Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 23 of Sexual Personae

 

​This Chapter is basically a continuation of Chapter 22. Like Chapter 22, Chapter 23 is titled "American Decadents," and the three authors covered here--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James--appear to be Dionysian-leaning androgynes. See my notes on Chapter 22 for the historical background for this period in American literature. For purposes of this chapter, I will just repeat the difference between Dionysian-leaning androgynes and Apollonian-leaning androgynes:

 

Recap: Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes

In my notes for Chapter 20 I said that Decadent androgynes seem to fall into two camps: Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes.

• Chapters 19 and 22 of Sexual Personae described Dionysian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Dionysian-leaning androgynes indulge their Dionysian side by seeking out commanding mother figures and becoming devoted to them. They normally repress their Apollonian side. When taken to the extreme, their Dionysian attraction to the maternal may turn into a masochistic worship of cruel, punishing mother figures in the form of female vampires.

• Chapters 20 and 21 of Sexual Personae described Apollonian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Apollonian-leaning androgynes indulge their Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism. They normally repress their Dionysian side. When taken to the extreme, their Apollonian aestheticism and hierarchism may turn into hedonism, cruelty, chaos, and self-destruction.

 

The batch of authors described in this chapter (Emerson, Whitman, and James) generally fall into the Dionysian-leaning camp. In other words, Apollonian Protestantism banned the maternal influence from American life, but the Dionysian Romantic authors brought it back in the form of nature worship and punishing mother figures. These authors lean toward Decadence in portraying the maternal as increasingly punishing or even vampiric. 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Introduction

Paglia says that Emerson had a natural Dionysian temperament, but that he was too inhibited by his Protestant upbringing and background to give that Dionysianism full lyrical expression in his poetry and essays. In other words, he appears to be another Dionysian-leaning androgyne who is highly conflicted about the maternal influence; this is another variation on the theme of the authors discussed in Chapter 22.

 

To break it down a bit:

 

Emerson's Dionysian temperament

Emerson was a leading figure in the Transcendentalist movement. The Transcendentalist movement was aligned with Romantic nature-worship, seeking a Dionysian immersion in and spiritual communion with nature. Paglia says, "As a transcendentalist, he sought to open imagination to nature, in the Wordsworthian way. [...] Transcendentalism seeks unity with nature by rejecting codes and institutions." (pp. 598-599)

 

Emerson himself professed a Dionysian philosophy of life, preferring Dionysian change and chaos over Apollonian structure and hierarchy. Paglia says, "He seems to take a Dionysian view of reality: 'Metamorphosis is the law of the universe. All forms are fluent.' He speaks of the 'evanescence and lubricity of all objects': 'All things swim and glitter.'" Paglia also notes that Emerson's writing style is Dionysian, in other words, it is chaotic and cluttered, without any conventional Apollonian structure to clarify it or provide analysis. Paglia says, "The essays fragment because he suspends Apollonian master control: there is no hierarchical ascent or progress of argumentation. The prose lies in multiples, a Dionysian “Many.” Unfortunately, this multiplicity is also Decadent decay and too-muchness, which clot Emerson’s essays into unreadability." (p. 600)

 

Emerson's Protestant inhibitions

As I mentioned in my notes for Chapter 22, Protestantism traditionally was very patriarchal/Apollonian, and it banned the Dionysian and maternal influence from American life. Emerson came from a long line of Protestant ministers. Thus Emerson, delving into Transcendentalism and the European Romantic movement, was "caught in the clash between American Protestantism and English Romanticism." (p. 598) The result: Emerson was too inhibited by his patriarchal Protestant roots and upbringing to give free rein to his own natural Dionysianism.

 

Paglia says that Emerson formally signed onto Romantic ideas of transsexualism. Paglia says, "Romantic poets are always self-consciously hermaphroditic; thus Emerson calls the 'highly endowed man' a 'Man-woman' who needs no wife. He sees the great man as a feminine receptor of historical force, his 'impressionable brain' prophetically vibrating to the future." But Paglia goes on to say that "the transsexual theme is only fleetingly present" in Emerson. (p. 601) Aside from a few such statements, Emerson imagined a largely male universe headed by a male creator (instead of a maternal nature goddess). His principal poems are about males; “The Sphinx” is about a female monster but ends in the defeat of female power. 

 

Paglia concludes, "Emerson’s doctrine of self-reliance, by which America declared independence of European culture, is also a rejection of a female past. As a poet, Emerson is stuck. English Romanticism enables him to turn away from his rationalist heritage toward nature. But the absence of an American mother imago prevents him from activating the other crucial component of Romantic consciousness, the sexual archetypal, without which no Romantic poem can be written." (p. 601)

 

Emerson's daemonic Apollonian: The aggressive western eye

Paglia goes on to say that Emerson's natural Dionysian spirit is also tainted by a daemonic aggressive western eye, courtesy of his repressed Apollonian side. (See my notes on Chapter 22 for more on the nature and origin of the aggressive western eye.)

 

In his essay Nature, Emerson originated the philosophical metaphor of the "transparent eyeball." (See the Wikipedia article under that name for more.) Paglia says that Emerson's intent was to illustrate a Dionysian mode of perceiving the world: He transforms himself into a large eyeball passively observing the world without judgment or condemnation. Paglia says, "Emerson is trying to remove the barriers between man and nature. [...] Passive to the life force, he no longer sings but only sees. [...] Emerson envies the eastern eye of mystic vision..." (p. 599)

 

But Paglia notes that the metaphor is also a near-perfect description of Decadent closure and the androgyne's withdrawal from the world. Paglia says, "Seeing without doing, I demonstrated, is a primary principle of Decadent Late Romanticism. [...] Emerson longs to merge but cannot. The eyeball in which nothing can befall him is a uterine sac, a glass alembic through which he peers like Goethe’s Homunculus. [...] The eyeball is the uncrushed grape of separation, the Apollonian skull of intellectual and connoisseur."  (pp. 599-600)

 

Paglia suggests that the image describes an undercurrent of Decadent aestheticism, a daemonic Apollonian desire to survey the world while keeping it at a distance: Hence the aggressive western eye in the mold of Oscar Wilde's characters. Paglia says, "Emerson’s detached retina is gross and shocking because it is a swollen Late Romantic member: the part exalted over the whole, an immobile and isolated looking. [...] In his journals he says, 'Man is insular, and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb.' The self’s untouchable orb repels invaders, like a citadel, but it also repels or repulses in the aesthetic sense. The repellent eyeball is a Decadent self-portrait, like the grisly picture of Dorian Gray." (p. 600)

 

In other words: In Dionysian-leaning androgynes, Decadent aesthetics represent an irruption of daemonic Apollonian in the form of the aggressive western eye. Paglia sums up Emerson's "transparent eyeball" metaphor as "High Romantic aspiration; Late Romantic eye." (p. 599)

 

Summing up

The end result is that Emerson's natural Dionysian sympathies and spirit are cut off and strangled both by his Protestant background and by his androgynous withdrawal from the world with its Decadent closure and daemonic aggressive western eye. As I said at the beginning of this essay, Emerson appears to be another Dionysian-leaning androgyne who is highly conflicted about the maternal influence.

 

Paglia says that Emerson desires Dionysian ecstatic communion with nature but is unable to achieve it: "Emerson exhilarated? The joyful, spontaneous poet is what he longs to be but is not." Protestantism takes its toll: "[N]ever has there been a prose more magnificent in pieces and more oppressive as a whole. Emerson’s voice has an unnatural sameness, a phlegmatic flat affect. He lacks music—dynamics, melody, variation. We are feeling the burden of Protestant moralism, which Emerson never could shake off." (p. 598)

 

Paglia says that Emerson is self-censoring, that is, generating Dionysian ideas but then cutting them short before they take him places that his Protestant moralism doesn't allow. Paglia says, "The problem, as I see it, is that Emerson constantly interrupts or reverses his line of thought, leaving each set of ideas languishing in a solitary cell. [...] His essays, as adventures in voice, are struggles against the masculine Puritan past, which traps him in the sharp-bounded ethical ego." (pp. 598-599) Speaking of the poem "Bacchus," for example, Paglia says, "The poem’s quickness and excitement may come from its energy of evasion. Its short, hasty lines are Decadent terminations, self-severings, a boundary line drawn just before the poet is entered by female force, with its blurring dissolutions." (pp. 601-602)

 

Paglia concludes: "Emerson’s incomplete hermaphrodization as a Romantic poet obstructs the organic form of essay and poem, flattens mood and tone, and inserts an Apollonian eyeball into an ode to nature. As a Romantic sexual persona, Emerson’s 'I' is half-born." (p. 602)

 

Walt Whitman

Introduction

Like Emerson, Whitman appears to have a naturally Dionysian temperament. Unlike Emerson, Whitman celebrates his Dionysianism in full-throated enthusiasm. Speaking of Emerson's poetry collection Leaves of Grass, Paglia says, "In its freewheeling structure and perpetual metamorphoses, Leaves of Grass is literature’s most perfectly Dionysian poetry." (p. 603)

 

Problems arise, however, when Emerson himself registers the overfullness and chaos of his own Dionysian world and endeavors to keep himself separate from it in order to preserve his individuality; in that direction lies the withdrawal and self-sufficiency of the androgyne. And once Emerson chooses the posture of the androgyne, his poetry begins to show evidence of the aggressive western eye (courtesy of his repressed Apollonianism), which appears as voyeurism and undercurrents of sadism. The result: Emerson becomes one more Dionysian-leaning androgyne, another "American Decadent" like the other poets of Chapters 22 and 23.

 

To break it down a bit:

 

Whitman's Dionysian temperament

Paglia says, "Whitman invents the American nature-mother, a heaving cycle of birth and death gorged with objects and persons. [...] By bardic instinct rather than learning, he revives the cosmology of the ancient mother cults." (p. 602) 

 

Whitman's nature-mother is hermaphroditic and all-encompassing, and in his adoration of her Whitman also makes himself hermaphroditic and all-encompassing. Paglia says, "He wants to assimilate all being into the self, imagined as a capacious sac. The epic catalogs of Leaves of Grass are the poet’s gluttonous self-fecundation or female swelling, a portrait of the artist as Great Mother, a Universal Man-Woman." (p. 602)

 

As was the case with Emerson writing, Whitman's poems are so devoid of conventional Apollonianism that they suffer from lack of structure and clarity. Paglia says, "Dionysus’ polymorphous perversity breaks down Apollonian categorization and hierarchy. [...] Whitman’s weaknesses also come from his Dionysianism, which offends Apollonian form and decorum. At his best, he has the sublimity of Pindar; at his worst, he is screechy and cornball, like a carnival barker. [...T]he zeal to honor and absorb everything courts a collapse into nondifferentiation." (pp. 603-604)

 

Whitman's daemonic Apollonian: His androgynous separateness and aggressive western eye

But even as he celebrates everything in the world and mashes it all together into a nondifferentiated unity, it seems that Whitman wants to keep himself separate from that unity. Paglia says, "But Whitman [...] never fully succeeds in his Dionysian drive toward one expanded identity. Like Emerson with his heavy eyeball, Whitman finds the will-to-merge blocked by a veil of flesh, his troublesome self." (p. 604)

 

For example, in the poem The Sleepers the narrator travels among people of all stations in life and observes them as they sleep. But Whitman doesn't consider himself one of them; he remains separate from them. The masses are faceless, nameless, and powerless; Whitman hovers above them, godlike, and creates them, pronounces on them, and disposes of them. Paglia says, "Whitman’s relation to people is tense. He does not genuinely celebrate their otherness, their multiple identities, for these condemn him to solitude. Hence he 'infolds' them in archaic night, drowning them in the democracy of dissolution." (p. 605)

 

Paglia views this as Decadent voyeurism and use of the aggressive western eye. She says, "Whitman’s sympathy and identification are based on aggression and invasion. The poem has a skopophiliac tyranny: the omnipotent eye forces passivity on its objects, denying them personal consciousness. Whitman, normally the Dionysian enemy of hierarchy, spreads all mankind before him from horizon to horizon, in abject postures of subordination. The sleepers are matter awaiting the impress of his mind. His criminal trespass, a violation of their dreams as well as bedrooms, has a hushed erotic excitement. The poem is a psychosexual breaking and entering, and Whitman is the vampire who walks by night." (p. 604)

 

A similar problem arises in Whitman's attitude toward the nature-mother he creates: She is so vast and all-encompassing that she threatens to swallow up Whitman himself. But Whitman refuses to merge with her and lose himself in her; he fights to remain separate. Paglia says, "Whitman must overemphasize his maleness to retain his own sex in the surging female nature of his poetry. [...] Whitman cannot escape his proletarian past, where a man is a man by labor and robustness. Hence Leaves of Grass makes us listen to the tiresome rattling of an imaginary saber." (p. 605)

 

Keeping himself apart in this manner, Whitman adopts the pose of a typical androgyne. Fearful of the complexity and chaos of the world, he separates himself from the world, studies it from a bubble of self-containment, and boils it down (via Decadent closure and partition) to a few features that he can focus on and admire. For example, Whitman celebrates women and female sexuality, but he celebrates it from a voyeuristic prospective; he doesn't engage with it. Paglia says "lust for women is merely mimed..." (p. 605) 

 

There are also homoerotic scenes in the poetry of Leaves of Grass, often sadomasochistic scenes of death and martyrdom. Whitman puts much more energy into these. Paglia says, "The real eroticism of Leaves of Grass goes toward athletic males in Iliadic spectacles of pleasure-pain [...] Whitman prefers a Late Romantic sexual script, sensuously sadomasochistic and terminated by martyrdom at nature’s hands." (pp. 605-606) 

 

Even in these homoerotic scenes, however, Whitman participates but he doesn't engage. As an androgyne and a voyeur, he is unreactive and passive. Paglia says, "For Whitman, homosexual action and gratification are as inconceivable as any other. His eroticism remains in Decadent voyeuristic suspension. When he enters his sexual scenes, rather than hanging back in spectral aloofness, he is passive to displaced sex acts." (p. 606)

 

To sum up: As I said at the beginning of this section, Paglia describes Whitman as yet another Dionysian-leaning androgyne: Self-complete, self-contained, in a comfortable protective bubble that turns into a prison over time; and perceiving the world passively with the voyeuristic aggressive western eye. Paglia says of Emerson, "[H]e is trapped in sexual solitude. His own androgyny, a privilege and a curse, keeps him from union with lovers male or female. There is no true intimacy in Whitman. His poetry is a substitute for intimacy and a record of the swerve from it." (p. 607)

 

Paglia compares Whitman to Aubrey Beardsley and Jean Genet. She says, "These three artists are a perverse paradox of fertility and negation. In each, autoerotic imagination flourishes in the prison of the modern self." (p. 607) And from time to time Whitman's aggressive western eye appears in the form of undercurrents of daemonic voyeurism, aggression, and sadism. As Paglia says, "Leaves of Grass is a High Romantic work bedeviled by Late Romantic impulses." (p. 604)

 

Henry James

Introduction

Henry James aspired to be a social novelist; his books describe relationships between people with an emphasis on the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize them. And most modern literary criticism analyzes James as a social novelist. But Paglia says that this approach undervalues James. She says, "Henry James, normally considered a social novelist, is a Decadent Late Romantic, which gives his writing its unique and aggravating character. James criticism is too adulatory. The result, as with Spenser and Goethe, is the academic censoring of a fantastically perverse imagination." (p. 607)

 

Paglia describes James as one more Dionysian-leaning androgyne in the Decadent Late Romantic style. She notes the portrayal of the male as a passive "male heroine," the reserve and self-sufficiency of the androgyne, and the aggressive western eye courtesy of repressed Apollonianism. She says, "[I]f James is understood as a Late Romantic, a Decadent in my extended sense, then his sadomasochistic perversities take coherent form, integrated with his witty aestheticism and ambiguous sexual personae. His fussy late style is Decadent because it is both fastidious and excessive." (p. 622)

 

To break it down:

 

James's Dionysian temperament: The passive male heroine

As is the case in most Late Romantic literature, James portrays men as passive male heroines orbiting around powerful and often punishing maternal figures. Quoting a few of Paglia's examples:

• In the novel The Ambassadors: "Lambert Strether, with his spindly, dithery name, is the timid male cowed by dominant women. [...] Mrs. Newsome, a New England grande dame, is a garrulous Muse or bloated teapot, a great gushing force of phallic personality cascading into his littleness." (p. 607)

• In the novel The Death of the Lion, Paglia describes Mrs. Wimbush and Neil Paraday as follows: “'A blind, violent force,' she is 'constructed of steel and leather.' He, on the other hand, is of 'india-rubber.' Mrs. Wimbush is a brazen totem, a locomotive flattening a doll." (pp. 607-608)

• In The Wings of the Dove, "Merton Densher, the shrinking violet [...] is subject both to Mrs. Lowder and her bold niece, Kate Croy, to whom he offers 'his pure passivity.' He enjoys 'mere spectatorship,' while Kate is 'the faultless soldier on parade.'”(p. 608)

• In The Portrait of a Lady, sickly Ralph Touchett "'shambled, and stumbled, and shuffled, in a manner that denoted great physical helplessness.' This maladroit marionette says of his subservience to the plucky heroine: 'Isabel Archer has acted on me--yes; she acts on every one. But I have been absolutely passive.'” (p. 608)

 

Paglia says, "Women in James have innate authority, while men are in retreat. [...] James, maneuvering his insipid heroes into reverential attitudes, makes himself a court hermaphrodite, an unctuous flatterer at the queen’s court. His slavishness is another version of the cultic reverence of Poe, Baudelaire, and Swinburne for their Romantic vampires. [...] The Jamesian male puts himself under the influence of female power, like a patient submitting to a hypnotist." (p. 608)

 

James's Dionysian temperament: The lesbian enthrallment

In three of his books James wrote about passive young women seduced by older vampiric females--a lesbian "enthrallment." Paglia says that James projects himself into the passive young woman in a process of "sexual metathesis." She says that James likely got the idea from Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, which was influenced by Coleridge's Christabel. (p. 610)

 

Basically, this is just the Dionysian archetype of the passive male heroine taken to the next level. In other words:

• In the "passive male heroine" novels, James embraces his feminine/Dionysian side and imagines himself a submissive male worshiping a punishing maternal figure. 

• In the "lesbian enthrallment" novels, James embraces his feminine/Dionysian side to the point of projecting himself into the role of a submissive female under the sway of a vampiric female figure.

 

Paglia says, "The sexually ambivalent artist projects himself into the passive girl, corrupted by a dominatrix." And she notes that the literary critic Edmund Wilson "sees transsexual identification in all James's heroines." Wilson says, "There was always in Henry James an innocent little girl whom he cherished and loved and protected and yet whom he later tried to violate, whom he even tried to kill.” (pp. 610-611)

 

Paglia adds that the repetition of this theme of lesbian enthrallment in three novels demonstrates Late Romantic obsession: "What is perverse in James is the obsessive repetition of this psychodrama. Like Poe, he writes the same story over and over again. Repetition, imperfect individuation: as in Wuthering Heights, such blurring of characterization signals the presence of Romanticism." (p. 611)

 

Paglia notes that the most blatant of these lesbian enthrallments occurs in the novel The Bostonians, which is also the only book to feature a male character--Basil--who is fully virile in the normal masculine sense. Paglia says, "The two things are related. Masculinity emerges unimpaired in The Bostonians because of the completeness with which James has fused with passive Verena. Olive’s unmasked lesbian ardor holds him in his transsexual state, without risk of contamination by maleness. Hence Basil, left to himself, can expand to the limit of his gender." (p. 611)

 

James's Dionysian temperament: The Turn of the Screw

In The Turn of the Screw, James takes the themes of the "lesbian enthrallment" and the "passive male heroine" and turns them into a Late Romantic horror story. Paglia says, "The Turn of the Screw is a great rebirth of the archaic, returning Hawthorne to his Coleridgean source by infusions of charismatic Late Romantic evil." (p. 615)

 

"Homosexual enthrallment": At the start of the novella, a new governess finds that her young charges, a brother and sister, are being haunted by two ghosts: The boy is being haunted by the ghost of a previous male employee, and the girl is being haunted by the ghost of a previous female governess. Critics have noted that the ghostly possession of the children isn't overtly sexual, but that it is "ambiguously sexual." (p. 612) Hence the novella contains a sense of a "homosexual enthrallment" of two young children by two ghostly predators. 

 

Paglia attributes the implied sexual nature of the enthrallment to the use of the aggressive western eye: The ghosts have a habit of standing motionless and staring at the children from a distance or through a window. Paglia says of the ghosts, "Quint and Jessel’s opacity comes from their intensity of seeing and being seen, [...] What is Decadent in Quint and Jessel is their visual concentration and immobility, their horrifying stillness. [...] Eroticism in The Turn of the Screw takes the frigid form of voyeurism." (p. 613)

 

These ideas (homosexual enthrallment, voyeurism, the aggressive western eye) are all trademarks of the Dionysian-leaning androgyne, as discussed in the sections on Emerson and Whitman: Homosexual enthrallment is a manifestation of the Romantic's overt Dionysian side; and voyeurism and the aggressive western eye are manifestations of the androgyne's repressed Apollonian side. 

 

The reader never knows why the ghosts haunt the children. But insofar as the ghosts represent a projection of James's own frame of mind, they can be seen as manifestations of the Dionysian-leaning androgyne. The Dionysian-leaning androgyne lives in a bubble of Decadent closure and passively observes the world; lighting upon an object of interest, the androgyne is content to simply fixate upon it. So the androgyne ghosts just stand and watch; enthrallment and obsession are an end in themselves. Paglia says of the ghosts, "The evil into which they threaten to abduct the children is more potent for its vagueness. Their lust is for homosexual capture, not contact. They entice their victims into a world of sexual anti-matter." (p. 612)

 

"Passive male heroine": Throughout The Turn of the Screw, it is never quite proven that the ghosts are objectively real. Modern criticism has increasingly seen the ghosts as fantasies of the new governess, in other words, products of her fevered imagination. Paglia explores this interpretation as well. She says, "The governess [...] is a Late Romantic imaginist who creates a psychodrama of enslavement. [...] The governess is another Khepera, a cosmogonic hermaphrodite exciting herself into autoerotic action. The ghosts may be emanations of her own double-sexed imagination, schizophrenically alienated: rejecting marriage, male and female separate for a homosexual spree." (pp. 612-613)

 

The governess interrogates the children about their interactions with the ghosts, which they deny. At the end, the governess sends the girl away from the house; and she torments the boy so insistently about his interactions with the male ghost that he dies in her protective embrace. 

 

Thus, the boy's death becomes another variant of the interaction between the passive male heroine and the punishing mother figure. The fate of the submissive male achieves the furthest extremity--martyrdom in the arms of the vampire. Paglia says, "But the governess’ supreme achievement is the death-by-imagination of the terrorized boy-child Miles, who expires in her imprisoning arms. Like the witch-queen of Snow White, she is the stepmother of fatal embrace. [...I]n James, woman triumphs, dandling the dead male in her personal pietà." (p. 614)

 

James's Dionysian temperament: The late novels

Paglia says that James's last three novels--The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904)--are written in a style that is deliberately obscure and impenetrable. She says, "There is a taunting obscurantism." (p. 616)

 

Paglia lists a number of problems with the prose: "James disorients the reader by dimming the spatial and psychological premises of perception. The character set before us becomes more, not less nebulous [...] Syntax is equally perverse. The prose is self- interrupted by hedging clauses, endless qualifications of Decadent precision, a pedantry numbing by overabstraction. James has a baffling style. That is, he sets the prose as a baffle or barrier between the reader and the thing described. [...] Open any novel at random: who is being talked about? We grope about, at a loss. Names are rare. James likes luxurious misty rowings through he, she, you, I." Paglia suggests that this is all quite deliberate on James's part: "There is good reason to be repelled by James's duplicity and guile, for line by line we are being deflected from what we really want to know." (pp. 615-616)

 

Paglia explains this shift in style by suggesting that James had grown wary of portraying the daemonic too nakedly. The Turn of the Screw was written just a couple years prior (in 1898), and James himself feared that The Turn of the Screw had descended into "pot-boiler" territory. So he attempted to disappear back into the genre of social novels by concealing the more lurid elements of his prose. Paglia says, "My theory: the late style’s complexity and impenetrability are a defense against the dangerous outbreak of the daemonic in Turn of the Screw. [...] James's systematic exclusion of the reader is crucial to his defense against the daemonic." (pp. 615-616)

 

Paglia also says that James's late style represents another manifestation of Dionysianism. In other words: Apollonianism favors structure, analysis, and clarity; Dionysianism, by contrast, favors chaos, drama, and hidden-ness. James's late novels feature the latter. Paglia refers to James's late style as a "Romantic withdrawal from masculinity." (p. 617) She says that his style is "a miasma, a new version of the female swamp of generation. [...] James's muffling social drapery is female fabric hung between persons to prevent human contact. The mother’s robes are materialized in his massy, ponderous style." (p. 621)

 

Paglia says that James's prose becomes one more way in which James plays the passive male and worships the maternal element: "James's world, we have seen, is ruled by women. With a few slick exceptions, men are limited, subordinate, or ludicrous. The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force whom James both resists and adores. We feel her hovering in his ornate style." (p. 621) Paglia suggests that James's late style is a way to imitate the maternal and at the same time conceal the imitation from his readers: "[W]hat the prose is concealing is James himself, transvestized." (p. 620) 

 

But at the same time, submission to the maternal is a feature of the Dionysian-leaning androgyne, and it results in androgyne passivity, withdrawal, and closure. Paglia says that the maternal influence is a "channel of the daemonic, through which man is crushed and humiliated by nature. James's union with the mother is an imprisonment that we, oppressed by his style, share. She prevents him from fully entering the world of personae. He is detained by her in a median state, halfway between Romanticism and the social novel, his artistic goal. So we wait—and wait and wait. Nothing ever happens in James, because he and we are hostages caught in a crossfire." (pp. 621-622)

 

The Dionysian-leaning androgyne withdraws from the world and closes himself in a bubble of detachment. Self-sufficient, he needs no connection with others; he just observes passively. Paglia notes the lack of connection with society inherent in James's writing, and the sense of passive observation: "James has a reputation as a psychologist. Yes, he records internal events, but his psychological insights are not particularly abundant. James is monotonous. His characters’ inner lives are poorly personalized. There is only one consciousness, his own. [...] James describes states of waiting. He seeks fullness, retention, rumination in the bovine sense. The unexpressed is an edemic engorgement, a male pregnancy without issue." (p. 616)

 

James's daemonic Apollonian: The aggressive western eye

Again, James's last three novels are much more opaque than his previous work, and it seems as though James depended on clever wordsmithing to carry the literary burden. Paglia says that this feature is particularly evident in James's use of metaphors, which stand out from the rest of the text by virtue of their manifestation of the aggressive western eye. 

 

As I said in the earlier sections on Emerson and Whitman, Dionysian-leaning androgynes are often tainted by a daemonic aggressive western eye, courtesy of the repressed Apollonian side. James's metaphors represent outbreaks of daemonic Apollonian aestheticism, which causes the metaphors to contrast with and stand out from all the obscure Dionysian prose that otherwise characterizes the late novels. Paglia says, "I will argue that grotesque visibility is one of James's primary techniques. The dense swaying mass of his prose rouses itself into tottering apexes of metaphor, in the late novels increasingly bizarre and sensational." (p. 617)

 

As I said of Emerson: In Dionysian-leaning androgynes, Decadent aesthetics represent an irruption of daemonic Apollonian in the form of the aggressive western eye.

 

Apollonian aestheticism puts James in the company of Apollonian-leaning androgynes like Oscar Wilde. Paglia says, "James's grotesque metaphors are the objets or curios of his Decadent aestheticism. Like Wilde, he joins Late Romantic sexual perversity to English high comedy of Carrollian absurdity." (p. 619) (See my notes on Chapter 21 for more on Oscar Wilde and his association with Lewis Carroll.)

 

Paglia specifically points out the wordplay on sexual themes contained in the metaphors. The metaphors become another arena where James hints at submission to the maternal. She says, "James's grotesque metaphors are Decadent tropes of moral and sexual ambiguity. [...] The comic Jamesian metaphor is a studded conglomerate of sadomasochistic meanings." (p. 617) "The metaphors are tiny psychodramas of sexual fall. The celibate James plays with sensations of seduction and surrender. The metaphors symbolize his own abasement before female power." (p. 619) "James dissolves the sexual body and diverts its materiality into the metaphors, which take on a crazy, leering exactitude. They are sexual displacements, erotic proxies." (p. 620)

 

But in the end, the metaphors themselves serve as devices to mislead, confuse, and add to the opacity and obscurity of the text. Dionysian chaos is the theme in the later novels, and the Apollonian aggressive eye is put in service toward that end. Paglia says, "James's metaphors are points of grotesque visibility in the diffuse mass of the late style. Since so much in him is invisible and unspoken, the prickly metaphors have a violent distinctness. [...] The grotesque metaphors are traps, decoys set to take the reader’s eye. [...] Page by page, the metaphors are sharp points of visibility that, like a matador’s cape, make the reader lunge past a protected center. Their function is to pretend something is being revealed, when it is not. [...] The reader, both invited guest and intruder, is lured and misled. We are pulled into a labyrinth or meander, then left in the dark." (pp. 619-620)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted August 1, 2026