The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
is linked to many other portrayals of the penis as symbolic of the vagaries of male desire and circumstance, in which possibilities of tumescence intersect crudely with economic opportunism, hygiene, or a limited staying-power: “Dildo has nose, but cannot Smell, / No Stench can his great Courage quell: / At sight of Plaisters hee’l not fail, / Nor faintly ask what do you Ail?” “Which of us able to Prevent is / His Girle from Lying with his Prentice, / Unlesse we other means Provide / For Nature to be satisfy’d? / And what more Proper, than this Engine, / Which wou’d outdo ’em, shou’d three men Joyne” (1–2, 6). Butler’s comical poem reaches a significant balancing of representational possibilities: although the second of the orators convinces the crowd of citizens to burn the dildoes lest “Idolatry … fill the Land, / And all True Pricks forget to Stand” (7), the first orator offers practical arguments in favor of dildoes, which are not bothered by health, smell, money, age, beauty, or desire in the ordinary ways that real yards are. Ultimately the poem chooses the real over the artificial phallus, but not before it has demonstrated the problematic relationship of soft and stiff yards.
Homosocial contexts, likewise, also hosted the juxtaposition of these two modes, as in a letter from the thirty-seven year-old Pope, who writes to thank Fortescue for “the fine Scollops” he has sent: “Those you favord me with are very safe arrived & have done me no little credit with the Dutchess of Hamilton. Alas! with any Female they will do me little credit, if I eat them myself: I have no way so good to please ’em, as by presenting ’em with any thing rather than with my self.” In this example, the meaning and functioning of the yard are linked politely to psychosexual matters of acceptance, which here circulates maddeningly just out of Pope’s reach; he is permitted to be the generous giver of the aphrodisiac scallops, but any presentation of his own stimulated yard will be ignored or shunned, the cursed result of his misshapen body. And yet in the very next paragraph Pope compensates for this rejection, juxtaposing a homosocial fantasy of his own phallic competence and sway: “Dr. Arbuthnot is highly mindful of you. He has (with my Consent) put a Joke upon Gay & me, out of pure disposition to give him joy & gladness. Gay is made to believe that I had a Clap, of which I fancy you’l hear his Sentiments in that ludicrous way, which God has given him to excell all others in” (Corr. 2: 290, 18 March 1724/5). As is often the case in examples from this period, the two modes of penis/phallus relationship accompany one another, offering very different and alternating possibilities of how a man might be defined or understood in relation to his yard.
John Armstrong’s The Oeconomy of Love (1736) is a perfect example of a non-pornographic treatise in which “the tumid Wonder”68 represents not a static emblem of symbolic power, but the variable phases of maleness from sexual maturation and the growth of pubic hair, to the teenager’s first wet dreams and intercourse, to the dangers of masturbation, and finally to the sexual frustrations of old age, impotence, and the attempt by “Flagellation, and the rage of Blows, / To rouse the Venus loitering in his Veins!” (54, 11. 528–9)—or, in a last desperate attempt to stimulate an erection, the use of aphrodisiacs such as “Orchis,” “Satyrion” (a member of the orchid family), “Eryngo” (candied sea holly), “Cantharides” (Spanish flies) (55, 11. 550–5). The figure of the aged male has received little study for this period, except for passing reference to satirical versions of the impotent or cuckolded fumbler. And yet the story is a more complex one, as Armstrong’s treatment suggests, and the temporal realities of the yard included sometimes moving and nostalgic accounts of desires which have outlived the aging body’s ability, as in Robert Herrick’s “To His Mistresses”:
Old I am, and cannot do
That I was accustomed to.
Bring your magics, spells, and charms,
To enflesh my thighs and arms;
Is there no way to beget
In my limbs their former heat?
Aeson had, as poets feign,
Baths that made him young again:
Find that medicine, if you can,
For your dry, decrepit man
Who would fain his strength renew,
Were it but to pleasure you.69
Or, the careful attentions of the young lady in Rochester’s “A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover”:
Thy nobler part, which but to name
In our sex would be counted shame,
By Age’s frozen grasp possessed,
From his ice shall be released,
And, soothed by my reviving hand,
In former warmth and vigour stand.70
These kinds of examples, both pornographic and non-pornographic, serve to remind us that penises were often represented as meaningful in relation to contexts of male life; that stiffened or slack yards often reflected the varieties of male experience in time rather than parts to be measured or indexed against an emblematized phallic standard which was totemically separate from the individual male body and will, but still applicable to one’s stature or value within the cultural subset of maleness.71 And it is worth noting that conditions in which there was difficulty achieving or maintaining an erection were not always or exclusively the object of satire or contempt. If one desired an erection, it was of course agreeable to be able to have one; if one could not, or if one depended on idiosyncratic erotic aids, this culture afforded not a single but a double symbolic register.
These two very different ways of imagining the relationship of the soft penis to the erection suggest a semiotic tug-of-war in which the yard could have meaning either as it was defined by the life-situation of the male, or as it defined maleness itself. Unlike the late twentieth-and twenty-first century, this earlier period had not yet narrowed its penis-symbolism exclusively to a disembodied Phallus; eighteenth-century pornography was not obsessed—as is the case with our current video porn—with the “money shot”;72 representations of the yard—however impolite as a topic of discussion—involved a variety of contexts whose symbolic possibilities were not uniformly the result of a phallus separated imaginatively from the penis.
Mind-Yard Connections: Direct and Inverse
Within such diversity, other kinds of oppositional structures are visible, particularly around the relationship of a man’s head and his genitals. Stiff pricks, of course—the bigger the better—could function unambiguously as signs of masculine capability, with turgid member a synecdoche for the power of male will, a marker of masculine stature, a guarantor of virility or masculinity itself. Ideas of privileged political power lurk even in some of the slang terms, such as “privy member.” This relatively uncomplicated equation can be described briefly.
The erection served variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful will and assertiveness of the male brain or of the masculine character. The mind’s ability to raise the yard was a token of the man’s knowledge of and power over a material world of others, as is reflected in the sexual connotations of the phrase “To Know.” Johnson’s dictionary-gloss is coy—“6. To converse with another sex”—but his biblical example—“And Adam knew Eve his wife”—makes plain the associations of mind, erection, knowledge, and copulatory power-over. As a mark of stature in the gender hierarchy, the metaphor was certainly used before 1650, as in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) in which the jealous Kitely bemoans his lack of psychological strength as “want[ing] the mindes erection.”73 At mid-century Hobbes would describe the human “Desire, to know why, and how” or “CURIOSITY” as “a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall pleasure.”74 If Hobbes’s conceit imagined the figuratively endless phallic pleasures of mental procreation, at century’s end John Dennis would rely on the metaphorical structure for an exaggerated compliment to Dryden:
Since I came to this place I have taken up my Pen several times in order to write to you, but have