Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 19 of Sexual Personae

Chapter 19 is about Decadence in the visual arts. Decadence was a feature in literature for a fairly long period of time, but in the visual arts it officially had a fairly short reign. Paglia says that Decadent sexual personae were everywhere in art and literature in the second half of the 1800s, but that Decadent art in particular was soon "swept away by the triumph of the avant-garde and modernism." (p. 489)

 

The Wikipedia article entitled "Decadent movement" says much the same. It says that Decadence gave way to Symbolism by 1890 or so, and it even suggests that Decadence was little more than a prelude to the much more extensive Symbolist period. The Wikipedia article says that Decadence was largely about being simply transgressive, while Symbolism sought to portray hidden or mystical meanings in life. Thus, a number of artists dabbled for a while in Decadent art but then moved on to Symbolism for its deeper meaning. Artists who remained in the Decadent movement were sometimes called "dissidents" for not changing with the times.

 

Paglia, however, disagrees that Decadence as a whole was short-lived. She feels that the Decadent style was very much in evidence in other periods as well. In previous chapters of Sexual Persona she has talked about how she considers Late Romanticism and Mannerism as practically synonyms for Decadence (see my notes for Chapter 15); here in Chapter 19 she says that art history should be revised at some point to "acknowledge how much avant-garde art really was Decadent Late Romantic: much of Whistler and Manet, all of Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, and Gaudí, and even Seurat's La Grande Jatte, with its Decadent immobility and claustrophobia." (pp. 489-490) 

 

She also disagrees that Decadence was merely transgressive. She says, "Decadent art is ritualistic and epiphanic. Its content: Romantic sexual personae, the hierarchs, idolators, and victims of daemonic nature. [...] Decadent art makes hostile claims on the viewer. Its style is pagan spectacle and pagan flaunting. Behind the trashiest Decadent painting are complex Romantic assumptions about nature and society overlooked by textbook accounts of nineteenth-century art." (p. 490)

 

Paglia sees Decadence appearing in the visual arts in the following ways:

 

The Decadent androgyne

--The androgyne is at the center of the Decadent visual arts. Paglia says that by 1893 the androgyne "mushrooms over culture like an antichrist." She says that Decadent art is filled with self-contained, indolent, hermaphroditic figures. Paglia says that the Decadent androgyne "is louring and enervated rather than radiant. Colette calls this type of androgyne 'anxious and veiled,' eternally sad, trailing 'its seraphic suffering, its glimmering tears.' Similarly, Jung sees in the feminine head from Ostia of Mithras or Attis 'sentimental resignation,' passive self-pity. [...] The modern androgyne, seeking only self-realization, forfeits the Spenserian energy of opposition and conflict." (p. 489)

 

Decadence as a combination of Dionysian & Apollonian

The Decadent androgyne has characteristics of both sexes, but the characteristics don't necessarily cancel each other out; often they continue to express themselves in distorted form. Paglia sees Decadence as a combination or "syncretism" of primitive Dionysian and sophisticated Apollonian influences; the two components are contrasted as pagan and modern, or sometimes as sadistic and civilized. For example, in her book Vamps and Tramps Paglia says that Decadence is "a complex historical mode, a thrilling, sensationalistic late phase of culture dominated by themes of sex and violence. In decadence, the major revival is of the primitive, which is juxtaposed with the supersophisticated." (p. 343) Similarly, in Chapter 19 of Sexual Personae, Paglia places much of Art Nouveau within the Decadent current and says that it "combines the primitive with the sophisticated." (p. 497)

 

To sum up: Paglia sees the Decadent visual arts (and the Decadent androgyne) in terms of two components that coexist and complement each other: A primitive Dionysian component and a sophisticated or modern Apollonian component. As described below, the primitive Dionysian component will manifest itself as a fascination with vampires; the sophisticated Apollonian component will appear as an exaggerated aestheticism.

 

Discussing them separately, I'll start with the primitive Dionysian component:

 

The primitive Dionysian component: Vampires

To recap: The Dionysian is associated with the Feminine influence, that is, disorder, chaos, nature, emotion, and earth (Dionysus was the dress-wearing god of drink, ecstasy, fertility, madness, etc. who presided over the women's Eleusinian rites).

 

The Dionysian component arises due to modern freedom. As I said in my notes for Chapter 9: 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. 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. 

 

In order to deal with their anxiety about the excesses of modern life, androgynes take up a posture of self-completeness and live in a bubble of passivity. As I said in my notes for Chapter 18: 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.

 

One way for the Decadent androgyne to indulge his sexual fantasies and still retain his androgyne composure is to take an interest in cruel, powerful mother figures--vampires. Anxiety arising from Dionysian excess and absence of limits is stilled by turning temptation and desire into sadomasochism. The asceticism and pain provide daemonic Apollonian hierarchy and structure and quell anxiety and guilt. So Decadent androgynes tend to be attracted to strong, masculine, vampiric women in order to offset their own effeminacy and passivity and to satisfy their sadomasochistic tastes.

 

In Chapter 18, Swinburne was an example of a Decadent worshiper of powerful, cruel women in the form of pagan or primitive vampires. Paglia said that Swinburne's obsession with punitive mother figures and sadomasochism is a "sexual compulsion." In Swinburne's universe the man's role is to be obsessed by mother figures but keep the resulting anxiety 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.

 

Returning to chapter 19: In the current chapter, Paglia describes a similar dynamic of androgyne fascination with vampires. A few examples:

 

--Paglia says, "Decadent art's main mission is to record the modes of female power. Its theme is hierarchic assertion, pure charismatic presence. [...] Decadent art's daemonic epiphanies are a response to the moral overestimation of woman in nineteenth-century culture, produced by Rousseau's utopian psychology. So woman becomes the enforcer of violent, primitive Sadean nature." (p. 501)

 

--In reference to Rossetti's fixation on Elizabeth Siddal, the single female model for his paintings, Paglia talks about Siddal's thick lips: "The Rossetti vampire mouth cannot speak, but it has a life of its own. It is gorged with the blood of victims." Paglia describes Siddal as remote and solipsistic, possessed of "somnambulistic languor" and "blanketed in silence and humid, private pleasures." (p. 491) "The sleepy vampires of his late paintings are chillingly oblivious to the masculine, upon which they have already fed." (p. 493) "[She] prays to the divinized idea of herself with closed eyes [...] impersonality or emotional lifelessness in a woman is a masculinizing abstraction. Siddal's Decadent androgyny resided in her solipsistic self-embowerment, her eerie aura. Decadence is about dead ends." (p. 494)

 

--Paglia says that Art Nouveau depicts mother nature as vampiric. Nature is portrayed in profusion, but Paglia says that it is sterile, choking, trapping, strangling. "Art Nouveau is active but sterile [...] a garden of moral darkness. [...] We see the triumph of mother nature over the masculine. [...] The picture proves that Art Nouveau's running vines are an abstract version of daemonic nature, come to aggressive life to trap and strangle the human." (p. 497)

 

--In reference to Gustave Moreau, Paglia says that his female characters are vampiric. "Moreau's supreme theme is the femme fatale--Judith, Delilah, Helen, Cleopatra, Messalina, Theban Sphinx." (p. 499) In the painting Helen at the Scaean Gate, Helen promenades through the wreckage of war; Paglia says, "Moreau's Helen is a cruel idol of pagan nature." In the painting The Poet and Nature, "an androgynous beautiful boy slumps, stupefied, in a pool of water. Above him stands titanic mother nature, her face in a demented stare. She grips the poet's head like a bowling ball, both killing and inspiring him." (p. 500)

 

--In reference to the painting Whistler's Mother, Paglia says that the subject of the painting is "another Late Romantic vampire. [...] Whistler's mother is chilly, half-dead, averting her face from her progeny. She is a Sphinx sitting in solid squares like stony Pharaoh, entombed in a sparse throne room of Decadent stasis. She is as mummified by dry Victorian decorum as the taxidermic mother of Psycho." (p. 504-5)

 

The sophisticated Apollonian component: Aestheticism

As I said above, Paglia sees the Decadent visual arts in terms of two components that coexist and complement each other: A primitive Dionysian component and a sophisticated or modern Apollonian component. In reference to the Apollonian component:

 

To recap: The Apollonian is associated with the Masculine influence, that is, order, symmetry, culture, rationality, and sky (Apollo was one of the most "spiritual" of the Greek gods, being the god of oracles, prophecy, healing, archery, music and arts, light, knowledge, etc.)

 

As I said in my notes for Chapter 18: The Apollonian component of Decadent androgyny arises due to repression of the Apollonian influence in society. As Romantics increasingly indulge the freedoms and permissiveness of Dionysianism, they repress Apollonianism. The result is that repressed Apollonianism returns in daemonic form as a fear/temptation/craving for closure, boundaries, and hierarchy: Apollonian structure and boundaries undergo a daemonic transformation into Decadent closure, passivity, and self-imprisonment. From inside his bubble of self-imprisonment, the androgyne uses the aggressive Apollonian eye to observe, analyze, dissect; he becomes an aesthetic and dandy--a connoisseur of sophistication and beauty--but otherwise a non-actor in life. 

 

When the Apollonian becomes Decadent, it turns into passivity, self-imprisonment, aestheticism, and dandyism. The character of Des Esseintes in Huysmans' A Rebours, described in chapter 16, was an example of Decadence manifesting itself as Apollonian aestheticism.

 

The daemonic western Apollonian eye rejects Dionysian chaos, change, and liquidity. In chapter 16 Paglia says, "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)

 

Apollonian focus and attention bring clarity by distinguishing and separating details out from their surroundings and hardening their boundaries as objects of Decadent obsession. In Chapter 15 Paglia says, "Art supplants nature. The objet d’art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality." (p. 389)

 

Returning to chapter 19: The name of the chapter is "Apollo Daemonized: Decadent Art." The principle of Apollonian hardness, artificiality, and rejection of liquidity is illustrated by such passages as the following:

 

--In reference to Decadent androgynes in general, Paglia says, "The sex-repelling Decadent androgyne is Apollonian because of its opposition to nature and its high mentalization, a western specialty." (p. 489). "Decadent art is ritualistic and epiphanic. [...] It dramatizes dominant western image and sexual subordination of the aggressive eye." (p. 490)

 

--In reference to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Paglia says, "Pre-Raphaelite art, like Mannerism, disturbingly avoids pictorial focus. Our eye is not automatically guided to the human figures but is forced to wander over the microscopic detail. Color is unshaded and applied in separate cells, as in Byzantine mosaic or Gautier's gorgeous color units. Flowers and blades of grass are brilliantly lapidary, the paint surface so richly worked that there is only a single step from Pre-Raphaelite naturism to Gustave Moreau's Decadent jewelled artifice. Everything in Pre-Raphaelite painting is seen too clearly. The eye is invited but coerced. Part triumphs over whole, exerting an uncomfortable pressure on the viewer." (p. 490) "Pre-Raphaelite sharpness of detail is polemically Apollonian. Pre-Raphaelite mummification is Apollonian objectification and fixation." (p. 491)

 

--Paglia says that Art Nouveau freezes mother nature and makes her sterile: "Mannerist Art Nouveau denies female mass and internality. [...] Art Nouveau combats the chthonian, mimicking in order to petrify it in art. Art Nouveau is a Late Romantic Apollonian style, turning nature's perpetual motion to perceptual stasis." (p. 497)

 

--In reference to Gustave Moreau, Paglia says that his paintings demonstrate Apollonian hardness and aestheticism: Somewhat Impressionistic, Moreau's paintings are murky with "jewelled incrustations." "Moreau's substitutions of inorganic for organic things illustrates aestheticism's flight from liquidity. His ornate Byzantine style is [...] an Apollonian crystal clotted with chthonian darkness." (p. 498-9)

 

Closure & obsession

Paglia revisits the subject of closure and shows how it combines both the Dionysian and Apollonian components. To recap:

 

In my notes for Chapter 16 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. 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.

 

But once something stirs the androgyne's attention, the daemonic Apollonian eye turns it into an object of obsession: The androgyne uses the aggressive Apollonian eye to observe, analyze, dissect. But as discussed above, the subject of obsession in the Decadent visual arts was often the Dionysian vampire. The result is closure, obsession, and self-enslavement in the orbit of the vampire. 

 

Paglia refers to this as "embowerment" or being trapped in a "bower." The reference is to Chapter 6, where knights are diverted from their quests and trapped by witches or vampires in a "bower of bliss": It's the castrating vagina that steals the knight's energy and traps him into domestic servitude. (See pp. 187-188.)

 

Returning to chapter 19: This principle of closure, consisting of Apollonian obsession with Dionysian vampires, is illustrated by such passages as the following:

 

--In reference to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Paglia says, "Landscape has an unnatural stillness, making it a Decadent frozen tableau. Sunlit panoramas are locked in Decadent closure, a Spenserian embowerment. Pre-Raphaelite painting deadens even as it celebrates. Persons and things are candied, mummified, miniaturized." (pp. 490-491)

 

--In reference to Rossetti's fixation on Elizabeth Siddal, the single female model for his paintings, Paglia says, "Rossetti's paintings obsessively returned to a single subject, a woman of somnambulistic languor." Paglia notes that "obsession is psychic closure, a Decadent deforming of reality." (pp. 491-492)

 

--Paglia talks about "allegorical repletion," the artistic technique of repeating the same figure in a painting, giving a sense of closure and obsession. She notes that one painting by Burne-Jones has 18 identical women; another is full of identical men. She says, "Burne-Jones' transexual world is populated by one incestuously self-propagating being. We are in another Late Romantic bower, shadowless under a grey sky. The ritual limitation on his sexual personae is a Decadent closure, denying our eye right of access to other human types." (p. 496) Elsewhere Paglia says that even when Decadent art isn't technically Decadent in composition, it is "monadic," ruled by a single subject. "Decadent painting is one of the most obsessively ritualistic styles in the history of art." (p. 501)

 

--In reference to Beardsley, Paglia says, "This is Beardsley's descent into the maelstrom, the womb of archaic night. Man, infantilized, is entombed in mother nature's bower, the ultimate Decadent closure." (p. 511)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted Oct 3, 2025