or contain a sexual element. Such was the case with the head and brain of Enlightenment male writers, whose creativity—both as an internal mental event, and as a textual product increasingly located in a public print culture—was often imagined and written about as though it were akin to a sexual or reproductive act, something that might be explained with reference to genitalia or one of several theories of generation. Heads and groins, that is, became a heavily freighted cultural imagery for notions about male creativity and sexuality, and Chapter 3 examines their rhetorical traffic.
A pre-Enlightenment history of procreative motifs associated with mental labor and creative invention is easy enough to find, well known to scholars, and I need not itemize its most famous examples here. As is well known, from classical times the male’s fertile intellect or imagination had been likened to the fecund female, whose pregnant womb became a metaphor for male creativity. But while the conjunction of the sexually-procreative and mentally-creative is hardly new, there is in the Enlightenment a unique reconfiguration of these traditional discourses which depended on newer embryological debates (especially ovist versus animalculist preformationism, and preformationism versus epigeneticism) and on the newer conceptual associations of male brain and sexualized male body. That is, the metaphors of embodiment used to characterize creative acts no longer relied so exclusively on hackneyed classical myth or quaint poeticisms but now grounded themselves in revised physiological assumptions which were quickly entering the wider domain of public thought and stereotypes. The best known of these analogies—the idea of pregnant male poets and their brain-wombs (with the book or work of art as child)—is prominent in self-conscious literary commentaries written by men during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but has received only limited attention despite the rich anthropological evidence it includes.26 Classical creativity/procreativity tropes had encouraged the connection of male brains and female groins, thereby sexualizing the male creative principle as both a heterosexual idea and a transvestite embodiment. The transgendered dramatization of male wit as pregnant woman or eroticized female Muse included a misogynistic gesture, certainly, in which female as fleshy materiality, passive reproductive vessel, or prostitute could reflect the new literary commercialism. But these transvestite renderings enabled other discourses about the traffic in male creativity, especially in erotically-charged, epicoene exchanges between men when they discussed the nature or status of literary endeavors.27 Part of an older rhetoric of male friendship, the presentation of self as a sexy or fecund female was a convenient vehicle for reflecting one’s homosocial status among friends or male competitors where one’s value as a writer could be voiced as a type of female objectification or passive sexuality; in this sense, male author as reproductive female Muse served as a marker of one’s masculinity. The heterosexual aspect of the trope—male poet’s erotic relationship with his female Muse—also called attention to the conjunction of the male body and creativity by making a successful imaginative outcome dependent on male sexual ability. These head-groin associations would be much affected by the historical transformations I sketched above, particularly when it came to representations of the economic value of literary “labor.”
More specifically, the first two sections of Chapter 3 examine the cultural underpinnings which might explain why the inner site of male creativity was so frequently imagined as a uterus, and why the male author’s entrance into, and public status within, the republic of letters was so often metaphorized as a young lady’s precarious position in a male sexual economy. Indeed, reproductive tropes—whether of pregnant male brains, the birth of the child-book, the begetting and birthing of the male writer himself—are so common that their presence has been largely taken for granted. Similarly, male self-projection as female—whether as woman about to give birth, eroticized Muse, chaste or prostituted young country lass—is so frequent and casual a rhetorical gesture in the period as to seem trite and without significance, except perhaps as evidence of a thoughtless male appropriation of matters female, or worse, of a systemic misogyny. I will be arguing instead that the implications of these well-known tropes and analogies have much to tell us about the deep-level constructions of male creativity as cultural subject within a newly-commodified world of letters, as well as about the competitive structure of male literary communities. These two sections will offer a variety of answers to a difficult question: why is the female Other in her reproductive and erotic capacities so often the metaphorical terrain onto which an entire male literary culture would map a symbolic understanding of itself? As we will see, these related metaphors allowed male writers to articulate a positive identity about themselves, their art, and their relationship to literary traditions and readers. But in a rapidly expanding print culture in which devaluation of various kinds was frequently decried, these metapoetic narratives were also used to sustain and dramatize a hierarchy among male writers, providing familiar allegorizations and rhetorical codes by which a logic of inclusion and exclusion would prevail. I will argue that tropes of male brain-wombs and female Muses allowed several generations of writers to respond to changed perceptions of the value and status of their literary labor.
The companion trope—the male mind as somehow about male reproductive parts—is so much a part of our own gender slang and stereotypes about men today (“dickhead,” “he’s got balls,” to take two examples) that one might assume the Enlightenment conjunction has been well studied. And yet, curiously, it has so far not engaged serious or sustained scholarly attention despite the fact that cultural connections of male imagination, wit, fancy, the poetical character and the genitals—especially the penis—constituted one of the most important revised and expanded discourses on male creativity as it was conceptualized in the period. Classical images associating mental creation with male genitalia are outnumbered by brain-womb/Muses before the seventeenth century, but the newer physiological models explaining male mind/body interrelationships would dramatically open up the ways the poetical character would be seen as an aspect of male embodiment. The last three sections of Chapter 3 are about the literal and figurative uses of male genitalia to characterize something about the male imagination, a male writer’s public status, or his response to his own commodification in a newer, capitalist print-culture. Self-conscious narratives about the poetical character were frequently invested with yard-wit equations or with reference to the stones or seed and, not surprisingly, these links were part of the larger set of cultural formations and reflective of its ambiguities. The creative imagination as yard could take several forms: wit could be metaphorized variously as getting it up, as coitus, masturbation, ejaculation; the male poet’s head might be imaged as a displaced privy member; the written work could be figured as male genitalia, something subject to expurgation which in turn was figured as a castration; pens and quills could be hard or soft yards spilling ink, semen, or urine; occasionally, the underlying subject of male writing itself was represented as a non-procreative phallus. Complex exchange principles sometimes prevailed in which yards had to be traded, lost, or denied for male wit to appear at all. Male writing might be linked to a heterosexual copulatory power or an apparently homoerotic exchange. In some instances, poet-yard equations provided an idealized mythos of an independent creative power under the sign not of Apollo and the Muses but of Priapus or some heightened epicoene begetting. In others, poet-yard tropes might circulate within the larger literary community as a kind of rhetorical prop or identifying shorthand which could be purloined maliciously or used combatively to enter the lists in which hierarchy, reputations, and collective standards among male writers might be fashioned and fought over. Tropes of poet-as-pintle or wit-as-yard were also used to figure an autonomous, self-generating male creativity which sometimes replaced heterosexual myths of the creative act with an exclusive homosocial drama which included ideas of autogenesis, autoeroticism, or male-male begetting. And of course male genitalia were used literally or figuratively in disputes between literary antagonists in the public realm, providing an accessible vehicle for sometimes preposterous comedy or vicious humiliation, as for instance in Colley Cibber’s whorehouse anecdote which so deeply embarrassed Pope in the early 1740s. Predictably, the record of literary usage is varied and often contradictory, reflecting the differential equations and oppositions of non-literary discourses.
Heads and groins: associations of
