went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling.” But at times his almost autoerotic textual recapitulations are dramatically extended, as they are with “Louisa” (actually Anne Lewis), “a handsome actress of Covent Garden Theatre”:
Proud of my godlike vigour, I soon resumed the noble game. I was in full glow of health. Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness, and my bounding blood beat quick and high alarms. A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance. She said it was what there was no just reason to be proud of. But I told her I could not help it. She said it was what we had in common with the beasts. I said no. For we had it highly improved by the pleasures of sentiment. I asked her what she thought enough. She gently chid me for asking such questions, but said two times.84
What is interesting here is the curious logic of the Boswellian measure. For Louisa, five times “lost in supreme rapture” makes Boswell a prodigy. For his own part (having wisely abstained from alcohol), Boswell’s “godlike vigour” makes him “somewhat proud of my performance.” And yet, ludicrously, he will set the bench-mark for “extraordinary” phallic accomplishment at ten orgasms.85 In this exaggerated priapic grid, size and number define the man, whose redoubtable tarse moves him upward on the scale of manliness from the beastly to the godlike with each additional encounter. Boswell’s five times is not extraordinary in this hierarchy, he claims, even if it is for Louisa, whose measure of the prodigious is to be tupped more than twice. Boswell situates his own performance against the idealized, always-ready priapic engine whose ten-fold capacity is more about the totemic erection than it is about the real penis. But these exaggerations also allow Boswell to attach his own considerable sexual appetite to the symbolic phallus, sign of male will, mental and physical strength, or desirability of character. Boswell’s godlike vigor would prove shortlived, however; days later came the “sorrow” of “Signor Gonorrhoea” (49, January 1763), and with it the entry of the other representational mode I described in the last section.
If the erection functioned variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful intentionality, knowledge, or assertiveness of the masculine character, then within this logic the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded man predictably embodied a semiotic stamp of male failure ranging from literary satires to the more complex imperfect enjoyment traditions to personal lampoons. These negative contexts are well known and need no further elaboration here.86
Far more complex is the inverse relationship of male mind and groin in which the prodigious yard is a mark of idiocy, deformity, or compensation for the male who is in some sense deficient. The medical and sexological traditions are one vehicle for this structure. For instance, Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671): “Some men, but chiefly fools, have Yards so long that they are useless for generation” (22); Thomas Gibson’s The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1697): “But it is generally observed to be larger in short Men, and such as are not much given to Venery; also in those that have high and long Noses, and that are stupid and half witted” (160); John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1708): “And we observe here, that little Men, deform’d Men, and Block-heads, (those of little Wit) are better provided in those Parts, than large Men, and others” (367); commenting on Heliogabalus’s preference for soldiers with large members, Venette remarks that “he did not suspect at the same time that these long-penised people were the most befuddled and stupid of men.”87 Although De Graaf had dismissed some of these equations as silly (including the midwife’s knotting of the umbilical cord as a determinant of penis size [see 46]), the notion that fools were more likely to possess the over-sized privy member persisted as an alternate structure to the direct model. One of the most famous examples is Cleland’s “Good-natur’d Dick” (160), simple-minded owner of the biggest erection in Fanny Hill. Louisa, Fanny’s colleague, has “conceiv’d a strange longing to be satisfy’d, whether the general rule held good with regard to this changeling and how far nature had made him amends in her best bodily gifts, for her denial of the sublimer intellectual ones” (161). True to form, Nature has given the idiot a phallus “of so tremendous a size, that prepar’d as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure surpass’d our expectation, and astonish’d even me, who had not been us’d to trade in trifles.” The “enormous” breadth and “prodigious” length “complet[ed] the proof of his being a natural … since it was full manifest that he inherited, and largely too, the prerogative of majesty, which distinguishes that otherwise most unfortunate condition, and gives rise to the vulgar saying, ‘That a fool’s bauble is a lady’s play fellow’ ” (162). Linking the epic tool of simple Dick to a tumescent majesty void of thought, Cleland presents this yard as the mechanically aroused flesh of “the man machine” (163), the La Mettrian figure whose gargantuan yard functions not as sign of mental preeminence but as meaty object serving the erotic convenience of lusty Louisa.
Like Cleland’s novel, the arbor vitae tradition includes both direct and inverse relationships, the latter associated in particular with the boorish and ill-educated Irishman, whose prominently large “tree of life” is compensatory for his other deficiencies, social and intellectual. Thus, according to The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae (1732), “The height here in England rarely passes nine [inches] … whereas in Ireland it comes to far greater dimensions, is so good, that many of the natives entirely subsist upon it, and when transplanted, have been sometimes known to raise good houses with single plants of this sort” (5).88 Rochester’s “Signior Dildo” includes the same principle—“Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick / To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick” (11. 37–8)—as does Defoe’s Roxana: “for I had now five Children by him; the only Work (perhaps) that Fools are good for.”89
But inverse relationships went beyond the association of well-hung but stupid, short, long-nosed, deformed, or Irish men. Importantly, the man who was impotent or small-yarded or castrated could also be linked to an aspect of mental ability or creativity which was sometimes viewed as natural compensation for a phallic deficiency. S. A. D. Tissot’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (English trans. 1768) is one instance of the inverse mind-genitalia relationship in a literary context. Writing of the various deleterious effects brought on the body by excessive intellectual or creative application, Tissot observes that
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