Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Overview
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae advances a sweeping, polemical history of Western art and literature as a struggle between nature’s dark, sexual energies and the civilizing structures of culture. Drawing on Nietzsche and Freud, Paglia frames the conflict as Dionysian versus Apollonian: chthonic female nature, fecund and devouring, set against the clarifying, distancing forms created by the male will. She argues that sexual identity is less a social construct than a set of enduring archetypes, personae, that recur across eras, and that art is a ritualized negotiation with nature’s daemonic force.

Thesis and Method
The core claim holds that men build culture to defend themselves from the engulfing maternal abyss, while women, aligned with nature’s cycles, are the elemental power to which culture must respond. Sex is violent, amoral, and pagan; art sublimates that danger into images and styles. Paglia’s method is syncretic: close readings of poems, plays, and paintings interlaced with myth, anthropology, and psychology. She rejects utopian egalitarianism and the denial of biology in modern theory, insisting that the erotic’s cruelty and hierarchy are permanent features of the human condition.

Antiquity and Archetypes
From the frozen mask of Nefertiti to the radiant precision of Greek sculpture, classical art exemplifies the Apollonian effort to fix the flux. Yet Dionysus, the god of trance, orgy, and dissolution, haunts the margins. Paglia maps enduring figures: the Great Mother, Medusa’s petrifying gaze, the androgyne as aesthetic ideal, and Pygmalion, the male artist who animates an inert female form. Sappho’s lyric, the cult of the beautiful boy, and the classical theater all stage conflicts between discipline and surrender, form and frenzy, that will echo through Renaissance and Romantic art.

Renaissance to Enlightenment
Renaissance paganism revives the classical personae under Christian veneers. Botticelli’s Venus is an exquisite mask over abyssal sexuality; Leonardo’s androgynes and Michelangelo’s monumental bodies fuse spiritual aspiration with eroticized form. In literature, Spenser’s Bower of Bliss dramatizes artifice and voluptuous trap, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra embodies the sovereign femme fatale, and Marlowe’s and Milton’s heroes grapple with ambition and submission to overpowering female or natural forces. The Enlightenment’s rational surface splits along Rousseau’s cult of nature and Sade’s clinical theater of sexual will, exposing the erotic’s aggression and the politics of domination.

Romanticism and Decadence
Romanticism intensifies the worship of nature and vision while unleashing Gothic terrors. Keats’s "La Belle Dame sans Merci", Coleridge’s dreamscapes, and Byron’s and Shelley’s exalted egos pivot on suffering male subjects confronted by enigmatic, consuming femininities. The Victorian imagination elaborates the femme fatale across Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; Swinburne and Baudelaire aestheticize pain and perversion; Pater and Wilde refine the dandy’s androgyny into a style that prizes surface, artifice, and the symbol as shields against the swamp of instinct. Decadence, for Paglia, is neither decline nor frivolity but a lucid acknowledgment that art’s masks are weapons in a permanent war with nature.

America and Emily Dickinson
American Puritanism attempts to purge pagan sexuality, yet its literature reveals obsessions with cold beauty, paralysis, and death. Poe’s necrophilic heroines and Hawthorne’s fatal scientist-priest figures stage sterile control confronting lush corruption. The book culminates in a radical reading of Emily Dickinson, whose compressed lyrics, volcanic metaphors, and crystalline diction are presented as instruments of power: the poet as a cloistered strategist binding nature through form. Poems like "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun" become emblems of eroticized violence and sovereign renunciation, a New England sphinx enthroning herself above flux.

Significance
Sexual Personae proposes a counter-history of Western art as a choreography of danger, glamour, cruelty, and constraint, governed by archetypes too persistent to be legislated away. Its audacity lies in uniting high scholarship with polemic, restoring the pagan, the sadistic, and the androgynous to the center of aesthetic experience, and insisting that culture’s beauty is born from its fearless gaze into nature’s abyss.