population at large? Were the cultural associations and symbols for this period different from earlier cultural systems? In what specific ways were male genitalia linked to the brain and ideas of masculinity? Why is there such a remarkable increase in public references to male genitalia in this period, especially to the penis? Is there an underlying logic or single structure to this period’s literal and symbolic use of male genitalia?
That the very seat of male thought or identity could be shaped by a man’s physical condition or sexual organs is arguably one of the most significant results of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical and non-medical developments, not least because it helps to explain the early formation of the concept of an essentialized male consciousness as sexually defined—the model inherited by modern western culture. The refashioned links between male brain/mind and body were part of the newer symbolic terrain within which one might have internalized one’s sense of identity as a man or imagined such an interior identity in other men, and these Enlightenment equations reflect a variety of reorganizations of the concept of masculinity as a biological and social entity. However, male mind/male genitalia associations were no simple matter. Newer notions of masculinity-as-sexualized-embodiment were characterized by ambiguity and differential symbolizing, especially when it came to the penis, or, what the period also called the yard, the privy member, tarse, pintle, or pego. Medical, pornographic, legal, and other non-literary discourses tell a similar story, that there was a perceived instability of male subjectivity as it might be grounded by reference to “the yard.” The penis-mind connection was especially vexed, being understood as either a direct or an inverse relationship, with mental capacity either the result of genital capacity or of genital deficiency. Even physiological accounts of the causes of erections made connections of a sexualized male body and masculine identity a troublesome issue, with tumescence often the result of imaginative caprice or mechanical/biological triggers rather than the will. The most striking development was that the yard was often viewed as a separate symbolic commodity even while attached to real men. The historical record suggests that the Enlightenment yard was often a problematic emblem of male identity because its function could be related either to a collective uneasiness about mind-body relationships or to the psychological complexities of individual male will and the instability of the conditions of desiring.
If newer notions of masculine identity and sexualized male bodies were important in the cultural landscape affecting literary discourses, there was another historical development whose impact was monumental, forever altering the very idea of the “literary.” I mean the commodification of literature which characterizes the history of print culture for this period—that well-known gradual shifting from older forms of male patronage to a literary marketplace in which writers and their books were being newly defined as consumer products with a potential economic value. In this newer capitalist milieu the dignity of male authorship and the enigmatic nature of the imaginative act would be sorely tested and modified, subject increasingly to a commercialized evaluation which affected the ways in which the poetical character was understood and represented. The fascinating history of the relationship between notions of the author as materially transcendent creator-genius and author as cultural commodity whose imagination was for sale has received a variety of excellent analyses.23 The explanations are now familiar ones: with the professionalization of imaginative writing from the late seventeenth century, the image of the independent author-gentleman was now also reducible to crass commercial object. The poetical character was for sale, too, victim of a meteoric literary capitalism whose effects are still evident in notions of aesthetic value today. Different explanations have been offered for how various kinds of writers responded to the commodification of their own works and status as authors, but a common thread of argument is that male writers combatted their entry into the marketplace of letters by differentiating their own creative genius from the hirelings, hacks, and literary prostitutes who depended on a paying public. However, little work has been done on the connections of literary commodification and masculinity or male bodies. While important studies have been published on the interrelationship of female authorship, female bodies, female sexuality and literary commodification, there exists no comparable body of scholarship for the men who were affected by the new economy of letters.
The important exception is Linda Zionkowski’s Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784,24 an enormously helpful account of the shift from late seventeenth-century notions of the male poet as the materially aloof or self-indulgent aristocrat to mid-and later eighteenth-century models of the poet as the professionally-engaged author in the marketplace. What particularly distinguishes her book are carefully reasoned accounts of how changing concepts of the poet were also linked to maleness and rank:
the period saw the emergence of a new “stereotype of manliness” that took as its reference point the market rather than the court, the bourgeois or economic man rather than the gentleman or aristocrat…. whether these poets viewed themselves as professionals engaged in commercial literary culture or vehemently rejected that identification, their verse constituted an important arena for conflicting definitions of masculinity—definitions that, in turn, legitimized particular forms of literary production and certain configurations of literary careers. (5)
In eloquent chapters about Rochester, Oldham, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson, Zionkowski convincingly shows “the extent to which a change in idealizations of manhood accompanied the shift toward the market in literature” (98), so that by mid-century writers had begun “to associate masculinity and cultural power with commercial success, while characterizing poets’ detachment from the market [her prime example is Gray] as an infantile, or effeminate, dependence upon others” (132). By the time we get to Samuel Johnson, she argues, “the gentleman writing from idleness and leisure inhabits a category separate from and inferior to that of the professional man of letters, who lives upon his talents” (182). Her book also examines some aspects of how these important transitions were accompanied by sexual and eroticized tropes about the male poet’s relationship to his readers or an emergent capitalist marketplace of letters.
My interests are similar to Zionkowski’s, but our emphasis and angle of perspective are very different. I am much more interested in how the sexualized male body and issues of masculinity-as-embodiment are related to redefined notions of the literary and of male creativity. Indeed, I want to suggest that there is an important historical convergence, a double commodification of literature and of masculinity as the sexualized male body. My book will argue that the perceived conjunction of the “literary” and the “manly” was being refashioned at a time when masculinity and literary labor were both becoming commodities—as ideas, discourses, processes. As male minds, brains, characters—literary or otherwise—came to be associated more intensely with the male reproductive system, men found themselves the object of a synecdochic gesture in which they were reduced to and commodified as their genitalia, most often “the yard.” At the same time, idealized notions of male authors and their books were being reduced and commodified as economic items in a literary marketplace where male creativity in turn could also be represented as genitalia in a kind of cultural shorthand. Both the “literary” and the “manly” circulated in a newer economy where they were being given a revised cultural capital as things. The two kinds of commodification are clearly homologous and related in the sense that male genitalia became the essentialized commodity—literal and symbolic—of both masculinity and male creativity.
Heads and Groins
These changing cultural equations had important implications for discourses of male wit and literary production, especially for the traditional creativity/procreativity tropes which so dominate the history of metaphors for mental invention. The parts and organs of the human body have always been objects of metaphorization, reflecting not only specific historical conceptualizations of the physiological interrelatedness of body systems, but also culturally specific ideas about religious, social, political, or gender hierarchies.25 But it was the figurative conjunction of heads and groins which were most congenial to ideas of literary activity. Head-groin associations had been around since classical times, but unlike other tropes for creativity, the connections of these two highly symbolic body parts called
