The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
felt the parallels of his own deficient body to the castrato of Italian opera—symbol of both feminized sexual deficiency and of a commercial star-culture in the burgeoning world of consumerist leisure: “opera’s sexual symbols and … its sexual politics … particularly spoke to the dwarfish Pope of impaired genitals who saw, or was forced to see, himself reflected in its eunuchs and castrati.”31 Deutsch and Rousseau both recognize the powerful connections among Pope’s body, creativity and market forces, reading his literal and symbolic deformity in poems and letters as acts of controlled self-exposure, over-compensation, internalized self-hatred, or masculine self-possession. But to these eloquent readings of Pope’s body and culture I want to add that associations of his physical condition and creativity, especially later in his life, were used publicly by others to gain profit or fame in ways that suggest the newer model of masculinity as sexualized interiority. The head and groin of Alexander the Little, that is, served as an exemplary association of the male mind as sexualized body; and in turn, the public conjunction of his poetry and penis also represented the commercialization of the association itself, the commodification of the discourse equating male sexuality and creativity.
And indeed Pope’s head and groin were used variously by others for profit. In the summer of 1735 when Edmund Curll moved his printing shop to Rose Street in Covent Garden, his new shop sign was “Pope’s Head,” a sarcastic business gesture signaling the wily Curll’s commercial investment in his enemy, whose head represented a significant source of Curll’s profit. But the most famous example came in 1742, when Cibber’s published account of a sordid whorehouse visit was followed quickly by several engravings and other pamphlet satires. Cibber’s comic tribunal brought Pope’s penis into the public glare—as did rumors of his urinary stricture—throwing into relief the cultural linkage of male genitalia and male creativity as interrelated print-culture commodities. I can think of no author before Pope whose poetic stature, reputation, and accomplishment were publicly imaged as questions about his privy members, with public speculation about the actual condition of his yard. Having tried all his life, not always successfully, to control images of his physicality, the ailing Pope was now faced with the prospect that his public image as poet, as a man, would be contaminated and rent by a crude equation with his pego. In a literary-historical moment of unusual spectacularization, the literal and figurative cultural connections of male genitalia and male creativity were made clear, and publicly situated on the body of England’s best-known poet. More dramatically than other writers in the period 1650–1750, Pope is exemplary of the double commodification of the “manly” and the “literary” as yard.
Chapter 2
Masculinity as Male Genitalia
The underlying premises of this chapter can be summarized as follows: (1) there is an unprecedented proliferation of male genitalia as subject matter ca. 1650–1750; (2) discourses of the penis/phallus which emerged in this period reflect uncertainty about the relationship of soft penis and phallus as that connection represented a range of possibilities for defining maleness or some facet of masculine identity; and (3) the newer equations—many of which we have unknowingly inherited—linking the male brain and mind to the condition of male privy members often viewed the yard as the physiological or psychological essence of maleness even while they symbolically separated the yard from the bodies of real men. One of the larger goals of this chapter, then, is to historicize the cultural function of male genitalia in the Enlightenment, and to examine literary and non-literary usage which might reveal discursive paradigms and their uneven and sometimes contradictory deployment in representative texts and contexts. I will suggest that these developments reflect the early modern origins of our now habitual separation of literal and symbolic genitalia, of the mundane penis—hardly ever a focus outside urology or Viagra ads—from the obsessively metaphorized and over-determined Phallus.
A simple historical question: why is it that from roughly the second half of the seventeenth century the penis, whether limp or erect (less often the testicles and semen), emerges as a common trope and frequent subject in public discussion, despite the fact that such reference was considered impolite? There are, of course, countless references to male genitalia in the written and representational records of earlier periods in Western culture, but not since classical times had men’s sexual parts been so often the focus of public discourse.1 A cursory inventory of examples will provide initial substance for this claim. Consider, for instance, the gossip and the many poems on affairs of state which talk of Charles II’s wandering pintle; the libertine yard of Restoration stage rakes (e.g., from the opening scene of Wycherley’s The Country Wife the audience’s attention is captured by competing stories about Horner’s penis); the scores of imperfect enjoyment and premature ejaculation poems; talking penis poems such as Pope’s Sober Advice from Horace2 in which the personified penis speaks to its owner; works such as The Members to Their Soveraign (1726, supposedly by Matthew Prior), the anonymous but possibly Rochesterian “One Writing Against His Prick” (late seventeenth century), and Sade’s Juliette (1791), in which men talk to their personified yards; the many dildo stories, from Rochester’s well-known “Signior Dildo” (1673), to Samuel Butler’s lesser-known Dildoides (first published 1706), to the now almost forgotten The Cabinet of Love (1721) and Monsieur Thing’s Origin: Or, Seignior D—o’s Adventures in Britain (1722); the sublime phallus and the limp penises of pornography as they are offered up in Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49); the many bawdy poems like The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae: Or, The Tree of Life (1732), Teague-Root Display’d (1746), “The Geranium” (n.d., attributed to Richard Brinsley Sheridan), or James Perry’s Mimosa: Or, The Sensitive Plant (1779) which rely on botanical metaphors of the penis/phallus as plant or tree; the notorious impotence trials in France and England in which the condition of the husband’s genitals was the primary focus of crowded courtroom debate and widely read trial reports; nuanced literary associations of the problematic penis and artistry as in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–65); the sharp increase of medical literature about male reproductive organs and venereal disease, with an attendant rise in the quantity of anatomical illustrations. Can one make up a comparable list for any period of English history before 1650 in which attention to male genitalia is so prominent? What does such a proliferation tell us about the cultural status of male genitalia?
My claim about a proliferation of the penis-as-public-subject in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be substantiated in other ways as well. Consider the curious allusion to Pope’s penis and urinary tract which appeared in an eighty-four page pornographic narrative of 1741, comically entitled A Voyage to Lethe; By Capt. Samuel Cock….3 The anonymous Gulliverian voyage was one of a handful of extended geographical metaphors in the still emerging world of eighteenth century pornography which spoke of penises, vaginas, and copulation in a barely-disguised lingo of navigation and exploration.4 When Captain Cock and his crew reach their destination, a palace (the willingly penetrated vagina), female hostess Voluptuaria provides them a guided tour. Just before she euphemistically compares the lengths and abilities of the yards of well-known men in London (Captain Cock’s being the most impressive), Voluptuaria admits to a desire for a visit from the famous poet, Alexander Pope: “I confess likewise I have been very ambitious of a Visit from the great Poet of Twickenham, but I must after all approve his Wisdom in despising my Palace, since it would be Madness in him to attempt a Voyage hither in the leaky Condition his Cockboat is in” (30).
This curious reference to Pope raises several questions: Why should the condition of Pope’s urinary tract come up as a subject in pornography in 1741? Would a public reference such as this have been typical or even possible to find a hundred and fifty or two hundred years earlier? And what, finally, are the latent cultural attitudes implied in the juxtaposition of male poet and his ailing yard? One answer is that Pope’s treatment at the hands of Dr. Cheselden in August 1740 for a strangury (a urethral stricture characterized by slow and painful emission of urine) had become public knowledge and was being comically exploited by an author who insinuated, in the interests of his phallic theme, that Pope’s “leaky … Cockboat” was the result of an earlier sexual encounter leading to an unfortunate gonorrhea. A crude tabloid raciness, in other words, targeting famous people in the marketplace