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
