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Preface

Pope’s penis: to suggest that the yard of Alexander the Little reveals something important about the culture of eighteenth-century male creativity will doubtless strike some readers as a preposterous and needless prurience. Yet it is clear that the links between male writing and contexts of masculinity and the male body—particularly genitalia—played a significant role in the self-fashioning of several generations of male authors from ca. 1650–1750. This book is about the collective structures of male creativity for the period—particularly its somatic and sexual discourses—with Alexander Pope as primary example.

My project started out as a study of how Pope fashioned his own poetical sensibility as a man: Why were his comments about poetry and creativity so often associated with sexuality? What impact did his many friendships, especially with older men, have in shaping his sense of himself as a poet? Why did his self-conscious dramatizations of the poetic imagination gravitate toward the body (Belinda’s and Eloisa’s, for example, or his own twisted frame)? What methodology might explain his investment of eros in both his male friends and his poems? What was one to make of the fact that his enemies so often attacked his writing and personality through ritualistic castration gestures or scathing belittlement of his genitals, and why did modern scholarship largely ignore this side of the Pope quarry? What was one to make of his handling of sexualized female Muses which he often projected onto himself or male friends, and why did he use tropes of the creative brain as womb? What did it mean for this diminutive man to say that “he pleas’d by manly ways,” and what sort of phallic strut might inform his public self-portraiture? What were the cultural subtexts of Colley Cibber’s embarrassing anecdote in 1742 about Pope’s supposed visit to a whorehouse as a young man? I wanted a clearer sense of the connections between Pope’s creativity and his masculinity.

Before long it was clear that such questions were related to the larger literary culture of other writers, that how Pope fantasized the symbolic landscape of male writing in his most self-conscious moments—both the interior site of creativity as well as his public status within the literary marketplace—was inescapably embedded within the collective norms and attitudes of male literary culture understood in its broadest sense. The scope of my book changed accordingly, and I sought answers to a question deceptively simple and yet richly entangled within deeper paradigms: how did male writers of the period, not just Pope, imagine the origins, nature, and structures of their own creativity, or what William Collins referred to as the “poetical character” (the phrase comes from his pindaric “Ode on the Poetical Character,” that beautiful mid-century lyric about the origins and mythopoeic properties of the creative imagination)?

One answer is that male literary culture of the period depended on a shared symbolic and metaphorical system to fashion a myth about its own creativity, often linking itself to the material realms of Enlightenment sexuality. There were other kinds of figurative linkage, of course—to politics, wealth, land, law, the nervous system—but male authors also typically constructed notions of their own poetic imagination, the origins of their creativity, and their life-long writerly output as masculine sexual dramas. Encoded at a casual but nonetheless deep level of cultural utterance in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a collective imaginative approach by male writers to questions about their craft, their intimate spaces of inspiration, and their sometimes unstable position within the larger group of other men. These gestures inhabited a metaphorized vocabulary of male sexuality and masculinity which—I shall be arguing—were in significant ways the foundations upon which the symbolic codes of male creativity and male literary communities were built.

Another answer is that the discourses linking creativity and sexuality functioned within the hierarchical dynamics and power structures of male literary communities—that is, within the homosocial domains of male friendship, or in its shadow form, male competition. This is not to forget or dismiss the increasing role played by a female readership at this time, or to underestimate the impact of the new wave of female authors. But for male writers roughly contemporary with the life of Pope, one’s authority within literary and critical circles was often specifically linked to being a man whose “manly” qualities—whether literal or figurative—were valued by other men who themselves occupied positions of influence by virtue of their own homosocial connections. Notions of literary authority, in other words, were frequently grounded on a dynamic of homocentric inclusion (or exclusion) whose subtext was an acceptable masculinity—visceral, social, or literary (ideally, all three)—and whose praxis was often linked to the bonds of friendship with other men. Within these homosocial contexts and hierarchies questions of male creativity were given definition, value, and status.

A third answer is that collective notions of the poetical character depended on how male writers metaphorized their literary “labor,” both as an internalized imaginative act and as an object of readerly attention. A significant aspect of the history of authorial self-representation is that men were concerned about how their creativity was perceived, and writers of all stripes—famous ones like Pope, up-and-comers like Mark Akenside, hacks such as Ned Ward—tried to shape and control the figurative definitions that would be associated with their creative efforts.

This study, then, is essentially an inventory of how the male literary culture ca. 1650–1750 deployed self-conscious and well-recognized sets of metaphors and allegories to talk of male creativity, both its internal character and its status in public. A rhetorical stock-taking, if you will, this book concentrates on how and why male writers linked their authorial work to male and female groins, genitalia, reproductive and erotic acts, and how these figurative gestures played a role within homosocial hierarchies in the larger literary community. As an investigation of cultural discourses of and about male creativity, my chapters try to identify the shared vocabulary of metaphorical codes among male writers of very different sorts, as well as to speculate on how changing cultural perceptions of the status of the “literary”—both professional and economic—account for variations in how these collective tropes were used. The result, I hope, will be a better understanding of how Enlightenment notions of male creativity were constructed and how they changed, although I will refer to examples and writers before and after the period 1650–1750 to suggest the continuity of many of these verbal codes.

There is another more personal side to the genesis of this book, one that illuminates the fascinating, and uneasy, professional politics of my subject matter. In the mid-1990s when I was asked at eighteenth-century studies conferences about the work I was doing, my “Pope and sex” rejoinder was often politely treated as an unnecessary and surprising prurience or simply as a non-starter, since, as we were all supposed to know, Pope did not have one—a real sex life, that is. Case closed. The conversation topic shifted, usually to Pope’s representations of female sexuality. I then took to explaining that I wanted to describe how male bodies, friendship, and genitalia were linked to notions of male creativity, and that Pope was of enormous importance in such a study, especially treatments of his penis. I quickly discovered that many people were embarrassed by my subject, and instead of engaging with it they sometimes simplistically interpreted my interest as a sign of my sexual orientation or, alternatively, as an unwelcome entry onto turf then owned by feminists and gay historians. It struck me that part of what was going on here was symptomatic of a general academic reluctance to study male genitals or to keep the historical subject of the sexualized male body in focus without digressing from it.

Other experiences seemed, amusingly, to confirm this reluctance: my male friends at the University of Saskatchewan joked for years that I was “working on Pope’s penis” (on informal days, “Pope’s dick”), and counted on me to supply the occasional racy photocopied engraving of something salacious from the period, but they seemed uncomfortable whenever I talked seriously about my subject, preferring humor and the light porn images from the past. My feminist friends were convinced I was working on eighteenth-century masculinity, trying to make a difference, and when one missed a paper I gave to our Department of Women’s and Gender Studies on “Men & ‘Yard’-Work in the 17th-18th Centuries,” a polite, handwritten message regretted that she had missed my talk on men’s domestic labor. Those who had attended seemed politely mystified by my interest in impotence trials, looking for ways to transpose my materials onto the female body.

Other anecdotes tell different, but related, stories. The three times I gave conference papers on aspects of the pregnant male brain-womb, I seemed to be in my audience’s good books. The three times I spoke on aspects related to the Enlightenment penis and reproductive system, I was given the impression by several established male academics that I had come close to doing something personally obscene in public. More recently it was intimated by a sophisticated conference-goer that both sex and the body were now old fashioned topics, that those in the know had moved on to fresher and more sumptuous academic game, and that female bodies were, anyhow, much more interesting than male. I began to wonder why there was so persistent a dodging of an obvious subject through substitution, humor, denial, or deferral. Why, I asked myself, was it so difficult to have scholarly discussion about the cultural history of men’s crotches?

These anecdotes—which I offer in good humor—contain interesting signs, it seems to me, of a nervous academic reluctance about the sexualized male body and its cultural symbolisms in history. The reasons for such uneasiness are complex, of course, but they are also part of our historical inheritance from the eighteenth century’s troubled musings about the sexualized connection of male body and mind. That male academics in particular are so reluctant to examine the history of the discursive site where the symbolic phallus tends to be preferred over their penises is perhaps not so surprising. But these hesitations are the result of historical legacies, and if there is a secondary purpose to this book it is to throw open the larger question of how the Enlightenment dislocation of the biological yard from the cultural phallus-as-commodity haunts individual male experience even today, although it would take another book to explore this historical continuity.

Things have changed a great deal since these personal experiences in the mid and later 1990s, as the many notes to this book will suggest. The resistance evident in the anecdotes above has given way to more candid inquiry, especially with the advent of Enlightenment “male studies” which has corrected and replaced many anachronisms and misreadings of the eighteenth-century male. In this new climate, my argument that the period witnessed the advent of a new Priapus of the literary marketplace may raise fewer eyebrows, and my claim that there is a new commercial traffic in creativity-genitalia imagery—or what my book calls “the yard of wit”—may seem less perverse than it did five or ten years ago.

We are the inheritors of these historical developments, but it seems to me that we are still in the early stages of recovering the variety of sexualized tropes, rhetorical gestures, and cultural narratives which informed part of a collective literary self-fashioning and an emergent literary consumerism, not to mention a revised symbolism of the male body. This book documents an important part of this history.