I emphasize the historical specificity of these issues because the penis has been plagued by a twentieth- and twenty-first century ahistoricism. Dominated as we still are by Freudian, Lacanian, and feminist readings of “the Phallus,” one can see the contemporary tendency to take the penis out of history altogether and metaphorize it in the name of some theoretical or political agenda. During the period we are concerned with here, literal and symbolic senses were not yet separated in the stark manner they have since come to be, and the erect phallus within metaphorical equations still had reference to the biological and temporal realms of real penises attached to men, and to a host of other historical conditions (political, social, professional, intellectual) which affected the make-up of what was then a newer cultural symbolism. Lacanian and feminist approaches to the penis—to indulge in some risky generalization—have been largely preoccupied with a disembodied, metaphorized “Phallus” which has little to do with the individual experience of having had a penis (whether flaccid or erect), and is very often uninformed by a notion of historical constructedness. This is not to dismiss the important contributions made by the larger theoretical orientation of psychoanalytical and feminist methodologies, both of which have done much in the last decades to open up important interpretive possibilities which can supplement historical analyses of sex and gender. One of the deep ironies, however, is that the poststructuralist Phallus—detached from men’s bodies, pried away from history—has also done much to obscure the complex historical discourses associated with the male reproductive system in general, and the penis in particular. By theorizing “the Phallus” as transcendental signifier of an original (and now missing) desire, or, as the phallogocentric discourse of Patriarchy itself, these sophisticated academic constructs have worked against the possibility of tracing a history of symbolisms associated with the penis. As a metaphor for a linguistic concept, or as a synecdoche for the paternal metaphor, “the Phallus” has proven to be an illuminating new category; for a history of male bodies, on the other hand, it has been a stumbling block, lacking a properly historical and material account of how the physiological has been transformed variously, at different historical moments, into the symbolic.
Predictably, notions of male creativity were affected by the discursive variety and ambiguity which informed a newer symbolic language for the male organs of generation. Indeed, the “literary” was an important vehicle for the proliferation and development of these discourses in the public imaginary, making accessible through the pleasures of wit the various tropes and rhetorical gestures which marked these discourses. A publication such as A Voyage to Lethe will make little claim upon literary greatness, and yet it is one of many examples in which a cultural “logic” is at work even in so bawdy a gesture as the juxtaposition of poet Pope and his ailing yard. But in order to investigate the important implications for male creativity and the poetical character we need to map the conceptual shifts and discursive formations by which Pope’s culture gave meaning to the male reproductive system.
The first section of this chapter will sketch the dominant cultural constructions which informed Enlightenment treatments of male organs of generation, first as they were inherited from classical medical traditions and modified to suit a newer medicalized sexuality, and then as they appeared in non-medical narratives as problematic cultural issues. I will be arguing that in these early modern formulations the most far-reaching implication would be the physiological links between the genitals and the brain—particularly the brain-testicles homology—and that newer models of brain-genitalia correspondences raised questions about how male consciousness might be informed by the organs of generation, which in turn intensified the perceived links between the reproductive system and an essentialized maleness.
The second section explores the “problematic penis,” the site of competing cultural equations of male body and mind. The historical evidence suggests that there were a variety of discursive formations which commodified the male as his penis. However, despite the diversity of specific deployments, there appears to be a deep-level set of cultural equations characterized by three intersecting categories, which I investigate in sections three through five: the ways the relationship between soft penis and erection was conceptualized; the question of whether the head-genitals relationship was conceived as a directly or inversely proportional one; the implications of a notion of an enigmatic yard in which the relationship of penis and mind was severed, leaving two separate systems in which the yard was incommensurate or enigmatically at odds with male will or identity.
More specifically, cultural conceptualizations of the relationship between soft and turgid penis were not limited to a privileging of the symbolically detached phallus, but rather the potent erection as self-contained symbol was found along with a discourse about the temporal drama of the yard in the lives and on the bodies of individual men. That is, there was a recognition that the process of tumescence and detumescence has different figurative possibilities than does the phallus separated imaginatively from the penis, and the presence of both discursive modes is typical of the period, reflecting an uncertainty about how the relationship of soft and erect tarse might be representative of masculine identity or mind. As well, various mind-yard equations reflected competing definitional systems: in directly proportional formulations, the turgid member was seen as a synecdoche for the power of male will, virility, or social and political sway, and the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded male was representative of forms of failure or mental lack; in inverse modes, however, the large penis was the sign of a fool, and a genital deficiency (castration, impotence, small penis) was compensated by mental capacity. Finally, the yard was sometimes viewed as an irrational and ungovernable Other, at odds with male will, and commodified as a thing to be owned or exchanged by others without reference to the male self or character to which it was attached. In medical debates about what caused an erection, it was agreed that not the will but the subversive imagination was the source, thus associating turgid tarse and wit with irrational bodily forces threatening to overwhelm the typical hierarchy of mind over body. Moreover, new medical techniques for “blowing up” the cut-off penis of cadavers contributed to concepts of the autonomous phallus severed from the conscious mind. The erect privy member as symbolic commodity was evident not only in anatomical explorations, but also in the tumescence of hanged criminals and in the function and status of dildoes. Section six examines several outcomes of these ambiguous symbolic practices as they figured in the notorious impotence trials. In these highly public tribunals, the vexed cultural meanings of the penis were reflected in the startling proposition that the erected yard is not the conclusive sign of male virility, thus destabilizing a notion of masculine identity as it might be proven in relation to the phallus.
A fascinating cultural logic emerged from these competing discourses, one which we have inherited and now largely take for granted: masculinity and male identity were increasingly understood as being intimately defined by one’s groin; this meant that male genitalia—the yard in particular—gained status as the new commodity representing maleness; but the yard-as-masculinity synecdoche included a tendency to separate men from the body part that had also become the key symbol of maleness itself; this commodification of the yard resulted in a new and fractured form of self-consciousness for individual