The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
of creative energy characterized as somehow equivalent to genitalia, the public circulation of oneself as male poet was also represented as a symbolic circulation and potential loss of one’s sexuality. Just as the male poet’s entry into the literary community could be likened to the plight of the young virgin who entered an adult world where sexual compromise and violation were likely, so too with the wit-yard tropes, where such entry was metaphorized as equivalent to putting one’s privy member in public circulation where it could be bought and sold, laughed at or admired, figuratively castrated, and owned by others.
One result was that head-groin associations changed over time. For example, the shift from ideas of autonomous gentleman author to professional writer in the marketplace was accompanied by a changing figurative embodiment: that is, the new traffic in male creativity was less frequently imaged as an immaculate patriarchal birthing or phallic self-sufficiency, and more often reflected by an imagery of precarious and painstaking reproductive “labor” or of potentially defective male genitalia. Chapter 3 will also investigate how tropes linking brains and genitalia sometimes reflected desires for a transcendent autonomy or independence from the emerging economic realities of the literary marketplace; at other times they offered metaphorical props perfectly suited to the new exchange principles. These two metaphorical systems thus served a double function, both as markers of a newer literary commercialism as well as an idealized resistance to the capitalist milieu where the status of literary labor was in transition. Often these competing functions clashed within the same work, signs of a larger ambiguity about the changing socio-economic position of authors and their writing.
Another result was that male writers such as Pope sometimes represented the poetical character as simultaneously about male sexual power and loss, as both an eroticized prowess and a sexual vulnerability. Head-groin metaphors contained contradictory possibilities about sexualized wit, presenting its origins as an erotic energy but often portraying its manifestation as an erotic depletion. The links between a writer’s brain and his genitalia were sometimes characterized as forms of exchange, displacement, or compensation, which in turn might dramatize his imagination as an instance of stifled or rejected sexuality, or of missing yards. With male genitalia as the essentialized commodity of both masculinity and male creativity, the shifts from conception to execution, from private site to public expression, or from inner creative autonomy to marketplace dependency could be represented as a sexual depletion and loss, despite collective myths and meta-narratives to the contrary.
There was another sense in which connections of creative male mind and organs of generation harbored a significant ambiguity, and that was in the relative sway which either the symbolic head or groin might have over the other. In a culture for which mind and personality were seen to reside in the brain, the inclusion of another body part as symbolic site of male essence—whether yard, stones, or seed—always entailed a potential instability or splitting of selfhood because the part in question might be either synonymous with soul/mind/will or somehow at odds. The possibility of such alienation or disjunction played a role in how masculinity-as-sexualized-interiority was understood, and the underlying genital source of male identity was sometimes represented as a threat to traditional mind-body hierarchies, and in the literary realm as an anxiety that the groin’s influence on the creative mind might issue in an unthinkable transgression.
Associations of the male writer’s skull with male and female groins became a convenient token for his status in the literary world, a symbolic commodity in an increasingly commercialized publishing realm where literature and authors alike were being bought and sold. The author’s head was subjected to a cultural metaphorization which articulated not one but a variety of collective formations ranging from the internal site of mental creativity to the sometimes fractious position of the writer in the public domain of literary hierarchies and marketplaces where the figure of the professional writer was emerging. Clustering around references to the male writer’s head and brain was a collective sexualized vocabulary signaling a variety of important differences—of talent, homosocial rank, and relative position and value as a commodity. In the new marketplace of literary labor, poets’ heads and groins were becoming things of commercial traffic.
The Exemplary Pope
Alexander Pope is my touchstone for these historical developments, and his example will haunt the conceptual parameters of this book just as his life, reputation, and writing forever changed and defined the eighteenth-century literary realm. Pope’s impact was enormous, influencing the scene of professional writing during his lifetime and well into the nineteenth century. He was in many ways symbolic of the poetical character itself, a public icon exemplifying male genius, literary fame and wealth, and the cultural status of the new professional author. No wonder eighteenth-century readers and writers referred to him more often than any other of their contemporaries. True, he cannot be perfectly typical of the several generations of male writers that this book is about, writers whose status, interests, peer group, subject-matter, nationality, profession, education, and age are in many instances quite different. Still, Alexander the Little, in some ways so very different—an unmarried, four-foot six-inch hunchback, denied so many official possibilities because of his Catholicism, and yet the most famous eighteenth-century poet—is in other ways exemplary of the new convergence of masculinity, sexuality, and male creativity.
What makes Pope so important to a study such as this is that, perhaps more than for other writers of the period, his creativity was experienced by him and perceived by others as a palpable aspect of his masculinity—physical, social, sexual. And because his life and career straddled the historical transition from older to newer notions of masculinity, his correspondence, poetry, and comments by contemporaries allow us to see how the maleness-creativity conjunction was defined both by one’s rank and homosocial connections—that is, manliness as public, reputational—as well as by an interiorized masculinity-as-sexual-embodiment. Pope’s body is also immensely important because his anatomical predicament called special attention to the reconfigured connections between male mind and body, which in turn were often projected onto his creativity as sexual or genital conditions. Indeed, Pope himself eroticized the poetical character almost obsessively, using the head-groin metaphors I have sketched above as well as other sexual gestures. Most important, his historical role in the gradual commercializing of the literary domain had a double aspect: not only was he one of the first professional writers to benefit hugely from the new marketplace of letters he so often derided, but he became an object of commodification himself, not only as target of a Pope-bashing industry which made money for others, but also as a cultural emblem of the male author whose creativity and masculinity both were defined against his sexualized body. This book will use a wide variety of men to make my case about the history of male creativity for this period—from friends of Pope such as Wycherley and Cromwell to enemies like Curll, Cibber, or Ned Ward; from important figures on either side of Pope such as Oldham and Dryden or Wilkes and Sterne—but I use Pope’s example as primary evidence, especially in Chapter 4, because he is so often paradigmatic of the complex intersection of male bodies, sexuality, and the poetical character.
Saving specific analysis of Pope and his contemporaries for the last chapter, I extend these preliminary observations about where his cultural exemplarity as sexualized male author can be discovered: (1) in his use of the two metaphorical economies; (2) in eroticized discussions of poetry in his correspondence with older male friends; and (3) in the literal and figurative function of Pope’s head and groin when they were publicly associated with his writing.
Sexual matters were often located by Pope at the site of creativity and in commentary about the poetical character, where ideas of the eroticized male body and genital urges were significant adjuncts of how he imagined the nature of his own poetic inspiration and output. Two brief examples will illustrate. First, in his earliest letter to the aging William Wycherley, the sixteen-year-old Pope applied a traditional reproductive trope to the poetical character, using the well-worn association of mental creativity with birthing: “True Wit,” he writes, “may be defin’d a Justness of Thought, and a Facility of Expression; or (in the Midwives phrase) a perfect Conception, with an easy Delivery.”28 Second, in the summer of 1707, when he was nineteen, Pope addressed and mailed a verse epistle to his friend Henry Cromwell