The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
yea which go comelily. (Corr. 2: 292, 1725?)
In these epicoene romps, Pope’s mock-jealous desire for Bathurst’s love takes a backseat to the escapades of the Lord’s yard, which has been diverted by countless mistresses. The poet slyly suggests that it is only through the Lord’s aroused member that a person—whether mistress or male friend—can engage Bathurst’s attention, and Pope comically offers up his Handmaids for the friend’s phallic pleasures, if only to provide the occasion for a meeting of friends. However tongue-in-cheek these libertine insinuations, the flattery is real enough, depending on the equation of male authority or stature of character with potent yard. Adding to his other manly accomplishments, Lord Bathurst’s ambitious phallicism distinguishes his desirability to women and other men alike; to defer to the noble yard is, by Pope’s neat epicoene logic, to “converse with” Lord Bathurst himself.
Biographical and autobiographical domains yield other versions of the erection as measure of selfhood and worth, as in the case of Horace Walpole’s jealous care of Lord Lincoln’s reputedly gargantuan member, or in the obsessive self-regard of James Boswell. The homo-sexually-inclined Walpole was, according to a recent biographer, a “size queen”82 obsessed with the beloved Lincoln’s potency and genital dimensions. At a public masquerade night in February 1743, Horace explained to Mann,
I dressed myself in an Indian dress, and after he [Lincoln] was come thither … made him three low bows, and kneeling down, took a letter out of my bosom, wrapped in Persian silk, and laid it on my head…. They persuaded him to take it: it was a Persian letter from Kouli Kan…. here it is: “Highly favored among women … We have heard prodigious things of thee: they say, thy vigour is nine times beyond that of our prophet … Most potent Lord, we have sent thee as a mark of our grace fifty of the most beautiful maidens of Persia…. Adieu! happy young man! May thy days be as long as thy manhood, and may thy manhood continue more piercing than Zufager, that sword of Hali which had two points.”83
Although there are some similarities here to Pope’s epicoene play with friend Bathurst, Walpole’s risqué public gesture is more psychologically complex, involving both the exhibitionist display of Walpole’s wit, as well as an attempt to embarrass Lincoln, who “stared violently.” But there is an underlying jealousy here as well, in which the clever Walpole indecorously calls attention to the penis of his well-hung friend in order to assert a humorous mastery over it by invoking it publicly at his own will. Having conjured up Lincoln’s yard, so to speak, for the amusement of the assembly, Walpole’s seraglio impersonation archly insinuates some intimate knowledge, and therefore token ownership, of Lincoln’s “vigour.” And “to know” the phallus, by this psychological circuitry, is to own the man, even though the letters indicate that Lincoln was the dominant one in the relationship, and the infatuated Horace a passive, emotionally needy lover sometimes desperate for a reciprocated passion from the apparently bisexual Lincoln. My larger point about these examples is that, however different the personal circumstances between Pope’s epicoene friendships and Walpole’s sodomitical passion, their writing sometimes shared a metaphorical economy in which the stiff prick could take on symbolic properties which represented the power or desirability of the beloved male, whose very being and stature were in turn equated with the turgid yard.
To take one final example of direct mind-yard equations we can look at autobiographical remarks by Boswell, whose compulsive philandering is sometimes attended by a narcissistic phallicism in which size and staying-power provide reassurances of his male worth. The occasions are often crude and potentially dangerous: “I picked up a girl in the Strand; went into a court with intention to enjoy her in armour. But she had none. I toyed with her. She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak. I gave her a shilling.” But at times his almost autoerotic textual recapitulations are dramatically extended, as they are with “Louisa” (actually Anne Lewis), “a handsome actress of Covent Garden Theatre”:
Proud of my godlike vigour, I soon resumed the noble game. I was in full glow of health. Sobriety had preserved me from effeminacy and weakness, and my bounding blood beat quick and high alarms. A more voluptuous night I never enjoyed. Five times was I fairly lost in supreme rapture. Louisa was madly fond of me; she declared I was a prodigy, and asked me if this was not extraordinary for human nature. I said twice as much might be, but this was not, although in my own mind I was somewhat proud of my performance. She said it was what there was no just reason to be proud of. But I told her I could not help it. She said it was what we had in common with the beasts. I said no. For we had it highly improved by the pleasures of sentiment. I asked her what she thought enough. She gently chid me for asking such questions, but said two times.84
What is interesting here is the curious logic of the Boswellian measure. For Louisa, five times “lost in supreme rapture” makes Boswell a prodigy. For his own part (having wisely abstained from alcohol), Boswell’s “godlike vigour” makes him “somewhat proud of my performance.” And yet, ludicrously, he will set the bench-mark for “extraordinary” phallic accomplishment at ten orgasms.85 In this exaggerated priapic grid, size and number define the man, whose redoubtable tarse moves him upward on the scale of manliness from the beastly to the godlike with each additional encounter. Boswell’s five times is not extraordinary in this hierarchy, he claims, even if it is for Louisa, whose measure of the prodigious is to be tupped more than twice. Boswell situates his own performance against the idealized, always-ready priapic engine whose ten-fold capacity is more about the totemic erection than it is about the real penis. But these exaggerations also allow Boswell to attach his own considerable sexual appetite to the symbolic phallus, sign of male will, mental and physical strength, or desirability of character. Boswell’s godlike vigor would prove shortlived, however; days later came the “sorrow” of “Signor Gonorrhoea” (49, January 1763), and with it the entry of the other representational mode I described in the last section.
If the erection functioned variously as a directly proportional sign of the successful intentionality, knowledge, or assertiveness of the masculine character, then within this logic the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded man predictably embodied a semiotic stamp of male failure ranging from literary satires to the more complex imperfect enjoyment traditions to personal lampoons. These negative contexts are well known and need no further elaboration here.86
Far more complex is the inverse relationship of male mind and groin in which the prodigious yard is a mark of idiocy, deformity, or compensation for the male who is in some sense deficient. The medical and sexological traditions are one vehicle for this structure. For instance, Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671): “Some men, but chiefly fools, have Yards so long that they are useless for generation” (22); Thomas Gibson’s The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1697): “But it is generally observed to be larger in short Men, and such as are not much given to Venery; also in those that have high and long Noses, and that are stupid and half witted” (160); John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (1708): “And we observe here, that little Men, deform’d Men, and Block-heads, (those of little Wit) are better provided in those Parts, than large Men, and others” (367); commenting on Heliogabalus’s preference for soldiers with large members, Venette remarks that “he did not suspect at the same time that these long-penised people were the most befuddled and stupid of men.”87 Although De Graaf had dismissed some of these equations as silly (including the midwife’s knotting of the umbilical cord as a determinant of penis size [see 46]), the notion that fools were more likely to possess the over-sized privy member persisted as an alternate structure to the direct model. One of the most famous examples is Cleland’s “Good-natur’d Dick” (160), simple-minded owner of the biggest erection in Fanny Hill. Louisa, Fanny’s colleague, has “conceiv’d a strange longing to be satisfy’d, whether the general rule held good with regard to this changeling and how far nature had made him amends in her best bodily gifts, for her denial of the sublimer intellectual ones” (161). True to form, Nature has given the idiot a phallus “of so tremendous a size, that prepar’d as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure surpass’d our expectation, and astonish’d even me, who had not been us’d to trade in trifles.” The “enormous” breadth and “prodigious” length “complet[ed]