The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
of self as commodity (yard = maleness). This fracture is symptomatic of later developments (such as Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis) in which the symbolic freight of the phallus-as-commodity overwhelms the historical record of men and their bodies.
Male Brain-Male Genitalia Interrelationships: Stones and Seed
Prior to the seventeenth century, the yard, stones, and seed were an important adjunct of masculinity, but not necessarily the most important signs of maleness. Male organs of generation were simply one of a variety of social markers acting as a subset of male privilege as citizen, father, patriarchal agent, or legal entity—bodily signs, in other words, which, along with other attributes (lineage in particular), entitled the owner to a position somewhere on a gendered socio-political hierarchy but did not by themselves constitute some essentialized male identity anchored ontologically to biological sex. I need not rehearse the arguments provided by Sander L. Gilman and Thomas Laqueur which trace the cultural manifestations of male and female sexuality within a one-sex, one-flesh corporeal model before the eighteenth century.5 Suffice it to say that before seventeenth-century physiology precipitated a paradigmatic shift from a hierarchical model of biological sex (in which female genitalia were an inverted, colder, less perfect version of male genitalia) to one based on essential biological difference (of sexual organs, nervous systems, skeletons), the privy parts of men served variously as symbolic tokens of a culturally construed masculinity and therefore of a superior position on the scale of being. But it would not be until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a biological notion of male sexuality was widely imagined as constitutive of masculine psychological reality, and that the male reproductive system would become one of the primary sites of an essentialized maleness, with the yard as the key symbol of that essence.
This is not to suggest that classical medicine and early cultural constructions of the significance of male genitalia did not make important links to masculinity; the testes, yard, and seed were obviously tied to matters of gender before 1650, and invested with cultural symbolism which would be inherited by Pope’s culture, although modified by a newer physiological symbolism which would replace the older equations. One way to assess the nature of this transmission is to ask what it was that mainstream Enlightenment commentaries found most distinctive about the representational qualities in classical medical theories and older social values. What, in other words, struck the moderns as typical in the older symbolism, and how did they both identify with and differentiate themselves from the figurations of bygone traditions?
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century “high” medical treatises and “low” popular sexologies are particularly revealing in this regard, nearly always glancing back at the ways an older symbolism converted biology into culture.6 A typical example from the medical literature is Regnier De Graaf’s Tractatus De Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus (1668), the longest medical treatise on male genitalia of the period, frequently cited by subsequent medical writers, and having the distinction of being perhaps the most significant compendium of received medical beliefs about the male organs of generation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a more comprehensive manner than most, De Graaf’s 160–page treatise included retrospective anthropological nods to older classical theories as well as careful references to all of the significant medical theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Introducing the genital parts outside the cavity of the abdomen, De Graaf begins with “the testes, i.e., ‘witnesses,’ either because they provide evidence of virility, in as much as from them we recognize a man capable of generating offspring, or because, among the Romans, no one was allowed to make a will unless he had witnesses and these were of the male sex.”8 De Graaf’s contemporaries (and the eighteenth-century physiologists to follow) would repeat the testes-as-virility formula, of course, and a rhetoric of “witnessing” would be repeated with few variations by “high” and “low” treatises alike. But his etymological precision is also a means of differentiating the symbolic value which the possession of testicles had earlier signified from the modernness of his own analysis, which I shall consider more fully below. What Enlightenment writers most noticed about the early formulations of masculinity and testicles was the symbolic emphasis placed on them as signs of acceptable oath-taking, the right to bear witness, and reliable testimony. The “testes” are so called, Thomas Gibson wrote in The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1682), “either because they testifie one to be a man, or because amongst the Romans none was admitted to bear witness but he that had them.”9 The twentieth edition of Venette’s Conjugal Love or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed Considered (1750) reflected that “it was not allowable formerly, in the courts of justice, at Rome, for any man to bear witness against another, except his testicles were entire.”10 And Voltaire would point to another ancient meaning, to be found in the Old Testament, of touching another man’s testicles as a gesture of promise-making: “It was a mark of respect, a symbol of fidelity, as formerly our feudal lords put their hands between those [thighs] of their paramount lords.”11
This thread of anthropological reportage characterizes Enlightenment understanding of earlier cultural constructions of the stones as biological signs of reproductive ability but also of a certain kind of homosocial privilege involving legal capacity or gestures of fidelity. The most colorful and perversely allegorized variation of these older conceptualizations comes in John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (6th ed., 1708), which tells of “one Combalus” who castrated himself:
because he perceiving himself to be affected by Stratonice, the Wife of the King of Assyria, who he was to attend upon in some Progress she made, after he had secretly Castrated himself, Sealed up his Testicles in a Box, and deliver’d it unto the King, to be kept as some Jewels of value enclos’d; and afterwards when he was suspected of Incontinency with the Queen, he was acquitted of the Accusation, by that pledge of Fidelity he left in the Custody of the King, when the Box came to be open’d.12
Swearing on the testicles as a gesture or “witness” of fidelity is here carried to a preposterous narrative pitch, but Marten’s anecdotal sensationalism is nevertheless consistent with the examples above, and marks one of the typical narrative tactics by which Enlightenment writers would distinguish an older symbolism associated with male genitalia. When we examine the underlying codes of seventeenth and eighteenth-century commentary below, we will see that the testes no longer have a dominant sense of male legal status but rather are situated among a hierarchy of bodily organs whose closest relative is the brain. And the testicles-brain homology, as one might expect, represents a significant shift in symbolic emphasis, with important implications for how masculinity and male identity would be figured.
A similar retrospective is to be found in introductions to the yard, in which the moderns briefly recount the mythical, military, or racial symbolism most prominent in earlier constructions. Although the classical deity Priapus is not a significant presence in seventeenth and eighteenth-century uses of mythology, it is this older ithyphallic god of fertility which Enlightenment treatises associate with the emphasis of a classical symbolism.13 Montaigne, one of Pope’s favorite writers, reminded the reader in his essay “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” that the ancients commonly deified the erect penis:
The Aegyptian dames in their Bacchanalian feasts wore a wooden one about their necks, exquisitely fashioned, as huge and heavy as every one could conveniently beare…. The greatest and wisest matrons of Rome were honoured for offring flowers and garlands to God Priapus. And when their Virgins were married, they (during the nuptials) were made to sit upon their privities.14
John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum (1709) would similarly recall that “The Ancients ranked the Yard of Man among the number of their Gods,”15 as would Voltaire: “The Egyptians were so far from attaching any depravity to what we dare neither uncover nor name that they carried in procession a large image, named phallum, of the virile member, to thank the gods for their goodness in making this member serve for the propagation of mankind.”16 De Graaf would isolate the same symbolism in his characterization of an earlier cultural construction of the penis, but with the addition of military and racial contexts:
How much esteem and dignity the male member enjoyed among