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
