Camille Paglia

I recently reread this book, and found it even more enjoyable than I had remembered. Obviously Paglia's project--a unifiied theory of Western culture--is bound to fall short, but it's impossible for me not to admire her ambition. She writes with an energetic style; at times she might be guilty of piling on too many metaphors and similes, but it's almost as though, in her exuberance, she can't help herself. In many respects she must certainly be regarded as well ahead of her time (the show more dissertation on which this book is based was submitted in 1974): she predicted, through the study of what she calls the "androgyne" in culture, many subsequent developments in gender and women's studies, ironic as I believe her to be almost universally reviled in those circles.

At over 600 pages, hammering away at the same theme, it might be a bit long, and the last chapters on American literature are perhaps among the least engaging, though it may be that I just became ground down after several hundred pages, or that her subjects chosen from American literature are simply the least suited to her thesis (a possibility she herself acknowledges in comparing American culture to European). When, therefore, she finally arrives at Emily Dickinson, the subject which the title suggests will be the culmination, if not the actual climax, of the entire book, it's almost impossible not to be disappointed because you want so much for it to be more than it is.

All that said, the book is surely a classic, and an engrossing read whether you agree or disagree with her argument. show less

Here's a collection of essays (a sort of best-of, if you want) from Camille Paglia's work, and spanning a whole array of arguments, although all concerned about one burning issue: the need to 'rescue feminism from feminists' (as she puts it herself).

Now, because it embraces a lot of topics (the role and place of women in history, art, sexuality, the abortion debate, so-called 'Women Studies' on American campuses etc.) it can only be expected that not everybody will agree with absolutely show more everything she has to say on everything. I, for one, disagreed with her claim that differences in characters and inclinations in men and women are 'innate'; I don't share her views on Sade (he surely was the polar opposite of a no less misguided Rousseau, but we need balance, not pitting opposites); and I don't understand her liking of the TV show 'The Real Housewives', a serie that, to me, doesn't show 'empowered' women but brats, displaying all the melodramatic and histrionic cliches behaviours one can think of when thinking about toxic women. Having said that...

Having said that... When it comes to the rest, she is absolutely right on point! Feminism has, indeed, and ever since the 1970s, been hijacked and monopolised by a radical trend of fanatics, trapped as much in gendered dogma as in a victimhood ideology, and it's a trend which has had catastrophic consequences for all of us. What was once a civil right movement concerned about equity has now turned into a soapbox for misandrists, being, as Paglia brilliantly demonstrates here, completely ignorant from art to history. She points not only to such ignorance, but also denounces their 'intellectual' sources, rooted (as she reminds us) as much in Neo-Marxist applied to gender as in post-structuralism and anti-Enlightenment mumbo-jumbo inherited from French academia. That such intellectual impostures and nonsense has gone mainstream is, quite frankly, worrying.

Now, of course, the hijack of American academia by such pseudo-intellectuals has been outlined elsewhere. Christina Hoff Sommers, for instance, had demonstrated more than thirty years ago how such pseudo-intellectuals operate, sadly, successfully (Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women. What Paglia does, here, is to show how such sexist and ignorant jeremiads passing off as 'empowering' have contributed absolutely nothing to women's cause. What has come out from Women Studies departments and such mindset indeed, apart from a whole generation of 'girls' thinking of themselves as 'victims', 'oppressed', 'marginalised', and who loudly demand the interventions from of a nanny State to school administrators to further cocoon them? The so-called 'date-rape hysteria' that has engulfed American university campuses should be a warning to us all. And indeed, Camille Paglia, of Italian descent and who grew through the sixties, is absolutely disgusted.

'Disgust' is not too strong a word. It's something which has been reproached to her, but, fiery, angry, fed up, her tone and writing style echo her inflamed and furious passion, sinking, at times, into ad hominem attacks (particularly virulent when it comes to thrash Dworkin and McKinnon). Is this bad?

Well, I personally think that this is not constructive. I surely understand where she is coming from. Camille Paglia, to me, embodies among the last remnants of what was once a strong, emboldened feminism; and, having seen it all ever since the 1960s, she has, of course, every right to be pissed. But: will such tone resonate with those having been bamboozled by this new wave, these women thinking of themselves as 'strong' and 'empowered' while, in fact, demanding to benefit from all sorts of special treatments as if they were fragile porcelains? I doubt it...

Nevertheless, here's a great collection. It will appeal, in fact, to anyone who truly cares about feminism. show less

This book is one of my all-time favorites and my favorite of Paglia's. I prefer Paglia the "academic" as opposed to the "media whore" (i.e. as she has expressed herself in her column for Salon.com) as I am at least 50% in disagreement with her political / geopolitical and often right-leaning Libertarian point of view. In "Sexual Personae" she presents herself in full-on scholarly mode, in a way that she has not, unfortunately, repeated since this work was published. I have read this book at show more least twice; it is rare for me as a reader to return to any text I've read previously. The essence of the work can be summarized via the blurb that appears on the back cover of the paperback edition of "Sexual Personae": "..... [makes] a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature" ("daemonic" being a term that appears frequently in this book). Also memorable are Paglia's theory of the artist's metaphysical "sex change" via his / her work of art (a là Coleridge's lesbian vampire / daemon) and the chapter covering Edmund Spenser's "The Fairie Queene", a product of the English Renaissance that I had been unaware of until my discovery of "Sexual Personae" and which I have still not read. "Sexual Personae" also aided me in refining my understanding of the terms "Apollonian" and "Dionysian", in a way that no other writer has besides Nietzsche.

Most importantly, it's Paglia's actual writing that draws me in. Whether or not what she is writing can be substantiated academically, that does not concern me. I inherently believe that Paglia knows what she's talking about. Thus I will close with this quote from page 55 of Chapter 2 ("The Birth of the Western Eye") concerning the statuette "Venus of Willendorf" [circa 30,000 B.C.]:

"Venus of Willendorf carries her cave with her. She is blind, masked. Her ropes of corn-row hair look forward to the invention of agriculture. She has a furrowed brow. Her facelessness is the impersonality of primitive sex and religion. There is no psychology or identity yet, because there is no society, no cohesion. Men cower and scatter at the blast of the elements. Venus of Willendorf is eyeless because nature can be seen but not known. She is remote even as she kills and creates. The statuette, so overflowing and protuberant, is ritually invisible. She stifles the eye. She is the cloud of archaic night." show less

When this book appeared in the early 90s it was at the same time an anachronism, and a highly modern masterpiece. An anachronism because few writers –then and now- combine a wide sweeping view of whole swathes of cultural history with startlingly observant close readings of particular works; and modern because its whole argument and method was rooted in the here and now, with its references to pop culture and attacks against the literal minded, the ignorant and the resenters. Paglia sees show more Western art and literary history as an agon between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, building on Nietzsche. This idea is tremendously fruitful, and she traces it through its various forms with verve, wit and great style. The chapter on The Picture of Dorian Gray is worth the price of admission alone. Paglia simply ‘gets’ Wilde like no one else, in my view. This is criticism in the grand style, criticism as art, historiography as literature. Paglia is the 20th century equivalent of a Burckhardt or a Renan. A work of genius, provocative and beautiful. show less