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
