by ideas—by contemplative self-removal from the sex act, which she voyeuristically observes from an Olympus of hierarchic mastery." (p. 475)

• "Surfeited by its Enlightenment adventurism and the High Romantic magnification of self, mind yields to the flesh, melancholy object of the Late Romantic age of discovery. [...S]ex no longer required institutional validation for meaning. The unhappy result of this liberation is evident in Baudelaire and Swinburne, for whom sex is a tormenting affliction visited upon us by God and nature. [...] Anactoria, Praz says, shows 'sadism permeating the whole universe.' This daemonic nature, lit by 'the sterile sun,' is ruled by a sadist God who oppresses his creation" (pp. 475-476)

 

Paglia says that Swinburne's obsession with punitive mother figures and sadomasochism is a "sexual compulsion." She says, "The idea of criminal compulsion was invented by Poe: the deranged speaker of The Tell-Tale Heart, irrationally driven to murder, bequeaths his experience to Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who takes up the matricidal ax in a motiveless trance. But it is Swinburne who invents the idea of sexual compulsion, a Decadent enslavement." (p. 480) 

 

The theme of compulsion appears to hark back to the idea that the "closure" and self-sufficiency of the Decadent becomes a prison. To review: 

• The idea of closure as a prison came up in context of Gautier's A Night with Cleopatra. See my notes for Chapter 16, where I said that the Decadent queen Cleopatra withdraws from the world and becomes trapped in a tiny circle of solipsism and sequestration. The queen, bored and at loose ends, seeks distraction in strong impressions or amusements; amused by the attentions of a male admirer, Cleopatra finds entertainment in offering him a night of sex at the price of his death the next morning.

• In the same chapter (Chapter 16) Baudelaire took this idea to the next level; both attracted and repulsed by sex, his obsessions became a type of "sexual closure." Baudelaire often began a poem with a pleasant or affectionate scene of airy freedom; but then the poem increasingly obsessed upon some disgusting or frightening aspect of sex or love (rotting carcasses, vampire lovers) until both the poet and the reader were "imprisoned" by the poet's fascination with the grotesque. Paglia said that Baudelaire's poetry represented a form of "Late Romantic enslavement." (p. 424)

 

In the current chapter (Chapter 18) Paglia says that Swinburne's habit of repetition is a symptom of imprisonment and compulsion. Referring to the poem Faustine she says, "Swinburne’s speaker is a Late Romantic imprisoned consciousness. The poem shows thought perpetually circling back to one sexual focal point. [...] All things return mechanically, compulsively to one female center, primary and corrupt." (pp. 463-464)

 

As I said in my notes for Chapter 16, 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 can turn into the pursuit of an obsession without limits.

 

Swinburne also adds a new element. Paglia suggests that Swinburne's obsession with cruel or punitive mother figures is so strong that he seemingly regresses into a worship of murderous prehistoric fertility goddesses who require human sacrifice. To provide some background on this theme:

 

• Paglia described the early fertility goddesses (traditionally called Great Mother goddesses) in the first couple chapters of Sexual Personae. For example, "The Indian nature-goddess Kali is creator and destroyer, granting boons with one set of arms while cutting throats with the other. She is the lady ringed with skulls." (page 8).

• Paglia's Sexual Personae was influenced by Erich Neumann's book The Origins and History of Consciousness. In that book Erich Neumann says that we all experience something similar to a "Great Mother goddess" in infancy. In the first couple months and years of our life we become aware of ourselves as separate from our mother. We seek increasing independence and come to see our mother as a limiting, suffocating entity; hence our raging and tantrums upon reaching our "terrible twos." As a result, the "Great Mother" is a source of not only nurture but also frustration and conflict, resulting in a typical love-hate relationship. In fact Neumann says that early societies projected powerful Great Mother goddesses such as Kali into the world around them as a reflection of the infantile experience of the mother. In other words, ancient experiences of a powerful, cruel Great Mother are common to all humankind, both prehistoric and modern, and haunt our earliest memories; they rise to the surface in times of conflict, stress, and regression. (See the Intuition chapter of my blog for more on Neumann and his theories.)

 

Paglia says that Swinburne's sadomasochism harks back to these early experiences, both cultural and personal: Paglia says, "Recreating the archaic mother-religions, Swinburne sweeps Christianity away" (p. 461) Elsewhere she says, "In its ritual repetitions and subordination to female hierarchs, Swinburne’s poetry recreates the primitive world where culture had not yet risen as a defense against nature and where human life was dictated by brute rhythms of the chthonian. [...] Swinburne remakes man in nature’s image, sending him back to his origins in a world of hostility and fear." (p. 480)

 

Paglia says that Swinburne's sadomasochism should be viewed through this prism: "Swinburne’s masochism had a metaphysical meaning. His recreational whippings were connected to his poetic cosmology, which restores the Great Mother to power. [...] Surrendering himself to whipping, Swinburne theatrically formalized the hierarchical sexual relations of a universe activated by female force. Mind and body, pleasure and pain, mother and son were reunited in archaic sexual ceremony." (p. 472)

 

The repetition and ritualism of Swinburne's poetry thus appear similar to religious rites of early fertility religions. Paglia says, "Faustine is the most incantatory of Swinburne’s poems and therefore the most overtly ritualistic. [...] Swinburne’s alliterations dramatize his repetition-compulsion, by which he constructs a vast world of female force. In Faustine, a terrible and uncanny poem, poetry returns to its origins in religious ritual. Few things in literature provide so intense a replication of primitive experience. [...] The forty-one thudding returns of Faustine are literally unbearable." (p. 464)

 

Stilling anxiety

As I said above, the Romantics (both High Romantics and Decadent Late Romantics) were assailed by anxiety: Repressed Apollonianism was projected out into the world as a threat or a temptation, resulting in anxiety about the world. Decadent Late Romantic androgynes deal with this problem by withdrawing and living in a bubble of contented self-sufficiency and solipsism. Their only fear is that some obsession may pierce that bubble and cause them to engage emotionally with the people around him. Trouble only arises when the androgyne is gradually pulled out of his bubble by a great attraction or obsession: He is drawn into the wider world of emotion, feelings, and anxiety, often very much against his will. (See my notes for Chapter 15 for more on this.)

 

Swinburne finds himself pulled from his bubble of Decadent closure and self-sufficiency by a strong obsession with incestuous relations with mother figures; he masters the obsession by turning it into pain and self-punishment. Referring to the poem Dolores, Paglia says, "The victim invites Dolores’ abuse in order to sink into oblivion. Sexual pain is a ritual to drive off the mental. Conscience is merely an aspiring leech. Swinburne evades both Christian guilt and Romantic self-consciousness by a historical detour, surrender to the primeval dominatrix." (p. 465) Elsewhere she adds, "Swinburne’s poetry shows paganism as it really was, not idleness and frolic but a severe code of ritual limitation, curbing the dangerous daemonism of sex and nature." (p. 461)

 

To sum up: In Swinburne's universe the man's role is to be obsessed by mother figures but keep the resulting anxiety and daemonism at bay by turning the attraction into pain. In a sense, this arrangement allows Swinburne to have his cake and eat it too. He can indulge his fascination for the Great Mother while avoiding any attendant anxiety and guilt. In the meantime, the mother is conceived as powerful and brutalizing but also non-sexual and even autistic (as seen in the case of the poems "Fragoletta" and "Hermaphroditus").

 

Aestheticism

Aestheticism usually accompanies Decadent Late Romanticism. The Decadent Late Romantic writers described in Chapters 15 and 16 were aesthetes in one fashion or another. Romantic writers (both High Romantic and Decadent Late Romantic) are typically passive, effeminate males who repress their Apollonian side; their repressed Apollonian side then emerges in daemonic form as the aggressive western eye; and the western eye is used as a discerning, critical tool for maintaining distance and keeping the world at bay. (See my notes on Chapter 15 a long discussion on how the western eye operates.)

 

From his perch of detachment and self-sufficiency the androgyne surveys the world with daemonic Apollonian discrimination and separates out and cordons off a small number of objects of attraction for further analysis. Attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their great beauty, which is measured solely by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne. Such attractions become aesthetic objets d'art.

 

The western eye prefers hard boundaries, hard lines, and hard, glittering surfaces: The aesthetic objet d'art. The western eye is Apollonian in nature, and it is often critical of Dionysian femininity and changeability; Paglia says that this is due to a rejection of female liquidity: "the Dionysian is liquid nature, a miasmic swamp whose prototype is the still pond of the womb." (p. 12) Thus Decadent male authors usually seek masculine-appearing androgynes for partners or may lean toward homosexuality. 

 

An example of this rejection of female liquidity: Dandyism is a form of Decadent aestheticism. In her discussion of Decadent dandyism in Chapter 16 Paglia says, "Woman is the dandy's opposite because she lacks spiritual contour and inhabits the procreative realm of fluids where objects dissolve. All art, as a cult of the autonomous object, is a flight from liquidity. 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)

 

Swinburne, however, is an exception to the stereotype of the Decadent aesthete. As I said at the end of the previous section, Swinburne has found a way to immerse himself in the Dionysian influence of mother figures while still maintaining androgyne withdrawal and self-sufficiency: He turns the pleasure of sexual experiences into the pain of anxiety-stilling sadomasochism. On page 460 Paglia states, "Swinburne was a Decadent but not an aesthete. Unkept and disheveled, he had no taste whatever in the major or minor arts." And then further on in Chapter 18 she elaborates: "In Swinburne there is no swerve whatever from physiologic liquidity, because he is the least ambivalent of poets toward female dominance. [...] I cited Swinburne’s lack of aestheticism, unique among Late Romantic artists. The object does not exist in Swinburne's poetry for the same reason the objet d'art did not exist in his life: because he is unconflicted toward female liquidity and does not require the objet d’art as a perceptual defense against it." (p. 471)

 

To sum up: With one notable exception (to be described below), Swinburne's poetry doesn't contain aestheticism: Swinburne has no aggressive western eye, he doesn't discriminate among objects and select some as objets d'art, and he doesn't flee from Dionysian liquidity, disorder and dissolution. Instead he unabashedly worships the Dionysian in its entirety by viewing it through the prism of sadomasochism and devoting regressive primitive Great Mother rituals to it.

 

The one exception to the above--in other words, the one appearance of the aggressive Western eye in Swinburne's poetry--seems to occur in the character of Sappho in the poem Anactoria. Sappho is a female androgyne who inhabits a bubble of Decadent closure. Like the typical androgyne aesthete, she has become captivated by an object of great beauty: her lesbian lover Anactoria. The obsession has pierced her bubble of withdrawal and pulled her back into the world of emotion, love, drama, and all the things she despises as an androgyne. Sappho is not happy about being pulled back into the world; Sappho devotes much of the poem to threatening Anactoria with descriptions of sadomasochistic brutalities she intends to visit upon Anactoria in revenge for the dangerous obsession that Anactoria has roused in Sappho. Love and sadism become one and the same in Sappho.

 

As Paglia describes it: "Anactoria departs from Swinburne’s other poems in its Late Romantic concern with eye-object relations. 'All thy beauty sickens me with love': Sappho protests her subordination to Anactoria’s beauty. One reason for the male aesthete’s effeminacy is his submission or enslavement to the objet d’art and to the beautiful person who is the objet d’art. [...] Swinburne's Sappho [...] is a female hierarch who cannot bear such subordination and, rather than yield to it, will destroy the love-object. Beauty is an encroachment upon autonomy." (p. 474)

 

In Swinburne's other poems prior to Anactoria, as I described above, women tended to be brutal and sadistic but also non-sexual and even autistic; they were female androgynes locked away in their bubbles of withdrawal and they were effectively immune to aesthetic attraction and obsession. Men were just playthings to them, toys to be used and abused. But in Anactoria Sappho departs from that mold: Sappho's Apollonian western eye appears in her discernment and attraction to beauty, which then becomes a painful vulnerability for her.

 

Why does the western eye appear in Sappho? Paglia says that the poem Anactoria is, in part, a debate with God on the role of art in the achievement of immortality. Paglia says, "God is intensely masculine, a Shelleyan tyrant and oppressor. Swinburne gives him this masculinity so that Sappho can be more masculine in her defiance and sedition." (p. 473)

 

In other words, in his earlier poems Swinburne portrayed women as prehistoric fertility and nature goddesses, living in their own world and viewing men as little more than entertainment and human sacrifices. But in the poem Anactoria Swinburne updates Sappho and equips her with Apollonian discernment and discrimination in order to pit her against the Judeo-Christian God. The character of Anactoria then becomes not only a hated lover but also a stand-in for God himself; Sappho vents her disdain for both parties and promises that she will torment and conquer both of them. Death will one day take her Dionysian body, but her Apollonian soul will survive in her art and poetry, outliving Anactoria and prevailing over God himself.

 

Paglia says, "Genius is Sappho’s means of evading God’s authority: 'Of me the high God hath not all his will.' God’s power affects only her body, which is passive toward natural law. Therefore her femaleness is marked for dissolution, while her maleness, invested in her self-created poetic identity, triumphantly escapes into eternal life, a hermaphroditic transfiguration." (p. 476)

 

Thus Sappho becomes another variation of the punitive mother figure that Swinburne desires for his own sadomasochistic pleasures. As I mentioned above, the character of Anactoria is also a projection of Swinburne himself, another case of "sexual metathesis"; as a result, the poem Anactoria serves as a script for Swinburne's own imagined masochistic punishments at the hands of the Greek poetess Sappho.  Paglia says, "When Sappho, like the raging Cleopatra, leaps from one sadistic fancy to the next, the vividness and vigor of language arise from the fact that it is Swinburne’s own body that is being mentally manipulated by the dominatrix." (p. 477)

 

At the same time, the addition of an Apollonian side to Sappho gives her added majesty. Paglia says, "Anactoria is not only Swinburne’s greatest poem but a supreme poem of the century. [...] Anactoria is the most overwhelming female monologue in literature. Swinburne gives Sappho towering emotional and intellectual passion. She combines Cleopatra’s steamy volatility with Madame de Clairwil’s late-Enlightenment high I.Q. In Anactoria the female voice has stupendous hermaphroditic power." (p. 473)

 

[Note 2]

The section on Pater repeats a couple of the same themes that I mentioned above in the section on Swinburne.

 

Passive male

Pater demonstrates the usual symptoms of a Decadent Late Romantic: Passivity, effeminacy, and Decadent closure. Paglia says, "Like Byron, Pater values 'susceptibility,' a feminine receptivity." (p. 483) Elsewhere she says that Pater emulated Rousseau in rejecting the Apollonian values of the Enlightenment: "Pater urges refinement of consciousness, not masculine achievement in a materialistic imperialist culture." (p. 482) His ideas were so seductive and caused such a scandal that he removed the  "Conclusion" from the second edition of his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance. It was feared that this portion of the book might encourage hedonism or even homosexuality. (p. 482) Paglia says, "His young contemporaries found cultural liberation in that prose. Its exquisite languor was a vapor or miasma clouding the masculine icons of duty and deed." (p. 483)

 

On the subject of Decadent closure, Paglia says, "there is no energy in Pater; his writing is the ultimate in Decadent lassitude and closure. There is no sex or even emotion in him. Nothing exists but the perceiving self. Pater perfects Romantic solipsism. The male persona projected by his prose is the most passive in western literature." (p. 481)

 

Aestheticism = Perception and connoisseurship

In contrast to Swinburne, Walter Pater was very much an aesthete. He was an art and literary critic; his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) was considered by many to be a manifesto of aestheticism.

 

In Note 1 concerning Swinburne I said that aesthetes repress their Apollonian side, which then resurfaces as the daemonic western eye. The western eye was largely absent in Swinburne (with the exception of the character of Sappho in the poem Anactoria). But in Pater the western eye is very much in evidence: With his Apollonian side repressed, Pater the androgyne sits in his bubble of withdrawal and surveys the world with his daemonic western eye. He does not interact with the world; simple perception is enough. He desires only to perceive the world around himself and look for beauty in the world. 

 

Paglia describes Pater's writing as follows, "Pater’s hypnotic, seductive sentences are a Romantic spell, drawing the reader into a strange passionless state of contemplativeness. They make perception the ultimate creative act. For Pater, not even creation is as creative as perception. The aesthete is not artist but connoisseur." (p. 481) Elsewhere Paglia says, "Pater’s religion is a cultic code of Decadent connoisseurship." (p. 483)

 

To the Decadent Late Romantic, connoisseurship is about perceiving beauty; all other concerns fall by the wayside. As I said in my notes for Chapter 16 concerning Gautier and Baudelaire, 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. Pater falls in this camp as well: He says that the connoisseur needs only "a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." Paglia adds, "Rejecting Ruskin’s evangelical view of the morality of art, Pater argues that form takes precedence over content. Art can have no content whatever [...] Morality is excess baggage on the winged steed." (p. 483)

 

Paglia also notes that Pater's western eye is fiercely Apollonian, to the point of celibacy. This runs contrary to the pop-culture image of Decadents as dilettantes and hedonists. Paglia says "Pater is a crucial figure in the eye-intense western tradition. Perceptual relations are his whole arena of quest and struggle. He demonstrates the monasticism and religiosity in aestheticism and Decadence, once dismissed as affectation or libertinage." (p. 488)

 

Heraclitus as the source of Pater's Aestheticism

Pater bases his theory of aesthetics on the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Heraclitus viewed the world as constantly in flux, constantly changing. Heraclitus used the metaphor of a flowing river and said "No man ever steps in the same river twice"; because the water in a river is constantly moving, it's impossible to step in the same water twice. The opposing philosophy was that of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, who viewed reality as static.

 

We tend to have a fixed impression of life, a set of expectations that we project onto the world around us. Those expectations work well enough until one day they suddenly don't; and when our expectations no longer match our world we find ourselves scrambling to catch up with a reality that seems to have unexpectedly changed or shifted on us. Pater says that as a rule we mistakenly create for ourselves "a false impression of permanence or fixity in things" that are in reality "full of animation, of vigour, of the fire of life.” (p. 484)

 

Pater acknowledges the pressure and anxiety of an overfull Dionysian world; he says “Experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality.” (p. 485) He says that if we want to capture the true essence of life, we should not have expectations about life or try to mold it to our whims; we should simply sit and observe. Pater says that if life is constantly changing, then passivity, perception, and connoisseurship are the best way to observe life and soak up the beauty around us. If we can train ourselves in the proper mode of observation, we can achieve maximum enjoyment of life by practicing a kind of hyper-mindfulness. Pater said, "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." (p. 481) 

 

As I mentioned above, Pater says that an observer only needs "a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects." (p. 483) Pater is an Apollonian androgyne, and his Heraclitean philosophy of aesthetics is his own recipe for immersing himself in the Dionysian changeability of life with enjoyment instead of anxiety. Paglia says, "Pater uses Heracleitus to dissolve the too-too solid flesh of his archaic Venus. By Decadent connoisseurship, he will clarify and purify the murky chthonianism of nature." (p. 488)

 

However, in the end Paglia has her doubts about Pater's theory of aesthetics. In fact, Paglia says that Pater has it backwards: She says that Pater doesn't immerse himself in Heraclitean Dionysian currents of life; quite the opposite, he seems to flee from the Dionysian side of life. According to Paglia, Pater is simply one more Decadent androgyne warding off anxiety by withdrawing from the world and imprisoning himself in a bubble of solipsism and self-completeness.

 

For example, Paglia questions the passivity required of the connoisseur. Interaction with things requires action; whereas passivity implies lack of interaction. Paglia says, "An act connects person to person, or self to world." (p. 482) Without differentiation, boundaries, and interaction, the observer and the thing being observed simply mirror each other: "[P]erson and art work are equivalent and interchangeable, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray." The passive observer becomes a nonentity, a mere reflection of the world around him: "Though Pater makes it the standard of aesthetic judgment, the self seems oddly undefined. [...] [P]ersonality is only a temperament, a shimmering watery wraith." (p. 483)

 

Paglia says that this lack of personality is reflected in Pater's own work. Pater claims that he perceives the beauty of life and "burns with a hard, gem-like flame"; but he deliberately writes in a passive style, draining his words and sentences of emotion and inducing a contemplative mood. In reference to Pater's novel Marius the Epicurean Paglia objects: "If Heracleitus’ fluid vision opens the authentic world to Pater, where is the animation, vigor, and fire? Marius completely lacks energy. It is overpoweringly effete--beautiful, grave, and austere, but Decadent with enervation [...] Pater makes English a Decadent corpse to make love to. Something is amiss between Paterian theory and practice. [...] As aesthete and art critic, Pater manages to make externals not more but less real to his readers. Objects do not really exist in him; they merely appear." (pp. 484-485)

 

Paglia quotes passages from Pater's work where even Pater seems to acknowledge his own withdrawal from the world. For example Pater says that "Reality is merely a series of 'impressions unstable, flickering, inconsistent.' The mind of each isolated individual keeps as 'a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.'" (p. 482)

 

Ultimately Paglia concludes that Pater's passivity is "another Decadent enslavement." (p. 483) She says, "In Pater we find emotional repression and inhibited movement [...] Pater finally drains significance from everything. The pursuit of beauty leads him into a Bower of Bliss that is a life sentence, solitary confinement without parole. He is like Rachilde's Raoule, the necrophiliac aesthete in a self-made tomb." (pp. 482-483)

 

Also, as I said above, Pater makes the claim that his passivity and Heraclitean detachment allow him to immerse himself in the Dionysian without anxiety. Paglia, however, disputes this claim as well. As I said in Note 1 above, the Decadent aesthete's daemonic western eye is Apollonian and normally regards Dionysian liquidity with horror. Paglia says that Pater exhibits the daemonic western eye of the Decadent aesthete, and as a result Pater flees the feminine and Dionysian to such an extent that he represses it in himself and regards it with awe and anxiety when he encounters it in the world.

 

Paglia says, "In Pater, aesthetic perception is at war with its archenemy, female nature. [...] That Pater’s Heracleitean aestheticism stems from an anxiety about nature is proved by his meditation in The Renaissance on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. By far the most powerful passage in his writing, it is a spectacular vision of Decadent Dame Nature. [...] Mona Lisa is everything Pater fears and represses. [...] Mona Lisa swells with Decadent too-muchness. Only Blake’s cruel nature goddesses are this vast." (pp. 485-486) Elsewhere Paglia says, "There are just two sexual personae in Pater: the passive male aesthete and his cosmic antagonist, mother nature." (p. 488)

 

To sum up: Pater claims that he can immerse himself in the Dionysian flow of life without anxiety, but Paglia concludes that Pater's claims are wishful thinking: "Heracleitus, his hero, gives Pater his vision of life as an ever-changing river. But Pater wants fluidity and flow, Dionysian principles, without passion, participation, or self-surrender. He wants dreaminess without chthonian night." (p. 481)

 

Ultimately the aesthete's daemonic western eye is at war with the chthonian realities of Dionysian life. Anxiety is inevitable. The Decadent aesthete must choose: Either retreat into Decadent closure, solipsism, and imprisonment, or embrace the Dionysian, immerse yourself in it, and live by its rules. Paglia says, "An aesthete, I said, is one who lives by the eye, a process of Apollonian objectification begun in Egypt. Pater is trapped in an uncomfortable intermediate state. His Apollonian transformation of nature is incomplete. Taking refuge in Heracleitus does not solve his metaphysical problem. If all things flow, the self cannot be a prison. Pater’s persona is as static as Baudelaire’s, but Baudelaire correctly and consistently projects petrifaction, not fluidity as the optimal condition of the aesthete’s universe." (p. 485)

​

Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

​​​

~Posted May 2, 2025