the careful attentions of the young lady in Rochester’s “A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover”:
Thy nobler part, which but to name
In our sex would be counted shame,
By Age’s frozen grasp possessed,
From his ice shall be released,
And, soothed by my reviving hand,
In former warmth and vigour stand.70
These kinds of examples, both pornographic and non-pornographic, serve to remind us that penises were often represented as meaningful in relation to contexts of male life; that stiffened or slack yards often reflected the varieties of male experience in time rather than parts to be measured or indexed against an emblematized phallic standard which was totemically separate from the individual male body and will, but still applicable to one’s stature or value within the cultural subset of maleness.71 And it is worth noting that conditions in which there was difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection were not always or exclusively the object of satire or contempt. If one desired an erection, it was of course agreeable to be able to have one; if one could not, or if one depended on idiosyncratic erotic aids, this culture afforded not a single but a double symbolic register.
These two very different ways of imagining the relationship of the soft penis to the erection suggest a semiotic tug-of-war in which the yard could have meaning either as it was defined by the life-situation of the male, or as it defined maleness itself. Unlike the late twentieth-and twenty-first century, this earlier period had not yet narrowed its penis-symbolism exclusively to a disembodied Phallus; eighteenth-century pornography was not obsessed—as is the case with our current video porn—with the “money shot”;72 representations of the yard—however impolite as a topic of discussion—involved a variety of contexts whose symbolic possibilities were not uniformly the result of a phallus separated imaginatively from the penis.
Mind-Yard Connections: Direct and Inverse
Within such diversity, other kinds of oppositional structures are visible, particularly around the relationship of a man’s head and his genitals. Stiff pricks, of course—the bigger the better—could function unambiguously as signs of masculine capability, with turgid member a synecdoche for the power of male will, a marker of masculine stature, a guarantor of virility or masculinity itself. Ideas of privileged political power lurk even in some of the slang terms, such as “privy member.” This relatively uncomplicated equation can be described briefly.
The erection served variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful will and assertiveness of the male brain or of the masculine character. The mind’s ability to raise the yard was a token of the man’s knowledge of and power over a material world of others, as is reflected in the sexual connotations of the phrase “To Know.” Johnson’s dictionary-gloss is coy—“6. To converse with another sex”—but his biblical example—“And Adam knew Eve his wife”—makes plain the associations of mind, erection, knowledge, and copulatory power-over. As a mark of stature in the gender hierarchy, the metaphor was certainly used before 1650, as in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) in which the jealous Kitely bemoans his lack of psychological strength as “want[ing] the mindes erection.”73 At mid-century Hobbes would describe the human “Desire, to know why, and how” or “CURIOSITY” as “a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall pleasure.”74 If Hobbes’s conceit imagined the figuratively endless phallic pleasures of mental procreation, at century’s end John Dennis would rely on the metaphorical structure for an exaggerated compliment to Dryden:
Since I came to this place I have taken up my Pen several times in order to write to you, but have constantly at the very Beginning found myself Damp’d and Disabled; upon which I have been apt to believe that extraordinary Esteem may sometimes make the Mind as Impotent as Violent Love does the Body…. I have heard of more than one lusty Gallant, who, tho he could at any time with Readiness and Vigour possess the Woman whom he lov’d but moderately, yet when he has been about to give his darling Mistriss, whom he has vehemently and long desir’d, the first last Proof of his Passion, has found on a sudden that his Body has Jaded and Grown resty under his Soul, and gone backward the faster, the more he has spurr’d it forward. Esteem has wrought a like effect upon my Mind.75
In this flourish, Dennis’s pretense that his phallic mind has been overcome by his esteem is transparent flattery whose own wit serves as a sign of his potent yard-brain.
Laurence Sterne would later offer his own idiosyncratic concoction for the connection of yard-brain to knowing and knowledge, reminding his reader that “it so happens and ever must, says Prignitz, that the excellency of the nose is in a direct arithmetical proportion to the excellency of the wearer’s fancy” (3: 38, 173–74). In so equating the capacity of heated imagination and euphemistic nose, Tristram announces one of the primary structures of the novel in which the mental and creative abilities of the male characters—Walter, Toby, Tristram himself—are framed by the copulatory and reproductive strengths of the yard, which the mischievous Sterne invites the reader to imagine at every conceivable moment. Thus, two chapters later:
The gift of ratiocination and making syllogisms,—I mean in man,—for in superior classes of beings, such as angels and spirits,—’tis all done, may it please your worships, as they tell me, by INTUITION;—and beings inferior, as your worships all know,—syllogize by their noses. (3: 40, 177)
In this comic synthesis, the nose-penis is mental capacity (notwithstanding the phallic incompetence of the Shandy males), and Sterne is unable to resist tweaking the nose of the great Locke, whose chapter on reason (Essay Concerning Human Understanding Bk. 4, Ch. 17, Sect. 18) is ludicrously reduced to a measure by cocks:
The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us,—or the great and principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the intervention of a third; (called the medius terminus) just as a man, as Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two men’s nine-pin-alleys to be of the same length. (3: 40, 177)76
If rampant yard could signify the power of male “knowing,” it could also be figured as a sublime object of desire itself—the “pride of nature, and its richest master-piece,” according to Cleland’s Fanny Hill (46)—which promised other forms of knowledge and pleasure to those who subjected themselves to its power. Thus, in a translation of Nicolas Chorier’s pornographic Satyra Sotadica (1659 or 1660), the mother of the just-married and now-deflowered fifteen year-old Octavia solemnly lectures her daughter on the virtues brought by the enormous member of “thy dear Philander”: “thou art now born to a new Life…. Thy Wit and Understanding will clear up with thy Enjoyments, for that very Engine that opens our Bodies, will do the same to our Minds.”77 This promised “knowing,” however, is about female acquiescence to a symbolic male authority which resides in the exaggerated phallus. The yard, as Fanny Hill recognizes, is not simply a “label of manhood” (165) but, in its hardened glory, can be “an object of terror and delight” (73), “the king member” (110), or the “scepter-member, which commands us all” (183). In this direct equation of erect penis and masculine character the stiffened tarse becomes on one occasion nothing less than a “plenipotentiary instrument” (113). The phallus has become the man, a genital envoy invested with the full power and authority of the male, with its/his ability to “know” women or to elicit a sublime curiosity in them signs of the man’s will and power over bodies, language, and desire itself.
As Cleland’s metaphors suggest, the brain-phallus
