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Chapter 2

Masculinity as Male Genitalia

The underlying premises of this chapter can be summarized as follows: (1) there is an unprecedented proliferation of male genitalia as subject matter ca. 1650–1750; (2) discourses of the penis/phallus which emerged in this period reflect uncertainty about the relationship of soft penis and phallus as that connection represented a range of possibilities for defining maleness or some facet of masculine identity; and (3) the newer equations—many of which we have unknowingly inherited—linking the male brain and mind to the condition of male privy members often viewed the yard as the physiological or psychological essence of maleness even while they symbolically separated the yard from the bodies of real men. One of the larger goals of this chapter, then, is to historicize the cultural function of male genitalia in the Enlightenment, and to examine literary and non-literary usage which might reveal discursive paradigms and their uneven and sometimes contradictory deployment in representative texts and contexts. I will suggest that these developments reflect the early modern origins of our now habitual separation of literal and symbolic genitalia, of the mundane penis—hardly ever a focus outside urology or Viagra ads—from the obsessively metaphorized and over-determined Phallus.

A simple historical question: why is it that from roughly the second half of the seventeenth century the penis, whether limp or erect (less often the testicles and semen), emerges as a common trope and frequent subject in public discussion, despite the fact that such reference was considered impolite? There are, of course, countless references to male genitalia in the written and representational records of earlier periods in Western culture, but not since classical times had men’s sexual parts been so often the focus of public discourse.¹ A cursory inventory of examples will provide initial substance for this claim. Consider, for instance, the gossip and the many poems on affairs of state which talk of Charles II’s wandering pintle; the libertine yard of Restoration stage rakes (e.g., from the opening scene of Wycherley’s The Country Wife the audience’s attention is captured by competing stories about Horner’s penis); the scores of imperfect enjoyment and premature ejaculation poems; talking penis poems such as Pope’s Sober Advice from Horace² in which the personified penis speaks to its owner; works such as The Members to Their Soveraign (1726, supposedly by Matthew Prior), the anonymous but possibly Rochesterian “One Writing Against His Prick” (late seventeenth century), and Sade’s Juliette (1791), in which men talk to their personified yards; the many dildo stories, from Rochester’s well-known “Signior Dildo” (1673), to Samuel Butler’s lesser-known Dildoides (first published 1706), to the now almost forgotten The Cabinet of Love (1721) and Monsieur Thing’s Origin: Or, Seignior D—o’s Adventures in Britain (1722); the sublime phallus and the limp penises of pornography as they are offered up in Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49); the many bawdy poems like The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae: Or, The Tree of Life (1732), Teague-Root Display’d (1746), “The Geranium” (n.d., attributed to Richard Brinsley Sheridan), or James Perry’s Mimosa: Or, The Sensitive Plant (1779) which rely on botanical metaphors of the penis/phallus as plant or tree; the notorious impotence trials in France and England in which the condition of the husband’s genitals was the primary focus of crowded courtroom debate and widely read trial reports; nuanced literary associations of the problematic penis and artistry as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–65); the sharp increase of medical literature about male reproductive organs and venereal disease, with an attendant rise in the quantity of anatomical illustrations. Can one make up a comparable list for any period of English history before 1650 in which attention to male genitalia is so prominent? What does such a proliferation tell us about the cultural status of male genitalia?

My claim about a proliferation of the penis-as-public-subject in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be substantiated in other ways as well. Consider the curious allusion to Pope’s penis and urinary tract which appeared in an eighty-four page pornographic narrative of 1741, comically entitled A Voyage to Lethe; By Capt. Samuel Cock….³ The anonymous Gulliverian voyage was one of a handful of extended geographical metaphors in the still emerging world of eighteenth century pornography which spoke of penises, vaginas, and copulation in a barely-disguised lingo of navigation and exploration.⁴ When Captain Cock and his crew reach their destination, a palace (the willingly penetrated vagina), female hostess Voluptuaria provides them a guided tour. Just before she euphemistically compares the lengths and abilities of the yards of well-known men in London (Captain Cock’s being the most impressive), Voluptuaria admits to a desire for a visit from the famous poet, Alexander Pope: “I confess likewise I have been very ambitious of a Visit from the great Poet of Twickenham, but I must after all approve his Wisdom in despising my Palace, since it would be Madness in him to attempt a Voyage hither in the leaky Condition his Cockboat is in” (30).

This curious reference to Pope raises several questions: Why should the condition of Pope’s urinary tract come up as a subject in pornography in 1741? Would a public reference such as this have been typical or even possible to find a hundred and fifty or two hundred years earlier? And what, finally, are the latent cultural attitudes implied in the juxtaposition of male poet and his ailing yard? One answer is that Pope’s treatment at the hands of Dr. Cheselden in August 1740 for a strangury (a urethral stricture characterized by slow and painful emission of urine) had become public knowledge and was being comically exploited by an author who insinuated, in the interests of his phallic theme, that Pope’s “leaky … Cockboat” was the result of an earlier sexual encounter leading to an unfortunate gonorrhea. A crude tabloid raciness, in other words, targeting famous people in the marketplace of gossip, might help sales. Another answer is suggested by my initial list of examples above: within an historical context in which public attention to the penis as a topic seems to become increasingly important, it is not so surprising to find a smutty short story conjuring up the great poet’s leaky penis in a surrealistic landscape of willing cunt-palaces and the crude navigations of tumescent cock-boats. But perhaps most important, this pornographer’s technique of making his male figures meaningful only as they have a phallic identity (whether potent or impotent, well-hung or short, poxed or sound) is linked historically to the examples above as a sign that male identity and masculinity itself were increasingly being defined by the male reproductive system (which in turn had been given its own complex set of narratives and codes). This is not to say that the period ca. 1650–1750 has no links with the past, or that it bears no similarity to twentieth-and twenty-first century symbolisms which connect male genitalia to male identity. Rather, I want to suggest that the subject “penis/phallus” (as well as stones and seed) functions variously in history, depending on the discursive formations generated by the changing ideological requirements of different cultures at different historical moments. I want to argue, as well, that the world roughly contemporaneous with the life of Pope was preoccupied by the problematic relationship of maleness and the yard in ways that do not characterize earlier periods.

I emphasize the historical specificity of these issues because the penis has been plagued by a twentieth- and twenty-first century ahistoricism. Dominated as we still are by Freudian, Lacanian, and feminist readings of “the Phallus,” one can see the contemporary tendency to take the penis out of history altogether and metaphorize it in the name of some theoretical or political agenda. During the period we are concerned with here, literal and symbolic senses were not yet separated in the stark manner they have since come to be, and the erect phallus within metaphorical equations still had reference to the biological and temporal realms of real penises attached to men, and to a host of other historical conditions (political, social, professional, intellectual) which affected the make-up of what was then a newer cultural symbolism. Lacanian and feminist approaches to the penis—to indulge in some risky generalization—have been largely preoccupied with a disembodied, metaphorized “Phallus” which has little to do with the individual experience of having had a penis (whether flaccid or erect), and is very often uninformed by a notion of historical constructedness. This is not to dismiss the important contributions made by the larger theoretical orientation of psychoanalytical and feminist methodologies, both of which have done much in the last decades to open up important interpretive possibilities which can supplement historical analyses of sex and gender. One of the deep ironies, however, is that the poststructuralist Phallus—detached from men’s bodies, pried away from history—has also done much to obscure the complex historical discourses associated with the male reproductive system in general, and the penis in particular. By theorizing “the Phallus” as transcendental signifier of an original (and now missing) desire, or, as the phallogocentric discourse of Patriarchy itself, these sophisticated academic constructs have worked against the possibility of tracing a history of symbolisms associated with the penis. As a metaphor for a linguistic concept, or as a synecdoche for the paternal metaphor, “the Phallus” has proven to be an illuminating new category; for a history of male bodies, on the other hand, it has been a stumbling block, lacking a properly historical and material account of how the physiological has been transformed variously, at different historical moments, into the symbolic.

Predictably, notions of male creativity were affected by the discursive variety and ambiguity which informed a newer symbolic language for the male organs of generation. Indeed, the “literary” was an important vehicle for the proliferation and development of these discourses in the public imaginary, making accessible through the pleasures of wit the various tropes and rhetorical gestures which marked these discourses. A publication such as A Voyage to Lethe will make little claim upon literary greatness, and yet it is one of many examples in which a cultural “logic” is at work even in so bawdy a gesture as the juxtaposition of poet Pope and his ailing yard. But in order to investigate the important implications for male creativity and the poetical character we need to map the conceptual shifts and discursive formations by which Pope’s culture gave meaning to the male reproductive system.

The first section of this chapter will sketch the dominant cultural constructions which informed Enlightenment treatments of male organs of generation, first as they were inherited from classical medical traditions and modified to suit a newer medicalized sexuality, and then as they appeared in non-medical narratives as problematic cultural issues. I will be arguing that in these early modern formulations the most far-reaching implication would be the physiological links between the genitals and the brain—particularly the brain-testicles homology—and that newer models of brain-genitalia correspondences raised questions about how male consciousness might be informed by the organs of generation, which in turn intensified the perceived links between the reproductive system and an essentialized maleness.

The second section explores the “problematic penis,” the site of competing cultural equations of male body and mind. The historical evidence suggests that there were a variety of discursive formations which commodified the male as his penis. However, despite the diversity of specific deployments, there appears to be a deep-level set of cultural equations characterized by three intersecting categories, which I investigate in sections three through five: the ways the relationship between soft penis and erection was conceptualized; the question of whether the head-genitals relationship was conceived as a directly or inversely proportional one; the implications of a notion of an enigmatic yard in which the relationship of penis and mind was severed, leaving two separate systems in which the yard was incommensurate or enigmatically at odds with male will or identity.

More specifically, cultural conceptualizations of the relationship between soft and turgid penis were not limited to a privileging of the symbolically detached phallus, but rather the potent erection as self-contained symbol was found along with a discourse about the temporal drama of the yard in the lives and on the bodies of individual men. That is, there was a recognition that the process of tumescence and detumescence has different figurative possibilities than does the phallus separated imaginatively from the penis, and the presence of both discursive modes is typical of the period, reflecting an uncertainty about how the relationship of soft and erect tarse might be representative of masculine identity or mind. As well, various mind-yard equations reflected competing definitional systems: in directly proportional formulations, the turgid member was seen as a synecdoche for the power of male will, virility, or social and political sway, and the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded male was representative of forms of failure or mental lack; in inverse modes, however, the large penis was the sign of a fool, and a genital deficiency (castration, impotence, small penis) was compensated by mental capacity. Finally, the yard was sometimes viewed as an irrational and ungovernable Other, at odds with male will, and commodified as a thing to be owned or exchanged by others without reference to the male self or character to which it was attached. In medical debates about what caused an erection, it was agreed that not the will but the subversive imagination was the source, thus associating turgid tarse and wit with irrational bodily forces threatening to overwhelm the typical hierarchy of mind over body. Moreover, new medical techniques for “blowing up” the cut-off penis of cadavers contributed to concepts of the autonomous phallus severed from the conscious mind. The erect privy member as symbolic commodity was evident not only in anatomical explorations, but also in the tumescence of hanged criminals and in the function and status of dildoes. Section six examines several outcomes of these ambiguous symbolic practices as they figured in the notorious impotence trials. In these highly public tribunals, the vexed cultural meanings of the penis were reflected in the startling proposition that the erected yard is not the conclusive sign of male virility, thus destabilizing a notion of masculine identity as it might be proven in relation to the phallus.

A fascinating cultural logic emerged from these competing discourses, one which we have inherited and now largely take for granted: masculinity and male identity were increasingly understood as being intimately defined by one’s groin; this meant that male genitalia—the yard in particular—gained status as the new commodity representing maleness; but the yard-as-masculinity synecdoche included a tendency to separate men from the body part that had also become the key symbol of maleness itself; this commodification of the yard resulted in a new and fractured form of self-consciousness for individual men in which the experiencing self (particular man with penis) had to engage with the experience of self as commodity (yard = maleness). This fracture is symptomatic of later developments (such as Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis) in which the symbolic freight of the phallus-as-commodity overwhelms the historical record of men and their bodies.

Male Brain-Male Genitalia Interrelationships: Stones and Seed

Prior to the seventeenth century, the yard, stones, and seed were an important adjunct of masculinity, but not necessarily the most important signs of maleness. Male organs of generation were simply one of a variety of social markers acting as a subset of male privilege as citizen, father, patriarchal agent, or legal entity—bodily signs, in other words, which, along with other attributes (lineage in particular), entitled the owner to a position somewhere on a gendered socio-political hierarchy but did not by themselves constitute some essentialized male identity anchored ontologically to biological sex. I need not rehearse the arguments provided by Sander L. Gilman and Thomas Laqueur which trace the cultural manifestations of male and female sexuality within a one-sex, one-flesh corporeal model before the eighteenth century.⁵ Suffice it to say that before seventeenth-century physiology precipitated a paradigmatic shift from a hierarchical model of biological sex (in which female genitalia were an inverted, colder, less perfect version of male genitalia) to one based on essential biological difference (of sexual organs, nervous systems, skeletons), the privy parts of men served variously as symbolic tokens of a culturally construed masculinity and therefore of a superior position on the scale of being. But it would not be until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a biological notion of male sexuality was widely imagined as constitutive of masculine psychological reality, and that the male reproductive system would become one of the primary sites of an essentialized maleness, with the yard as the key symbol of that essence.

This is not to suggest that classical medicine and early cultural constructions of the significance of male genitalia did not make important links to masculinity; the testes, yard, and seed were obviously tied to matters of gender before 1650, and invested with cultural symbolism which would be inherited by Pope’s culture, although modified by a newer physiological symbolism which would replace the older equations. One way to assess the nature of this transmission is to ask what it was that mainstream Enlightenment commentaries found most distinctive about the representational qualities in classical medical theories and older social values. What, in other words, struck the moderns as typical in the older symbolism, and how did they both identify with and differentiate themselves from the figurations of bygone traditions?

Seventeenth and eighteenth-century “high” medical treatises and “low” popular sexologies are particularly revealing in this regard, nearly always glancing back at the ways an older symbolism converted biology into culture.⁶ A typical example from the medical literature is Regnier De Graaf’s Tractatus De Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus (1668), the longest medical treatise on male genitalia of the period, frequently cited by subsequent medical writers, and having the distinction of being perhaps the most significant compendium of received medical beliefs about the male organs of generation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a more comprehensive manner than most, De Graaf’s 160–page treatise included retrospective anthropological nods to older classical theories as well as careful references to all of the significant medical theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁷ Introducing the genital parts outside the cavity of the abdomen, De Graaf begins with “the testes, i.e., ‘witnesses,’ either because they provide evidence of virility, in as much as from them we recognize a man capable of generating offspring, or because, among the Romans, no one was allowed to make a will unless he had witnesses and these were of the male sex.”⁸ De Graaf’s contemporaries (and the eighteenth-century physiologists to follow) would repeat the testes-as-virility formula, of course, and a rhetoric of “witnessing” would be repeated with few variations by “high” and “low” treatises alike. But his etymological precision is also a means of differentiating the symbolic value which the possession of testicles had earlier signified from the modernness of his own analysis, which I shall consider more fully below. What Enlightenment writers most noticed about the early formulations of masculinity and testicles was the symbolic emphasis placed on them as signs of acceptable oath-taking, the right to bear witness, and reliable testimony. The “testes” are so called, Thomas Gibson wrote in The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1682), “either because they testifie one to be a man, or because amongst the Romans none was admitted to bear witness but he that had them.”⁹ The twentieth edition of Venette’s Conjugal Love or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed Considered (1750) reflected that “it was not allowable formerly, in the courts of justice, at Rome, for any man to bear witness against another, except his testicles were entire.”¹⁰ And Voltaire would point to another ancient meaning, to be found in the Old Testament, of touching another man’s testicles as a gesture of promise-making: “It was a mark of respect, a symbol of fidelity, as formerly our feudal lords put their hands between those [thighs] of their paramount lords.”¹¹

This thread of anthropological reportage characterizes Enlightenment understanding of earlier cultural constructions of the stones as biological signs of reproductive ability but also of a certain kind of homosocial privilege involving legal capacity or gestures of fidelity. The most colorful and perversely allegorized variation of these older conceptualizations comes in John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (6th ed., 1708), which tells of “one Combalus” who castrated himself:

because he perceiving himself to be affected by Stratonice, the Wife of the King of Assyria, who he was to attend upon in some Progress she made, after he had secretly Castrated himself, Sealed up his Testicles in a Box, and deliver’d it unto the King, to be kept as some Jewels of value enclos’d; and afterwards when he was suspected of Incontinency with the Queen, he was acquitted of the Accusation, by that pledge of Fidelity he left in the Custody of the King, when the Box came to be open’d.¹²

Swearing on the testicles as a gesture or “witness” of fidelity is here carried to a preposterous narrative pitch, but Marten’s anecdotal sensationalism is nevertheless consistent with the examples above, and marks one of the typical narrative tactics by which Enlightenment writers would distinguish an older symbolism associated with male genitalia. When we examine the underlying codes of seventeenth and eighteenth-century commentary below, we will see that the testes no longer have a dominant sense of male legal status but rather are situated among a hierarchy of bodily organs whose closest relative is the brain. And the testicles-brain homology, as one might expect, represents a significant shift in symbolic emphasis, with important implications for how masculinity and male identity would be figured.

A similar retrospective is to be found in introductions to the yard, in which the moderns briefly recount the mythical, military, or racial symbolism most prominent in earlier constructions. Although the classical deity Priapus is not a significant presence in seventeenth and eighteenth-century uses of mythology, it is this older ithyphallic god of fertility which Enlightenment treatises associate with the emphasis of a classical symbolism.¹³ Montaigne, one of Pope’s favorite writers, reminded the reader in his essay “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” that the ancients commonly deified the erect penis:

The Aegyptian dames in their Bacchanalian feasts wore a wooden one about their necks, exquisitely fashioned, as huge and heavy as every one could conveniently beare…. The greatest and wisest matrons of Rome were honoured for offring flowers and garlands to God Priapus. And when their Virgins were married, they (during the nuptials) were made to sit upon their privities.¹⁴

John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum (1709) would similarly recall that “The Ancients ranked the Yard of Man among the number of their Gods,”¹⁵ as would Voltaire: “The Egyptians were so far from attaching any depravity to what we dare neither uncover nor name that they carried in procession a large image, named phallum, of the virile member, to thank the gods for their goodness in making this member serve for the propagation of mankind.”¹⁶ De Graaf would isolate the same symbolism in his characterization of an earlier cultural construction of the penis, but with the addition of military and racial contexts:

How much esteem and dignity the male member enjoyed among the Egyptians as well as among not a few other peoples can be seen in Riolan’s Anthropographia (2.30)…. [De Graaf quotes verses which refer to the public decoration by reputable women of a huge artificial phallus carried through the main square.] A story told by van Linschoten in his Itinerario is also worthy of note. The Kaffir peoples of Ethiopia, who dwell on the sea coast at the Cape of Good Hope, are constantly engaged in wars with one another. Victorious warriors cut off the penises of those they have slain or captured, dry them out and regularly offer them to their king in the presence of the other noblemen in this fashion: they each take a number of penises in their mouths and spit them out at the feet of the king, who gathers them together, picks them up and restores them to the victorious warriors as royal gifts; the warriors string them together to form necklaces which they hang from the necks of their betrothed or their wives. (45)

The racialized image of penis-spitting African tribesmen is as startling, perhaps, as Marten’s testicles-in-a-box anecdote, especially when contrasted to De Graaf’s medicalized penis, but it also indicates the range of an older symbolism which associated male genitalia with contexts of military victory, war trophies, or aggressive penile display.¹⁷ And the anthropological account also anticipates early modern racial stereotyping which would assign the threateningly over-sized or grotesquely infibulated penis to primitive non-white males. Certainly the phallus as scepter, weapon, or castrated trophy can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century records, particularly around Charles II’s notoriously phallic reign, and, forms of priapic worship are still evident in pornographic works such as John Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s),¹⁸ Alexis Piron’s Ode à Priape (1710),¹⁹ and John Wilkes’s Veni Creator; Or, The Maid’s Prayer (1750s)²⁰; but Pope’s culture had assigned to the penis/phallus a new role whose symbolism was about a potentially problematic masculine identity rather than externalized signs of mythical generation, military prowess, or the racially exotic and monstrous. For the ancients, both the yard and stones were relatively direct signs of status or legal character; for the moderns, signification could be a more difficult matter, especially when the relationship between groin and mental identity was viewed as an inverse or incommensurate one.

I dwell on the historical and anthropological note-taking of these Enlightenment commentators to illustrate just how self-conscious they were about the older constructions of the meaningfulness of male genitalia. In the cases of the testicles and penis, earlier representations were either no longer a part of the insistent medicalization of physiological systems within the new health sciences, or their legal, social, and military metaphors had been absorbed but largely rewritten within a newer cultural mapping of the human body as machine.²¹ Semen was another matter, however. Despite debates by classical medical theorists about the make-up of male seed, its genesis, and its function, older morphological models had nevertheless produced two generally agreed-upon concepts which were to be absorbed almost completely by the new physiology and its popular transmission, either literally or figuratively: semen was (along with animal spirits) one of the most spiritous and vital fluids, and therefore exceedingly important to the well-being of the male body; and the production of seed and its discharge were linked directly to the brain.²² In both instances, the moderns would medicalize and concentrate these beliefs through a newer physiology which increasingly located an essentialized maleness exclusively within the microscopic workings of the tubes, glands, tissue, and fluids of the parts of generation. The new constructs of male reproductive biology would recall the older medical symbolism while ushering in very different cultural contexts and symbolic codes.

From the earliest narratives of its essence, sperm was seen as a vital pneuma associated with heat, fire, fertile foam, and an ineffable admixture of spirit and matter.²³ A liquid with a supreme generative power, seed had acquired the status of a life-force itself. The new physiology and the sexologies repeat this conceptual rhetoric with approval. On the refinement of semen in the epididymis, De Graaf writes that the watery parts of the seminal liquid “foam more as they pass through the tubules and bestow final perfection upon them, a process which we believe Hippocrates to have understood similarly to ourselves where he says that foam is of ‘the essence of semen’ ” (32); he concludes that “the most noble” semen “is a hot and humid spiritous body produced in the testicles or a body full of spirit capable of generating a soul” (44). Paraphrasing Hippocrates, Samuel Tissot’s Onanism: or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation (4th ed., 1772) ranks “the seminal Liquor … [as] the most valuable” of bodily humors, and, with Galen’s authority, calls it “the most subtle … vital spirit…. the Essential Oil of the animal liquors” (48–9, 52). Venette’s encomium is also typical, claiming of “Sperma” that “The moisture from whence the seed is derived … is the most refined and noblest part of the human frame, containing, in itself, the whole nature and complexion of every part of the body; or in other words, being the very essence of man” (38–9). Other medical treatises offer up a similar rhetorical palette of heightened agency, privileged status, or sublime creativity: Joseph Cam’s A Practical Treatise: Or, Second Thoughts on the Consequences of the Venereal Disease (3rd ed., 1729) registers a sense of awe that “such noble Virtues are hoarded up in that Matter elaborated by the Testicles” (2); Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary (1745) calls semen “the Flower, and choicest Part of the Blood, and nervous Fluid”;²⁴ and Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s The Earthly Venus (1753) asks whether “the seminal spirits” are “not the fire sung by poets as having been stolen from the gods by Prometheus.”²⁵ By far the most remarkable eighteenth-century appreciation of the power of the seminal liquor is to be found in James Graham’s end-of-century A New and Curious Treatise of the Nature and Effects of Simple Earth, Water and Air (1793):

The seminal principle, or luminous, ever-active balsam of life, is the grand staff, strength, all-animating vital source or principle of the beauty, vigour and serenity, both of body and of mind. Without a full and genial tide of this rich, vivifying luminous principle, continually circulating in every part of the system, it is absolutely impossible that either man or woman can enjoy either health, strength, spirits or happiness. (27)²⁶

The rhetorical dimension is an important aspect of how the moderns would keep alive older ideas of sperm as a male quintessence linked to a semi-divine realm of spiritual fluids. But the verbal vehicles of this conceptual tradition were carried over into the literary realm as well, where semen as a sublimely-charged synecdoche of male creativity reflected a larger tendency to equate maleness with genitalia. In one of the few successfully concluded imperfect enjoyment poems of the Restoration—an anonymous poem entitled “The Lost Opportunity Recovered,” printed in Wit and Drollery. Jovial Poems (1682)—Lysander, the premature ejaculator, returns the morning after to his Cloris (a married woman) and, “With a proud Courage and with stiffness blest, / Foaming with Love he makes to Beauty’s Lap” for a second encounter. Engaging more efficaciously this time, Lysander recovers his tumescence, ejaculates, and his paramour “wip’d away those drops of Liquid Fire.”²⁷ Nearly a century later Claude Quillet’s The Joys of Hymen, Or, the Conjugal Directory: A Poem, in Three Books (1768) prescribed nothing less than a personal technology for the most favorable production of sperm, as well as specific recommendations about the best time for intercourse. One must avoid the venereal act after the evening meal, “Fresh from the festal board,” to allow proper time for the decoction of semen from the newly supplied blood:

For sages say, the warm and active juice,

Which purple wines and Ceres gifts produce;

The kindly strength which feeds the genial flame

Of love, or nourishes the vital frame:

All these (a rude and undigested heap)

Digestive pow’rs will ripen while you sleep;

Strain through unnumber’d tubes the flowing tide,

And blood from Chyle, and sperm from blood divide.²⁸

According to this physiologically nuanced poet, morning is the ideal moment to discharge “love’s warm balm.” Leaving aside the timing of intercourse or the happy recoveries of premature ejaculators, however, one can easily discover a vocabulary of liquid fire, genial flame, foaming energy, or spiritous fluid permeating the seed-lingo in non-medical narratives throughout the period under discussion. Swift uses the spirit-semen equation satirically in A Tale of a Tub and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,²⁹ as does Pope in an allegedly suppressed conclusion to “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation.”³⁰ John Cleland’s Fanny Hill rapturously describes male ejaculate as “his soul distil’d,” “the spermatic injection … spurting liquid fire,” and, in the novel’s last sexual act, the beloved Charles’s orgasm is attended by “my dear love’s liquid emanation of himself.”³¹

This last passage from Fanny Hill clearly indicates the direction which Enlightenment writers would take in their refitted use of classical medical beliefs, and points to another set of beliefs about the value of semen and its effects, namely, the aura seminalis as productive of masculinity itself. In the overall economy of bodily fluids (blood, lymph, milk, menses, sweat, tears, urine, phlegm), seed had always been ranked highly, placed on a par with animal spirits. Part of the reason for this was that semen was viewed as an especially concentrated liquid whose powerful presence (or excessive loss) was not to be underestimated. Recounting earlier theories, De Graaf noted that “Some even think that a single drachm of semen is the equivalent of twenty of blood” (44). The sexologies made greater claims: “if we believe Avicenna,” Venette would explain, one unit of seed is the equivalent of “forty times the quantity of blood” (172); predictably enough, Tissot’s anti-masturbation tract would repeat the more exaggerated claim, reminding the reader “that physicians of all ages have been unanimously of opinion, that the loss of an ounce of this humour would weaken more than that of forty ounces of blood” (2). For the seventeenth and eighteenth century medical experts, however, male seed would hold precedence as a fluid also because it was a chemical agent of maleness itself. As “the heaviest humour in the human body,” according to Albrecht von Haller’s First Lines of Physiology (1747), seed’s function went beyond creative discharge, being “absorbed again into the blood, where it produces wonderful changes.”³² It was the aura seminalis, after all, which explained the journey from boyhood to virile manhood, altering the voice and skin, producing body hair, giving rise to physical strength and courage. Described at times as almost a world-soul or fiery emanation of divine-like spirit, semen was also a concentrated, essentialized masculinity—each drop a distilled and heated liquid carrying within it the potential code, as it were, of a male identity.

Indeed, one of the striking features of Enlightenment medical narratives is that it is not the yard or testicles but the seed which evoked an overall heightening of rhetoric. An important cause of this medico-scientific wonder is surely the improvement of microscopes and the discovery of sperm in the 1670s by Ham and Leeuwenhoek, the latter an acquaintance of De Graaf (both lived in Delft).³³ As Marjorie Nicolson and John Harley Warner have demonstrated, the larger cultural effects which microscopic visions had on the collective imagination ought not to be underestimated,³⁴ and in the case of Leeuwenhoek’s animalcules, homunculi, or spermatic worms (see Figure 1)—“spermatozoa” would not be used until the 1820s—the imaginative appeal is particularly noteworthy given the fact that it was not the animalculist but the ovist school of preformationist thought which dominated embryology from the late seventeenth until well into the eighteenth century.³⁵ That is, although the miniature human was thought by most to reside within the egg, where its unfolding and growth would somehow be triggered by male semen, and, although a majority of the medico-scientific community was skeptical of animalculist arguments, the idea of the sperm as homunculus or preformed human-ness (particularly maleness) nevertheless held a wide imaginative appeal throughout the same period, showing up not only in animated debates published in the Philosophical Transactions,³⁶ but also in accounts of intense personal curiosity by non-scientists such as Charles II, who in the mid-1680s commanded Robert Hooke, Curator of the Royal Society, to demonstrate these animalcula, or by the twenty-nine year-old Pope, who with his mother visited one Mr. Hatton “who is … curious in microscopes and showed my mother some of the semen masculinum, with animascula [sic] in it” (Corr. 1: 465, Pope to Caryll, 18 February 1717/18). Popular versions of sperm-as-man showed up in print as well, most famously in the first two chapters of Tristram Shandy, but also in novels such as The History of the Human Heart (1749) or in “Sir” John Hill’s spoof of sperm-catching machines in Lucine sine Concubitu (1750). The reasons for this appeal are not simply the new imaginative venue provided by the microscope, however; the image of the teeming seminal fluid—each drop containing the compacted human being, usually imagined male—also maintained the larger ideological construct of a superior male creativity not just at the macro levels of art, politics, and material sway, but now also at the micro level of the nearly invisible processes of life-giving itself. What microscopes brought to discourses about sperm was visible proof of maleness in its smallest constituent form. These conceptual images—sperm as male spirit, animalcule as tiny man—gave dramatic substance to the idea that masculinity and male identity itself were directly dependent on the man’s genitals and, by extension, that in the mysterious and spiritous inner workings of the organs of generation could be found an essential truth about the male mind.

But in seventeenth and eighteenth century medical models, no theory about sperm was more important than the brain-testicles homology, which functioned not as a direct but an inverse relationship. The origins of the homology can be explained partly as the legacy of classical medical theorists, the majority of whom believed that semen originated in the brain,³⁷ and that excessive seminal loss would therefore debilitate the brain. Tissot’s anti-masturbatory tract cites this model of inverse relationship as a historic remnant of classical thought: “Hippocrates thought it was extracted from all the body, and particularly the head…. Galen is of this opinion … [that] When a person loses his seed … he loses at the same time the vital spirit: so that it is not astonishing that too frequent coition should enervate, as the body is thereby deprived of the purest of its humours” (48–49). Venette, likewise, would acknowledge the literalism of the ancients’ notion of a balanced fluid economy, reporting that “The brain … has been diminished to that degree in some lascivious men, according to Galen, that it has not been bigger than one’s fist” (162–63). The force of the older model is evident in other sexologies, as well, which sometimes appear to accept the classical theory without modification, as does Marten’s Gonosologium Novum in accounting for one of the causes of impotence:

Figure 1 Leeuwenhoek’s drawings of spermatozoa, “Observations Di. Anthonii Leewenhoeck, de prognatis è Semine genitali Animalculis,” Philosophical Transactions, No. 142, 1678. Courtesy of The Wellcome Library, London.

So will a man’s being wounded behind the Ears … whereby certain branches of the Jugular Veins and Arteries that are there have been cut; so that after those Vessels have been cicatriz’d, there follows an interception of the Seminal Matter downwards, and also of the community, which ought of necessity to be between the Brain and the Testicles; so that when the Conduits or Passages are stopp’d, the Stones or Testicles cannot any more receive either Matter or lively Spirits from the Brain in so great quantity, as it was wont. (41)

As these passages suggest, the older thesis survived in the sexologies, which offered readers a simplistic literal version of the brain-sperm connection: interrupt the downward flow from brain to testicles and sperm would be deficient; discharge too much sperm and suffer a brain-drain (usually figured as lassitude, headache, blurred vision, dizziness, stupidity; sometimes as madness or death, as in the anti-masturbation diatribes). But the brain-testes homology was also intensified by newer studies in reproductive physiology such as De Graaf’s which, having explained the confection of semen as a refinement of blood within the testes (see his Tractatus 29–32) rather than of nervous fluid or blood within the brain, were now more keenly interested in the physiological dynamics by which blood and animal spirits were shared by brain and testicles. One result was that the literalism of the classical linkage of brain and sperm was replaced by a homology in which brain and testicles were seen to have a correspondence of structure and function—that is, the brain produced animal spirits from the blood just as the testicles produced semen from the blood. As Jean Baptiste Verduc put it in A Treatise of the Parts of a Human Body (1704), “nothing can give us a clearer Idea of the vast Activity of the Seed, than the Similitude, which is betwixt those Parts which prepare the Seed, and the Brain. These two parts in short, have in a manner the same Structure; they both consist of several small Pipes which suck in the most spiritous parts from the Mass of the Blood; and so we may say that the Testicles are in a manner a second Brain, since they do filtrate as the Brain doth, a Liquor which is almost as penetrating, and as spiritous as the Animal Spirits.”³⁸

Of course, the shift from literal to homologous connection did not happen in a vacuum, and depended on parallel developments in neuroanatomy and new theories about cerebral and neurological function, particularly as they were set forth by Thomas Willis, arguably the most significant neurophysiologist of the early modern period.³⁹ In writing of the nerves which affected the testicles, and wanting to correct the erroneous belief that semen was derived from nervous fluid in the brain, Willis offered an account of the interrelationship of seed, blood, animal spirits, brain, and testes which provided the dominant conceptualization of such matters through much of the eighteenth century. Excessive discharge of semen, he reasoned, produces a general debility of brain and nerves because the replenishment of seed requires an immediate flow of blood and animal spirits to the genital area, thus temporarily robbing the brain of its own requirements.⁴⁰ But while Willis’s and De Graaf’s physiological models helped to banish older connections in favor of the more complex similitude later described by Verduc, what they retained from classical assumptions was the notion that brain and testicles were still linked by a complex fluid economy which functioned as an inverse hydraulic relationship. As major physiological entities in the hierarchy of bodily organs, the brain and testicles shared the same system of fluids, competing for animal spirits or vital matter in the blood; according to nearly every commentator in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maximum health and stability were achieved for each organ and for the body as a whole when a happy physiological balance of fluid-making and fluid-use could be maintained. Within what has been called “the sublime order of the spermatic economy,”⁴¹ this meant neither the excessive discharge nor prolonged retention of semen. Reflecting the state of knowledge at mid-century, Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary (1745) would present the orthodox view that “Retention of the Semen induces a Torpor and languid State of the Body, and often lays a Foundation for terrible nervous Disorders…. Venery ought to be only moderately used, lest too great an Evacuation of the Semen should prove prejudicial to Health…. Nor should Persons indulge themselves in Venery after strong Application of Mind” (3: s.v. “VENUS”). A balanced fluid economy assured health, and this entailed occasional rather than frequent sexual intercourse; masturbatory emission was unnecessarily wasteful and potentially harmful. Excessive venery might not shrink one’s brain to the size of a fist, as Galen had warned, but it would surely interfere with a man’s ability to think.

But the inverse relationship of brain and testicles via sperm was not merely a mechanical matter. What was most significant about the updated use of classical literalism was the newer conceptualization of the relationship of male body and male mind encouraged by the homology itself. And in this regard, the impact of Willis’s neurophysiological theories are particularly important. Because concepts of mind and soul were now commonly localized as brain and nervous system, the newer male brain-male genitalia correspondences—whether direct or inverse—were not simply issues of animal health, but also raised important questions about how masculine consciousness might be informed by the organs of generation. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had inherited from classical medical models an identification of maleness with the reproductive system, but the meaning of that system had changed as a result of improved physiological experimentation, the advent of the microscope in medicine, and new embryological and neurological speculation. The older symbolism, as we have seen, was about hierarchy and analogy in which seed, yard, and testes were one of many markers linking the man to issues of legitimacy or power within the frameworks of law, citizenship, paternity, or reproductive potency. The medicalized version of the moderns absorbed some of these older constructions, but now viewed genitalia as an important effect on the brain/mind; reproductive biology, in other words, was generating a model of an essentialized maleness whose consciousness and experiential history might be understood as linked to the condition and activities of the sexual parts.

But it is in the non-medical discourses that we find the larger cultural ramifications of how the genitals-mind correspondences were absorbed and then played out through a variety of verbal codes, many of which informed the self-mythologizing narratives of male literary communities. From the most simplistic mechanical versions of the equation to the sophisticated adaptations of Laurence Sterne, the historical record reflects an interest in this newly sexualized male brain whose sensibility and deepest thinking could be understood as inescapably linked to the privy parts. As we will see, the interrelated head and groin were often conceived in subtle symbolic terms, as in Diderot’s epistolary observation that “Il y a un peu de testicle au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus epurée” [“There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness”].⁴² This is a complex notion, intimating a deep link between mental conception or sensibility and the generative production of spiritous seed in the testes. In this symbolic short-hand, creative acts are not about male brain-wombs but rather the microscopic making of the seminal liquor which expands and unfolds as a male principle of body and mind. Sterne offers up his own comic redaction of the brain-testes homology in Walter’s meditations on the seat of the soul, one of whose possibilities is the “very thin, subtle and very fragrant juice which Coglionissimo [big balls] Borri, the great Milaneze physician, affirms, in a letter to Bartholine, to have discovered in the cellulae of the occipital parts of the cerebellum.”⁴³ Hilariously blurring the distinction between semen and neurospinal fluid, Sterne implies that great thoughts about the brain—indeed, the soul itself—might come from the personified testicles of the good Italian doctor. Satirists such as Swift would also come to the mind-genitals equation with a sophisticated sense of their interaction, even though his put-down of the Fanatic would depend on the crudest reduction of intellect and spirit into lust and sperm:

the Seed or Principle, which has ever put Men upon Visions in Things Invisible, is of a Corporeal Nature: For the profounder Chymists inform us, that the Strongest Spirits may be extracted from Human Flesh. Besides, the Spinal Marrow, being nothing else but a Continuation of the Brain, must needs create a very free Communication between the Superior Faculties and those below: And thus the Thorn in the Flesh serves for a Spur to the Spirit. I think, it is agreed among Physicians, that nothing affects the Head so much, as a tentiginous Humor, repelled and elated to the upper Region, found by daily practice, to run frequently up into Madness…. I have been informed by certain Sanguine Brethren of the first Class, that in the Height and Orgasmus of their Spiritual exercise it has been frequent with them *****; immediately after which, they found the Spirit to relax and flag of a sudden with the Nerves, and they were forced to hasten to a Conclusion. (A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit)⁴⁴

In this comical parley of body and mind, Swift anatomizes religious hypocrisy by deploying iatromechanical concepts which transformed mind and body into simple machine laws. However, he also insinuates an inescapable presence of a genital sexuality as it will affect the farthest reaches of mind into philosophy, religion, and the visionary. While Swift might parody “mechanical operations” as a methodology for investigating the interface of body and mind, his own ironic play with “Spirit”—as ineffable mind/soul, animal spirits, or sperm—points to the complex linkage of consciousness, nervous system, and libido.

That the very seat of male thought or masculine identity could be influenced or even defined by a man’s sexual organs is a significant historical formation, but in this early phase the newer symbolism which came into being was characterized by contradictoriness. As we have seen, the conceptualization of the traffic between brain and genitalia contained a fundamental tension: on the one hand, the relationship could be a directly proportional one in which the presence and activity of testicles, yard, and seed created and defined a physical and mental maleness itself (as with notions of aura seminalis); on the other, the mind-genitalia connection could be inversely proportional (as with the brain-testicles homology), which meant a potential antagonism between genital and mental performance. These contradictory views existed simultaneously in the medical and sexological treatises, and their alternative (and highly problematic) implications for notions of masculinity and male identity are never clearly resolved. The non-medical discourses are likewise uncertain about the significantly different ramifications of these two models, sometimes exemplifying both systems within a single text. Unlike high and low medical narratives, however, the other discourses provide a clearer picture of how these competing concepts might have informed cultural constructions at large, the first model of direct relationship allowing for equations of male mental capacity with lust, reproductive potency, phallic size, or excessive intercourse (think, for instance, of the libertine sexual energy of the witty Restoration stage-rake). The second model of inverse proportion offered either/or scenarios in which one could possess either heightened mental or genital ability but not both at the same time, allowing for complex exchanges in which large amounts of wit or intellect might compensate a missing phallicism and vice versa.

The medical commentaries intensified the link between the male reproductive system and an essentialized maleness, refining the conceptual bridging between genitalia and the male mind in particular. But they are also witness to the uneasy and uneven cultural terrain as a newer symbolism about the male organs of generation came into being. As we turn now to the moderns’ approaches to the penis/phallus, we will see that the most problematic and contradictory features of the genitals-mind models were shifted onto the yard.

The Problematic Penis and Male Identity

As I have suggested, the penis is problematic in the twofold sense that Enlightenment usage was differential and ambiguous, and that the subject “the penis” has been plagued by a twentieth- and twenty-first century ahistoricism. The history of the penis, I am arguing, has not been well served by current theory. At the heart of my quarrel with psychoanalytical and feminist methodologies is their tendency to separate the penis and the phallus, forgetting that in so doing they are participating in a history of such splitting which privileges the metaphorized erection. An almost obsessive attention to the phallus as symbol has created the illusion that we are studying the cultural implications of male genitalia, when in fact we have focused on a single aspect—the erection as abstract idea—all but ignoring the relationship of hard and soft penis with its implications for studies of the male body. Lacan, as is well known, insists that the phallus is not a penis, but rather “the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.” Lacan’s phallus is thus a linguistic concept, “a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck,” and a symbolic attribute no more in the possession of men than of women, both of whom will experience not the transcendental expression of a unitary, integrated self—one version of “having” the Phallus—but rather a perpetual “play of displacement and condensation … [which] marks his [or her] relation as a subject to the signifier.”⁴⁵ Occupying a symbolic role qua signifier at the level of desire in general, Lacan’s phallus is thus to be carefully distinguished from the mundane penis, whose cultural and representational function is all but dismissed. Feminist critiques of the Lacanian phallus have exposed the rhetorical slight of hand which places Lacan himself at the center of definitional power whose patriarchal authority cannot be confronted.⁴⁶ But feminist psychoanalytical frameworks have tended to follow Lacan in their absorption with the metaphorical phallus, as well as in their reluctance to recognize the value, or indeed the necessity, of reconstructing a history of penis-phallus conceptualizations which would explain why we have arrived at our current mode of privileging an ahistorical, symbolic phallus over the material penis.

There are signs that this theoretical myopia is giving way to a historical curiosity. David M. Friedman’s recent popularized approach in A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis⁴⁷ suggests a mainstream interest in such a history. But scholars have also begun to speculate about a history of penis-phallus relationships in western culture, wondering why and when the penis and phallus came to be separated symbolically, with the latter becoming an intellectual icon and the former a taboo or at best an impolite subject not quite fit for professional academic discussion. One version of this historicization is the difficult question of how to explain the historical distance and differences between the early phallus worshipers of classical periods and the all but invisible phallus of postmodern theory and psychoanalysis. Jean-Joseph Goux has considered the differences between the symbolic “phallophorism of antiquity” (i.e., rites of Osiris, figures of Hermes and Dionysius) and the “modern phallocentrism” of psychoanalysis and philosophy, suggesting that “The modern phallus is a deciphered phallus…. The phallus is rediscovered, but, being no longer religious, sacred, ritualized, figural, it is no longer the same. It is unconscious and structural. There is a major difference between a culture which reserves a mythico-ritual place for the phallic emblem, and one which has a need for the experience and theoretical reconstruction of psychoanalysis to uncover the role and function of the phallus.”⁴⁸ Daniel Boyarin argues in a different vein that “The phallus became the phallus, i.e., became separated from the penis by being veiled in the Mysteries of late antiquity,” and that “it is the ideological separation of phallus from penis, produced in history, but forgotten as history, that enables the phallus [in its Lacanian and feminist senses] to do its work, that founds the Dominant Fiction.” For Boyarin, “Historicizing ‘the phallus’ thus becomes crucial to a political retrieval of the entire psychoanalytic project.”⁴⁹ Paul Smith has likewise called for a renovation of the psychoanalytical by the historical: “the task of historicizing the preoedipal must take on the same importance as the task of historicizing the monolithic psychoanalytical metaphor of the phallus: the imaginary is only ever constructed through phenomenologically available matter which is variable across history, and the body itself is also variably constructed across history.”⁵⁰ Given the sweeping nature of these remarks, how does one begin to imagine the Enlightenment in some grand narrative about the history of male genitalia? Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture certainly had its own array of symbols for the erect penis, and compared to earlier cultural formulations around the penis-phallus relationship, Enlightenment discourses are increasingly the site of a symbolic maleness recognizably modern—one in which the flaccid privy member was separated and understood as symbolically different from the stiffened yard. But in contrast to today’s current focus, the connections among symbolic, biological, and historical realms were then more palpable and not yet abstracted and rewritten within the disembodied and sometimes unreachable terrain of modern psychoanalysis or the reductionist caricatures of some feminisms.

But historicizing the symbolic phallus is only one important new line of inquiry. Another arises from the recognition that a history of penis-phallus relationships as they are variously conceptualized at different times is also an important aspect of the history of masculinity and the male body. Susan Bordo has recently warned of the consequences of using

the most abstract and attenuated forms of the phallus … such as the “phallogocentrism” that deconstructionists and feminists have claimed runs throughout Western philosophy, science, and religion…. I have avoided dealing with these kinds of arguments here (although I have made them myself in other contexts) precisely because they move discussion of the phallus so extremely far afield from the male body, and I fear they will pull me into an abstract realm where I would be vulnerable to the very disease that I would be diagnosing.⁵¹

While she does not pursue her study of male bodies outside the twentieth century, Bordo recognizes that “the symbol emerged historically … out of forms of reverence that did have reference to biology,” and that the connection of the penises of real men to the symbolic cultural level of ideas ought not to be underestimated if we want to understand the history of male flesh as it might have been occupied and experienced by men, or if we wish to understand the relationship of individual men to the cultural metaphorization of the male body: “The phallus,” she writes, “haunts the penis. Paradoxically, at the same time the penis … also haunts phallic authority, threatens its undoing.”⁵² As Bordo realizes, a good deal of academic discourse has demonstrated, somewhat paradoxically, how difficult it has been to keep the male body in view while studying the penis-phallus as subject.

This emergent intellectual and historical curiosity about male genitalia will perhaps reverse current academic trends, reminding us that there is a history of the relationship between the soft and hard penis—not only experiential but cultural—that the combined process of erigibility and detumescence has also been symbolized variously throughout history (as have testicles and semen), and that such investigations will have much to tell us about why male genitalia have come to play the part they have in postmodern psychoanalytical and feminist theory.

What made the penis such a metaphorically preeminent and culturally problematized physical site? For one thing, the yard was the seat of pleasure whose sensitivity made it the exterior part most experientially representative of internal reproductive physiology. Visually the penis was also a dramatic physical feature of the loins, capable of size-change, urination, and ejaculation. It was popularly viewed as the most active genital part and thus the vagaries of its condition and multiple function made it a particularly convenient vehicle for a variety of symbolic registers, despite the elaboration of the role of testes, glands, fluid systems, and micro-vessels provided by the physiologists. Moreover, the glans was understood as having a high proportion of extremely sensitive nerves, and the heightened responsiveness to stimulation helped to make the connection of the yard to the nervous system and brain a relatively easy matter.⁵³ The ability of the limp penis to become erect could easily be metaphorized, with successful or unsuccessful tumescence having obvious implications for the male’s status within psycho-sexual, social, political, or literary contexts, as well as for the plight of male desire itself. Its diseases, too—chancres, lues, gleets, stranguries, priapisms—were easily converted into social and moral tokens, evidence of the failure of masculine will, of social or political immorality, or even of a national decline.⁵⁴ Of the external organs of generation, the yard appeared to have the most complex role—and thus the greatest range for metaphorical use—and in non-medical discourses it was the penis which typically represented the reproductive system as a whole in the genitalia-mind correspondences.

To expand our answers to why the penis became so prominent a sign we must also investigate the influence of larger cultural contexts, ranging from the history of masculinity and the emergence of pornography, to legal proceedings and literary practices, and even to political and nationalistic currents. If one were to search for some master category which explained the reasons of such a convergence, one might point to the well-known historical shifting through the seventeenth century from notions of the individual as an integrated part of an organic cosmos governed by God’s will to a self increasingly defined by inner physiological and external material conditions within a mechanized cosmos. In this context of paradigmatic change, one can view the proliferation of the yard-male identity equation as a specific version of the newly quantifiable self subject to forms of mechanical measurement.

And there were other macro contexts of historical change which contributed to this convergence. For instance, the male body was being culturally repositioned as a symbolic entity in response to large-scale social shifts, with the result that the reproductively potent penis became one symbol by which several value-systems would be defined. As Michael McKeon has argued, a significant feature of attacks on aristocratic ideology through the eighteenth century was the dismantling of the notion that birth determined worth, “that honor is biologically inherited.” The dynamics of what McKeon calls “a dissection of the cadaver of male aristocracy” included three relocations relevant to my discussion: “honor” was increasingly lodged in the idea of the domestic female; the perceived sterility and effete corruption of the male aristocrat “was reembodied in the effeminate nonmale, the ‘unreproductive’ sodomite”; personal worth and internal value would now be found in the sentimental man of public virtue, “defined by his economic activity, his occupational status, and his heterosexuality.”⁵⁵ To these careful assessments I would add that if an eighteenth-century norm of masculinity depended increasingly on differentiating the effete sterility of aristocrat or molly from the heterosexual male within the family unit, then one of the governing bodily signs of this new male was the reproductively potent penis which authenticated social and sexual norms at which the sodomitical aristocrat either failed or transgressed. A biological essentialism, in other words, which had once propped up an aristocratic hierarchy of worth and honor, was now rewritten as a gendered distinction among kinds of males, whose heterosexual phallicism was central to a definition of the “normal” self.⁵⁶

The penis could define male identity in other ways, as well, with a non-reproductive sexual competence becoming a basic measure of a man’s personality. Leo Braudy has approached late seventeenth-century premature ejaculation poems in this way, suggesting that the period’s near obsession with the idea of impotence represents “one of the earliest modern examples of the ambiguous relation between the male sexual body and the male sense of personal identity that will become one of the main themes of writing in western literature.” The specific significance of a poem such as Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” he writes, is that “the man has become the prick,” and the larger historical import of Rochester’s work as a whole is that it “helps mark a historical moment in which masculinity was becoming not the God-given portion of every male but an aspect of character primarily defined by sexual accomplishment and performance, constantly needing to be reattained.”⁵⁷ While Braudy does not explore other discourses in which man-as-penis becomes a more common trope, he is right in marking this literary fashion as a historical example of new ways by which maleness would be essentialized. One might add that within the empirical culture of the new science, the medicalization of sexuality made such quantitative appreciations almost predictable. In the hands of De Graaf and other anatomists, the organs of generation and coition received the kind of empirical dissecting, inflating, mapping, and measuring never before so anatomically precise; it is therefore not surprising to discover that in a culture for which “sexuality” had been reified as a category, the quantitative and mechanical approaches of human biology would support a vocabulary of size, prowess, frequency, and potency.⁵⁸

The proliferation of the penis as public subject appears in some unlikely places, as well, informing aspects of eighteenth-century English nationalism which (among other strategies) used the sexually potent English penis to valorize a national identity, morality, and even a made-in-Britain aesthetic sensibility. In writing of Fielding and popular Italian castrati such as Farinelli, Jill Campbell has examined the ways in which the castrato’s testicular loss was viewed in general as a phallic deficiency, which in turn “provided an occasion to isolate, and to literalize, to make explicit, the cultural significances of the phallus itself: in considering the nature of the castrato’s loss, the satirists at times assume the phallus to be the guarantor of everything from moral discourse to English currency to English-ness.”⁵⁹ Moreover, theatrical instances of the erect, limp, or missing penis—as it is figured in Restoration stage-rakes and eunuchs—has also been explained as the metaphorical centering of political and gender anxieties following the Civil War, particularly as these upheavals might have produced a so-called “crisis” in masculinity.⁶⁰

The symbolic function of the male organs of generation, and the yard in particular, can also be understood in relation to pornography and the libertine quality of Charles II’s court. As a relatively new and subversive genre initially combining political and religious satire with the more intimate narrative potential of the novel, pornography increasingly turned away from its satirical ethos toward the narrower domain of private sexual titillation in which pornographers sought for ways to raise the yards of their male readers, thus linking the imaginative act more intimately with a phallic response. Samuel Pepys would privately masturbate during his reading of L’Escole des Filles, writing in code that the salacious descriptions “did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez decharger.”⁶¹ Seed and testicles do not disappear in the sexual configurations of pornography, but it is the phallus—both as the sought-after object of many erotic episodes, as well as the masturbated penis of the reader—that is privileged. The early modern “invention of pornography,” to use Lynn Hunt’s phrase, can thus be viewed as a new literary or subliterary genre devoted almost exclusively to stimulating the nervous connections between men’s brains and their pricks, although matters are somewhat more complicated than this, as we will see.

Older formulations of the penis as power, trophy, or political might can also be found in notorious anecdotes about the libertine aggression of rakes such as Rochester, or in the publicly discussed royal pintle of Charles II, whose monarchy was often figured as an endless swiving, as in Rochester’s cheeky poem, “On King Charles”: “His sceptre and his prick are of a length; / And she that plays with one may sway the other.”⁶² Remarkable imagery indeed, not only as a courtier’s playful but potentially dangerous critique of Charles’s privileging of penis over politics, but also as an instance of the extent to which this culture would personify a single part of the male body, transforming penises into a large variety of symbols for male spheres of action. The ups and downs of the yard, as well as its contact with the world of others through intercourse, made it a convenient vehicle for a wide range of usage in the affairs of men, from the in-close physiological workings of reproduction and sexual pleasure in medical books and sexologies; to the careers of kings, the hypocrisy of aristocrats and randy clergymen in gossip and pornography; to new gender roles for men; and to an increasingly democratized male body politic. To this list we will later add male literary communities, for whom the yard and its doings often symbolized something about the creative energy within the poet’s brain.

So what was problematic or unstable about specific representations of the penis/phallus? In this gathering of new and refurbished symbols, what were the implications for concepts of maleness? As we turn now from brief sketches of the macro contexts of symbolic usage to closer scrutiny of representative textual evidence in the next three sections, we encounter a sprawling inventory ranging from literal to figurative, from biological marker to socio-sexual status, from youth to old age, from the privy member as “hard” sign of male will and power to the symbol of an irrational Other outside one’s control. But despite the diversity of specific deployments, there appears to be a deep-level set of cultural equations whose intersecting and often oppositional structures relate to the conceptual linkage between male mind and yard.

The Erection and the Penis

It is important that we resist our postmodern tendency to consider only the already symbolic phallus and ignore the literal penis, a slippage or act of convenient blindness of which seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers cannot often be accused.⁶³ The historical record for this period suggests that there were two different ways of imagining the relationship of the soft yard to the erect pintle: either they were linked together as part of a single process of tumescence and detumescence, symbolizing a wide range of masculine experience from puberty to old age; or, the penis was separated or sharply differentiated from the phallus, with the former marginalized as a sign of male failure and the phallus left as a sign of male will and power. Indeed, one of the striking features of the record is the attention given to the first formulation. The period’s symbolic equations, in other words, do not always begin and end with the already engorged yard, but frequently include the circumstances within which the penis stiffens or resumes its accustomed flaccidity. The Enlightenment penis, one might say, is significantly present in cultural representations of male genitalia, and not removed peremptorily from the site of symbolic formation—as in current academic approaches—to some invisible place detached from the phallus, or simplistically resituated in a visible but negative category of male failure such as impotence. Of course, hard and soft yards could signify opposite conditions about masculine capability, with hardened member a synecdoche for male power and limp pizzle the satirized plight of fumbler or premature ejaculator, but penis and phallus were not always separated in this fashion, and indeed often linked as a variable process representative of some aspect of male embodiment in time.

The combined process of tumescence and detumescence clearly has a different set of figurative possibilities than does the already erect, symbolically detached yard, which tends to represent a static condition of empowerment. The erigibility and softening of the yard, by contrast, represent the variability of masculine experience as it is related to the material realms of sex, desire, age, health, social and economic station. The significance of this second representational scheme is that the biological penis often foregrounds the unique subjectivity of particular kinds of men, throwing into relief the uneven conjunction of male sexuality and historical contingencies; the phallus-by-itself, on the other hand, is often presented as symbolically distinct from the male who owns it, even though it might represent masculine power. These two modes are frequently juxtaposed in the discourses ca. 1650–1750, and their jostling suggests uncertainty about what kind of symbolic equations ought to prevail: defining maleness against a relatively narrow phallic emblem? or broadening the typology so as to reflect a greater variety of maleness? The second option entails much greater range, of course, but also a higher probability of problems or failure. And yet the writers of this period frequently eschew an exclusive equation of the unitary Phallus-as-Man and write instead about the rising-and-falling penises-of-men. From the urinary to the ejaculatory, from the limp to the poxed, from the hormonal vigor of youth to aged impotence, from satyriasis to due benevolence, from cantharides to flagellated readiness—the Enlightenment yard was often a problematic emblem of male identity because its function could be related to the psychological and physical complexities of individual men.

A good place to begin is with the pornographic tradition, the genre we most often associate with an uncomplicated phallicism. The period’s most famous pornographic novel—John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49)—illustrates that phallic modes were frequently attended by the variable and sometimes idiosyncratic realities of penises. While the powerful erection is at the center of the three-dozen scenes which make up his plot, Cleland is not unmindful of the penis, and the novel offers a typology of yards suggesting a far greater range of male subjectivity than the always-hard, symbolically-ready erection represents. Moreover, as Peter Sabor has pointed out in the introduction to his edition of the novel, “Cleland’s world is assuredly not the ‘pornotopia’ that Stephen Marcus defines [in which] ‘All men in it are always and infinitely potent’ ” (xxi–xxii). Fanny’s epistolary account presents a sequence of men who are largely defined by the variable connection of their yards to their mental constitutions: the impotent older male (15–16) and premature ejaculator (19); the “shortliv’d erection” (139) of Norbert, the thirty year-old debauchee; the punishingly-achieved erections and emissions of Barvile, the young flagellant (143–52); the “sickly appetite” of “a grave, staid, solemn, elderly gentleman,” whose fetishes include hair-combing and biting off the finger-tips of Fanny’s gloves (153); the “middle-siz’d … red-topt ivory toy” (158) of the teenaged mollies.⁶⁴ That some of these examples turn the men into objects of satire or negative treatment at the same time as they exist for the purpose of prurient titillation, is clear enough. But one must also ponder the larger implications of these representations in which the process of tumescence and detumescence—whether frustrated or deviant—characterizes the identity of these men.⁶⁵ Why it is that the phallic imagery of Enlightenment pornography is so often bracketed by the unstable psychological and material conditions upon which male sexuality and erections depend?

It seems to me that the presence of these two modes of representation is typical of the period, and the sign of a larger cultural hesitation about how to give symbolic substance to the new equations of male minds and genitalia. Something similar can be found in the popular tradition of facetiae, bawdy songs, ribald jests, riddles, and extended metaphors which take the yard as subject. The “arbor vitae” treatises, for example—those not so subtle analogies of the penis as shrub, tree, or sensitive plant⁶⁶—contain predictable gestures of phallic competence and over-sized glory set against sodomites, fumblers, or the poxed; but noteworthy is how frequently a “history” of the penis/phallus is made a part of these humorous treatments, making space for descriptions of the process of tumescence and detumescence as well as for often matter-of-fact references to aging, impotence, flagellation, aphrodisiacs. The culture of Pope’s day seems interested simultaneously in glorifying the potent erection as a self-contained symbol and yet representing the yard as playing a sometimes problematic role in the history of individual men.

The presence of both modes can be found in other kinds of narratives and discourses as well, in which the relationship of the yard to blunt realities of money, beauty, or the unpredictable world of sexual desire is the subject. For example, in his satirical argument in favor of dildoes—objects which, from one vantage-point, are a mock-perfect instance of the symbolically-detached phallus—Samuel Butler’s outrageous Dildoides (written in the 1670s; first published in 1706) makes the non-satirical point that “Woman must have both Youth and Beauty / E’re the damn’d Ρ—ck will do his duty, / And then Sometimes he scarce will stand too / Tho’ you apply your Misses’ hand to.” Stirrings of the yard can be fussier and even more venal than this, however, “For wicked Pintles have no mind t’her / Who has no Mony, nor no Joynture.” Notwithstanding the misogynistic measure of the sometimes fickle prick against artificial “Man in this Epitome,”⁶⁷ Butler’s treatment is linked to many other portrayals of the penis as symbolic of the vagaries of male desire and circumstance, in which possibilities of tumescence intersect crudely with economic opportunism, hygiene, or a limited staying-power: “Dildo has nose, but cannot Smell, / No Stench can his great Courage quell: / At sight of Plaisters hee’l not fail, / Nor faintly ask what do you Ail?” “Which of us able to Prevent is / His Girle from Lying with his Prentice, / Unlesse we other means Provide / For Nature to be satisfy’d? / And what more Proper, than this Engine, / Which wou’d outdo ’em, shou’d three men Joyne” (1–2, 6). Butler’s comical poem reaches a significant balancing of representational possibilities: although the second of the orators convinces the crowd of citizens to burn the dildoes lest “Idolatry … fill the Land, / And all True Pricks forget to Stand” (7), the first orator offers practical arguments in favor of dildoes, which are not bothered by health, smell, money, age, beauty, or desire in the ordinary ways that real yards are. Ultimately the poem chooses the real over the artificial phallus, but not before it has demonstrated the problematic relationship of soft and stiff yards.

Homosocial contexts, likewise, also hosted the juxtaposition of these two modes, as in a letter from the thirty-seven year-old Pope, who writes to thank Fortescue for “the fine Scollops” he has sent: “Those you favord me with are very safe arrived & have done me no little credit with the Dutchess of Hamilton. Alas! with any Female they will do me little credit, if I eat them myself: I have no way so good to please ’em, as by presenting ’em with any thing rather than with my self.” In this example, the meaning and functioning of the yard are linked politely to psychosexual matters of acceptance, which here circulates maddeningly just out of Pope’s reach; he is permitted to be the generous giver of the aphrodisiac scallops, but any presentation of his own stimulated yard will be ignored or shunned, the cursed result of his misshapen body. And yet in the very next paragraph Pope compensates for this rejection, juxtaposing a homosocial fantasy of his own phallic competence and sway: “Dr. Arbuthnot is highly mindful of you. He has (with my Consent) put a Joke upon Gay & me, out of pure disposition to give him joy & gladness. Gay is made to believe that I had a Clap, of which I fancy you’l hear his Sentiments in that ludicrous way, which God has given him to excell all others in” (Corr. 2: 290, 18 March 1724/5). As is often the case in examples from this period, the two modes of penis/phallus relationship accompany one another, offering very different and alternating possibilities of how a man might be defined or understood in relation to his yard.

John Armstrong’s The Oeconomy of Love (1736) is a perfect example of a non-pornographic treatise in which “the tumid Wonder”⁶⁸ represents not a static emblem of symbolic power, but the variable phases of maleness from sexual maturation and the growth of pubic hair, to the teenager’s first wet dreams and intercourse, to the dangers of masturbation, and finally to the sexual frustrations of old age, impotence, and the attempt by “Flagellation, and the rage of Blows, / To rouse the Venus loitering in his Veins!” (54, 11. 528–9)—or, in a last desperate attempt to stimulate an erection, the use of aphrodisiacs such as “Orchis,” “Satyrion” (a member of the orchid family), “Eryngo” (candied sea holly), “Cantharides” (Spanish flies) (55, 11. 550–5). The figure of the aged male has received little study for this period, except for passing reference to satirical versions of the impotent or cuckolded fumbler. And yet the story is a more complex one, as Armstrong’s treatment suggests, and the temporal realities of the yard included sometimes moving and nostalgic accounts of desires which have outlived the aging body’s ability, as in Robert Herrick’s “To His Mistresses”:

Old I am, and cannot do

That I was accustomed to.

Bring your magics, spells, and charms,

To enflesh my thighs and arms;

Is there no way to beget

In my limbs their former heat?

Aeson had, as poets feign,

Baths that made him young again:

Find that medicine, if you can,

For your dry, decrepit man

Who would fain his strength renew,

Were it but to pleasure you.⁶⁹

Or, the careful attentions of the young lady in Rochester’s “A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover”:

Thy nobler part, which but to name

In our sex would be counted shame,

By Age’s frozen grasp possessed,

From his ice shall be released,

And, soothed by my reviving hand,

In former warmth and vigour stand.⁷⁰

These kinds of examples, both pornographic and non-pornographic, serve to remind us that penises were often represented as meaningful in relation to contexts of male life; that stiffened or slack yards often reflected the varieties of male experience in time rather than parts to be measured or indexed against an emblematized phallic standard which was totemically separate from the individual male body and will, but still applicable to one’s stature or value within the cultural subset of maleness.⁷¹ And it is worth noting that conditions in which there was difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection were not always or exclusively the object of satire or contempt. If one desired an erection, it was of course agreeable to be able to have one; if one could not, or if one depended on idiosyncratic erotic aids, this culture afforded not a single but a double symbolic register.

These two very different ways of imagining the relationship of the soft penis to the erection suggest a semiotic tug-of-war in which the yard could have meaning either as it was defined by the life-situation of the male, or as it defined maleness itself. Unlike the late twentieth-and twenty-first century, this earlier period had not yet narrowed its penis-symbolism exclusively to a disembodied Phallus; eighteenth-century pornography was not obsessed—as is the case with our current video porn—with the “money shot”;⁷² representations of the yard—however impolite as a topic of discussion—involved a variety of contexts whose symbolic possibilities were not uniformly the result of a phallus separated imaginatively from the penis.

Mind-Yard Connections: Direct and Inverse

Within such diversity, other kinds of oppositional structures are visible, particularly around the relationship of a man’s head and his genitals. Stiff pricks, of course—the bigger the better—could function unambiguously as signs of masculine capability, with turgid member a synecdoche for the power of male will, a marker of masculine stature, a guarantor of virility or masculinity itself. Ideas of privileged political power lurk even in some of the slang terms, such as “privy member.” This relatively uncomplicated equation can be described briefly.

The erection served variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful will and assertiveness of the male brain or of the masculine character. The mind’s ability to raise the yard was a token of the man’s knowledge of and power over a material world of others, as is reflected in the sexual connotations of the phrase “To Know.” Johnson’s dictionary-gloss is coy—“6. To converse with another sex”—but his biblical example—“And Adam knew Eve his wife”—makes plain the associations of mind, erection, knowledge, and copulatory power-over. As a mark of stature in the gender hierarchy, the metaphor was certainly used before 1650, as in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) in which the jealous Kitely bemoans his lack of psychological strength as “want[ing] the mindes erection.”⁷³ At mid-century Hobbes would describe the human “Desire, to know why, and how” or “CURIOSITY” as “a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall pleasure.”⁷⁴ If Hobbes’s conceit imagined the figuratively endless phallic pleasures of mental procreation, at century’s end John Dennis would rely on the metaphorical structure for an exaggerated compliment to Dryden:

Since I came to this place I have taken up my Pen several times in order to write to you, but have constantly at the very Beginning found myself Damp’d and Disabled; upon which I have been apt to believe that extraordinary Esteem may sometimes make the Mind as Impotent as Violent Love does the Body…. I have heard of more than one lusty Gallant, who, tho he could at any time with Readiness and Vigour possess the Woman whom he lov’d but moderately, yet when he has been about to give his darling Mistriss, whom he has vehemently and long desir’d, the first last Proof of his Passion, has found on a sudden that his Body has Jaded and Grown resty under his Soul, and gone backward the faster, the more he has spurr’d it forward. Esteem has wrought a like effect upon my Mind.⁷⁵

In this flourish, Dennis’s pretense that his phallic mind has been overcome by his esteem is transparent flattery whose own wit serves as a sign of his potent yard-brain.

Laurence Sterne would later offer his own idiosyncratic concoction for the connection of yard-brain to knowing and knowledge, reminding his reader that “it so happens and ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy” (3: 38, 173–74). In so equating the capacity of heated imagination and euphemistic nose, Tristram announces one of the primary structures of the novel in which the mental and creative abilities of the male characters—Walter, Toby, Tristram himself—are framed by the copulatory and reproductive strengths of the yard, which the mischievous Sterne invites the reader to imagine at every conceivable moment. Thus, two chapters later:

The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms,—I mean in man,—for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits,—’tis all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings inferior, as your worships all know,—syllogize by their noses. (3: 40, 177)

In this comic synthesis, the nose-penis is mental capacity (notwithstanding the phallic incompetence of the Shandy males), and Sterne is unable to resist tweaking the nose of the great Locke, whose chapter on reason (Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. 4, Ch. 17, Sect. 18) is ludicrously reduced to a measure by cocks:

The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us,—or the great and principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third; (called the medius terminus) just as a man, as Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two men’s nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length. (3: 40, 177)⁷⁶

If rampant yard could signify the power of male “knowing,” it could also be figured as a sublime object of desire itself—the “pride of nature, and its richest master-piece,” according to Cleland’s Fanny Hill (46)—which promised other forms of knowledge and pleasure to those who subjected themselves to its power. Thus, in a translation of Nicolas Chorier’s pornographic Satyra Sotadica (1659 or 1660), the mother of the just-married and now-deflowered fifteen year-old Octavia solemnly lectures her daughter on the virtues brought by the enormous member of “thy dear Philander”: “thou art now born to a new Life…. Thy Wit and Understanding will clear up with thy Enjoyments, for that very Engine that opens our Bodies, will do the same to our Minds.”⁷⁷ This promised “knowing,” however, is about female acquiescence to a symbolic male authority which resides in the exaggerated phallus. The yard, as Fanny Hill recognizes, is not simply a “label of manhood” (165) but, in its hardened glory, can be “an object of terror and delight” (73), “the king member” (110), or the “scepter-member, which commands us all” (183). In this direct equation of erect penis and masculine character the stiffened tarse becomes on one occasion nothing less than a “plenipotentiary instrument” (113). The phallus has become the man, a genital envoy invested with the full power and authority of the male, with its/his ability to “know” women or to elicit a sublime curiosity in them signs of the man’s will and power over bodies, language, and desire itself.

As Cleland’s metaphors suggest, the brain-phallus equation was also used as a measure of political might, where “the king member” signaled the sway and dominion of the monarch. Charles II’s private sexuality and public political role met often in such formulas—“His sceptre and his prick are of a length,” to take Rochester’s famous barb—where the king’s pretensions to godhood or potential for tyranny and absolutism were figured by the powerful rule of the over-sized royal yard. Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s) alludes to Charles’s sceptre-phallus, linking political might to “thy Soveraign Pr-k’s Prerogative”:

Methinks I see thee now in full Seraglio stand,

With Love’s great Scepter in thy hand,

And over all its Spacious Realm thy Power extend:

Ten Thousand Maids lye prostrate at thy Feet,

Ready thy Pintle’s high Commands to meet;

.............................................................

Far as wide Nature spreads her Thighs,

Thy Tarse’s vast Dominion lyes:

All Womankind acknowledge its great Sway,

And all to its large Treasury their Tribute pay,

Pay Custom of their unprohibited Commodities.⁷⁸

However preposterous the image, royal command and dominion here reside in the tarse, which embodies the king’s rule over Nature herself. More exaggerated yet are the opening lines of the obscene closet drama, the Rochesterian Sodom (1684), in which the hard penis of King Bolloximian (read Charles II) literally replaces both crown and sceptre:

Thus in the zenith of my lust I reign,

I drink to swive, and swive to drink again.

Let other monarchs who their sceptres bear,

To keep their subjects less in love than fear,

Be slaves to crowns—my nation shall be free.

My pintle only shall my sceptre be.

My laws shall act more pleasure than command,

And with my prick I’ll govern all the land.⁷⁹

As Harold Weber has noted, the king “insists that political power can be understood and expressed only as a manifestation of his royal phallus, the male organ that generates and sustains the patriarchal structures of society.”⁸⁰ But the figurative traffic between mind and yard is equally clear: because the erect pintle perfectly reflects the royal will and character, it is an even better symbol than the sceptre and crown it replaces, serving as instrument of the sovereign’s power and as surrogate for the royal mind itself.

The non-royal yard must not be forgotten in this context. Although hardly the only marker in the hierarchy of masculinity, the privy member of the well-hung gentleman or genteel whoremaster could add to one’s stature. Bolingbroke and Bathurst were both noted for their phallic exploits, causing friend Pope to commemorate the sexual appetites of both in his Sober Advice from Horace. But their notorious cocksmanship was also appreciated as an extra mark of their status among men. For someone like the passionate Alexander, whose erotic yearnings are so palpable in his poetry and letters, Bolingbroke represented a masculine model of the many things he admired or wanted for himself, including libidinal self-indulgence. As Brean Hammond has noted astutely, “ ‘all accomplish’d St. John’ was everything that Pope aspired to be in his imagination,” and if, “ludicrously, in spite of Pope’s actual physical incapacities, the poet liked to imagine himself something of a rake,” “in Bolingbroke he found the genuine article.”⁸¹ St. John’s phallic prowess was an extra badge of virility and manliness, his ambitious yard conferring a distinction of desirable masculinity which would gather respect even from other men.

Something similar is evident in Pope’s representations of Bathurst’s copious swiving, which is presented humorously as being in competition with Pope’s loving friendship:

There was a Man in the Land of Twitnam, called Pope. He was a Servant of the Lord Bathurst of those days, a Patriarch of great Eminence, for getting children, at home & abroad. But … his Love for strange women, caused the said Lord to forget all his Friends of the Male-Sex; insomuch that he knew not, nor once rememberd, there was such a man in the Land of Twitnam as aforesaid. It were to be wisht, he would come & see; or if nothing else will move him, there are certain Handmaids belonging to the said Pope which are comely in their goings, yea which go comelily. (Corr. 2: 292, 1725?)

In these epicoene romps, Pope’s mock-jealous desire for Bathurst’s love takes a backseat to the escapades of the Lord’s yard, which has been diverted by countless mistresses. The poet slyly suggests that it is only through the Lord’s aroused member that a person—whether mistress or male friend—can engage Bathurst’s attention, and Pope comically offers up his Handmaids for the friend’s phallic pleasures, if only to provide the occasion for a meeting of friends. However tongue-in-cheek these libertine insinuations, the flattery is real enough, depending on the equation of male authority or stature of character with potent yard. Adding to his other manly accomplishments, Lord Bathurst’s ambitious phallicism distinguishes his desirability to women and other men alike; to defer to the noble yard is, by Pope’s neat epicoene logic, to “converse with” Lord Bathurst himself.

Biographical and autobiographical domains yield other versions of the erection as measure of selfhood and worth, as in the case of Horace Walpole’s jealous care of Lord Lincoln’s reputedly gargantuan member, or in the obsessive self-regard of James Boswell. The homo-sexually-inclined Walpole was, according to a recent biographer, a “size queen”⁸² obsessed with the beloved Lincoln’s potency and genital dimensions. At a public masquerade night in February 1743, Horace explained to Mann,

I dressed myself in an Indian dress, and after he [Lincoln] was come thither … made him three low bows, and kneeling down, took a letter out of my bosom, wrapped in Persian silk, and laid it on my head…. They persuaded him to take it: it was a Persian letter from Kouli Kan…. here it is: “Highly favored among women … We have heard prodigious things of thee: they say, thy vigour is nine times beyond that of our prophet … Most potent Lord, we have sent thee as a mark of our grace fifty of the most beautiful maidens of Persia…. Adieu! happy young man! May thy days be as long as thy manhood, and may thy manhood continue more piercing than Zufager, that sword of Hali which had two points.”⁸³

Although there are some similarities here to Pope’s epicoene play with friend Bathurst, Walpole’s risqué public gesture is more psychologically complex, involving both the exhibitionist display of Walpole’s wit, as well as an attempt to embarrass Lincoln, who “stared violently.” But there is an underlying jealousy here as well, in which the clever Walpole indecorously calls attention to the penis of his well-hung friend in order to assert a humorous mastery over it by invoking it publicly at his own will. Having conjured up Lincoln’s yard, so to speak, for the amusement of the assembly, Walpole’s seraglio impersonation archly insinuates some intimate knowledge, and therefore token ownership, of Lincoln’s “vigour.” And “to know” the phallus, by this psychological circuitry, is to own the man, even though the letters indicate that Lincoln was the dominant one in the relationship, and the infatuated Horace a passive, emotionally needy lover sometimes desperate for a reciprocated passion from the apparently bisexual Lincoln. My larger point about these examples is that, however different the personal circumstances between Pope’s epicoene friendships and Walpole’s sodomitical passion, their writing sometimes shared a metaphorical economy in which the stiff prick could take on symbolic properties which represented the power or desirability of the beloved male, whose very being and stature were in turn equated with the turgid yard.

To take one final example of direct mind-yard equations we can look at autobiographical remarks by Boswell, whose compulsive philandering is sometimes attended by a narcissistic phallicism in which size and staying-power provide reassurances of his male worth. The occasions are often crude and potentially dangerous: “I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling.” But at times his almost autoerotic textual recapitulations are dramatically extended, as they are with “Louisa” (actually Anne Lewis), “a handsome actress of Covent Garden Theatre”:

Proud of my godlike vigour, I soon resumed the noble game. I was in full glow of health. Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness, and my bounding blood beat quick and high alarms. A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance. She said it was what there was no just reason to be proud of. But I told her I could not help it. She said it was what we had in common with the beasts. I said no. For we had it highly improved by the pleasures of sentiment. I asked her what she thought enough. She gently chid me for asking such questions, but said two times.⁸⁴

What is interesting here is the curious logic of the Boswellian measure. For Louisa, five times “lost in supreme rapture” makes Boswell a prodigy. For his own part (having wisely abstained from alcohol), Boswell’s “godlike vigour” makes him “somewhat proud of my performance.” And yet, ludicrously, he will set the bench-mark for “extraordinary” phallic accomplishment at ten orgasms.⁸⁵ In this exaggerated priapic grid, size and number define the man, whose redoubtable tarse moves him upward on the scale of manliness from the beastly to the godlike with each additional encounter. Boswell’s five times is not extraordinary in this hierarchy, he claims, even if it is for Louisa, whose measure of the prodigious is to be tupped more than twice. Boswell situates his own performance against the idealized, always-ready priapic engine whose ten-fold capacity is more about the totemic erection than it is about the real penis. But these exaggerations also allow Boswell to attach his own considerable sexual appetite to the symbolic phallus, sign of male will, mental and physical strength, or desirability of character. Boswell’s godlike vigor would prove shortlived, however; days later came the “sorrow” of “Signor Gonorrhoea” (49, January 1763), and with it the entry of the other representational mode I described in the last section.

If the erection functioned variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful intentionality, knowledge, or assertiveness of the masculine character, then within this logic the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded man predictably embodied a semiotic stamp of male failure ranging from literary satires to the more complex imperfect enjoyment traditions to personal lampoons. These negative contexts are well known and need no further elaboration here.⁸⁶

Far more complex is the inverse relationship of male mind and groin in which the prodigious yard is a mark of idiocy, deformity, or compensation for the male who is in some sense deficient. The medical and sexological traditions are one vehicle for this structure. For instance, Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671): “Some men, but chiefly fools, have Yards so long that they are useless for generation” (22); Thomas Gibson’s The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1697): “But it is generally observed to be larger in short Men, and such as are not much given to Venery; also in those that have high and long Noses, and that are stupid and half witted” (160); John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1708): “And we observe here, that little Men, deform’d Men, and Block-heads, (those of little Wit) are better provided in those Parts, than large Men, and others” (367); commenting on Heliogabalus’s preference for soldiers with large members, Venette remarks that “he did not suspect at the same time that these long-penised people were the most befuddled and stupid of men.”⁸⁷ Although De Graaf had dismissed some of these equations as silly (including the midwife’s knotting of the umbilical cord as a determinant of penis size [see 46]), the notion that fools were more likely to possess the over-sized privy member persisted as an alternate structure to the direct model. One of the most famous examples is Cleland’s “Good-natur’d Dick” (160), simple-minded owner of the biggest erection in Fanny Hill. Louisa, Fanny’s colleague, has “conceiv’d a strange longing to be satisfy’d, whether the general rule held good with regard to this changeling and how far nature had made him amends in her best bodily gifts, for her denial of the sublimer intellectual ones” (161). True to form, Nature has given the idiot a phallus “of so tremendous a size, that prepar’d as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure surpass’d our expectation, and astonish’d even me, who had not been us’d to trade in trifles.” The “enormous” breadth and “prodigious” length “complet[ed] the proof of his being a natural … since it was full manifest that he inherited, and largely too, the prerogative of majesty, which distinguishes that otherwise most unfortunate condition, and gives rise to the vulgar saying, ‘That a fool’s bauble is a lady’s play fellow’ ” (162). Linking the epic tool of simple Dick to a tumescent majesty void of thought, Cleland presents this yard as the mechanically aroused flesh of “the man machine” (163), the La Mettrian figure whose gargantuan yard functions not as sign of mental preeminence but as meaty object serving the erotic convenience of lusty Louisa.

Like Cleland’s novel, the arbor vitae tradition includes both direct and inverse relationships, the latter associated in particular with the boorish and ill-educated Irishman, whose prominently large “tree of life” is compensatory for his other deficiencies, social and intellectual. Thus, according to The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae (1732), “The height here in England rarely passes nine [inches] … whereas in Ireland it comes to far greater dimensions, is so good, that many of the natives entirely subsist upon it, and when transplanted, have been sometimes known to raise good houses with single plants of this sort” (5).⁸⁸ Rochester’s “Signior Dildo” includes the same principle—“Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick / To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick” (11. 37–8)—as does Defoe’s Roxana: “for I had now five Children by him; the only Work (perhaps) that Fools are good for.”⁸⁹

But inverse relationships went beyond the association of well-hung but stupid, short, long-nosed, deformed, or Irish men. Importantly, the man who was impotent or small-yarded or castrated could also be linked to an aspect of mental ability or creativity which was sometimes viewed as natural compensation for a phallic deficiency. S. A. D. Tissot’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (English trans. 1768) is one instance of the inverse mind-genitalia relationship in a literary context. Writing of the various deleterious effects brought on the body by excessive intellectual or creative application, Tissot observes that