coupled with a variety of libidinal analogies and sexual tropes, thus encouraging an epicoene banter between males when they talked about their authorship or writing. For young Pope, these discursive repertories must have provided some compensation for his increasingly doubtful heterosexual accomplishments, but they also reinforced the connection of his poetry to his masculinity, sexual competence, and relative position in a male hierarchy. Homosociality, sex, and the poetical character converged again and again in Pope’s early exchanges about his own poetic practice, as they do in this example, providing us an important glimpse into the historical conjunction of male creativity and masculinity. But while the status of young Alexander’s auspicious wit was subject to the power dynamics of rank and homosocial connections, his stature as a male would also be heightened by an impressive literary debut whose genius was metaphorized as a type of manliness or a potent form of sexual energy. My point about this kind of evidence is that Pope’s early career especially reflects an older model of masculinity as reputation and rank, and that his exchanges with other men underscore the importance of homosocial contexts within which a sexualized male creativity was fashioned and articulated.
Finally, as exemplary of sexualized male creativity, Pope’s body was turned into a commodity, an item for sale and also a symbolic imaging of his creativity. Although we are more accustomed, perhaps, to thinking of this gifted hunchback as sadly unique or unfortunately deformed, in fact Pope’s dwarfed body and literary fame became emblems of the new marketplace of letters. Helen Deutsch has shrewdly described the complex interface of Pope’s body and his authorial power, and of the textual struggle to control representations of the relationship of his deformity and poetry. Describing Pope’s references to his own deformed body as a kind of pre-emptive strike against a public pruriently keen about the connections between physical deformity and human character, Deutsch reminds us that “the market for Pope’s poetry was inseparable from a thriving market for images of the poet. Portraying Pope was something of a national pastime.” In a capitalist market where physical images of Pope’s head and ideas of his body were of interest to consumers, the poet waged “war with a contemporary reading (and lampooning) public … for the power of self-representation,” and he did so not by trying “to write himself out of his body, rather he silences his audience by making his body visible.”30 G. S. Rousseau has more recently argued how Pope must have painfully felt the parallels of his own deficient body to the castrato of Italian opera—symbol of both feminized sexual deficiency and of a commercial star-culture in the burgeoning world of consumerist leisure: “opera’s sexual symbols and … its sexual politics … particularly spoke to the dwarfish Pope of impaired genitals who saw, or was forced to see, himself reflected in its eunuchs and castrati.”31 Deutsch and Rousseau both recognize the powerful connections among Pope’s body, creativity and market forces, reading his literal and symbolic deformity in poems and letters as acts of controlled self-exposure, over-compensation, internalized self-hatred, or masculine self-possession. But to these eloquent readings of Pope’s body and culture I want to add that associations of his physical condition and creativity, especially later in his life, were used publicly by others to gain profit or fame in ways that suggest the newer model of masculinity as sexualized interiority. The head and groin of Alexander the Little, that is, served as an exemplary association of the male mind as sexualized body; and in turn, the public conjunction of his poetry and penis also represented the commercialization of the association itself, the commodification of the discourse equating male sexuality and creativity.
And indeed Pope’s head and groin were used variously by others for profit. In the summer of 1735 when Edmund Curll moved his printing shop to Rose Street in Covent Garden, his new shop sign was “Pope’s Head,” a sarcastic business gesture signaling the wily Curll’s commercial investment in his enemy, whose head represented a significant source of Curll’s profit. But the most famous example came in 1742, when Cibber’s published account of a sordid whorehouse visit was followed quickly by several engravings and other pamphlet satires. Cibber’s comic tribunal brought Pope’s penis into the public glare—as did rumors of his urinary stricture—throwing into relief the cultural linkage of male genitalia and male creativity as interrelated print-culture commodities. I can think of no author before Pope whose poetic stature, reputation, and accomplishment were publicly imaged as questions about his privy members, with public speculation about the actual condition of his yard. Having tried all his life, not always successfully, to control images of his physicality, the ailing Pope was now faced with the prospect that his public image as poet, as a man, would be contaminated and rent by a crude equation with his pego. In a literary-historical moment of unusual spectacularization, the literal and figurative cultural connections of male genitalia and male creativity were made clear, and publicly situated on the body of England’s best-known poet. More dramatically than other writers in the period 1650–1750, Pope is exemplary of the double commodification of the “manly” and the “literary” as yard.
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
