The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson

dangerous critique of Charles’s privileging of penis over politics, but also as an instance of the extent to which this culture would personify a single part of the male body, transforming penises into a large variety of symbols for male spheres of action. The ups and downs of the yard, as well as its contact with the world of others through intercourse, made it a convenient vehicle for a wide range of usage in the affairs of men, from the in-close physiological workings of reproduction and sexual pleasure in medical books and sexologies; to the careers of kings, the hypocrisy of aristocrats and randy clergymen in gossip and pornography; to new gender roles for men; and to an increasingly democratized male body politic. To this list we will later add male literary communities, for whom the yard and its doings often symbolized something about the creative energy within the poet’s brain.

      So what was problematic or unstable about specific representations of the penis/phallus? In this gathering of new and refurbished symbols, what were the implications for concepts of maleness? As we turn now from brief sketches of the macro contexts of symbolic usage to closer scrutiny of representative textual evidence in the next three sections, we encounter a sprawling inventory ranging from literal to figurative, from biological marker to socio-sexual status, from youth to old age, from the privy member as “hard” sign of male will and power to the symbol of an irrational Other outside one’s control. But despite the diversity of specific deployments, there appears to be a deep-level set of cultural equations whose intersecting and often oppositional structures relate to the conceptual linkage between male mind and yard.

      The Erection and the Penis

      It is important that we resist our postmodern tendency to consider only the already symbolic phallus and ignore the literal penis, a slippage or act of convenient blindness of which seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers cannot often be accused.⁶³ The historical record for this period suggests that there were two different ways of imagining the relationship of the soft yard to the erect pintle: either they were linked together as part of a single process of tumescence and detumescence, symbolizing a wide range of masculine experience from puberty to old age; or, the penis was separated or sharply differentiated from the phallus, with the former marginalized as a sign of male failure and the phallus left as a sign of male will and power. Indeed, one of the striking features of the record is the attention given to the first formulation. The period’s symbolic equations, in other words, do not always begin and end with the already engorged yard, but frequently include the circumstances within which the penis stiffens or resumes its accustomed flaccidity. The Enlightenment penis, one might say, is significantly present in cultural representations of male genitalia, and not removed peremptorily from the site of symbolic formation—as in current academic approaches—to some invisible place detached from the phallus, or simplistically resituated in a visible but negative category of male failure such as impotence. Of course, hard and soft yards could signify opposite conditions about masculine capability, with hardened member a synecdoche for male power and limp pizzle the satirized plight of fumbler or premature ejaculator, but penis and phallus were not always separated in this fashion, and indeed often linked as a variable process representative of some aspect of male embodiment in time.

      The combined process of tumescence and detumescence clearly has a different set of figurative possibilities than does the already erect, symbolically detached yard, which tends to represent a static condition of empowerment. The erigibility and softening of the yard, by contrast, represent the variability of masculine experience as it is related to the material realms of sex, desire, age, health, social and economic station. The significance of this second representational scheme is that the biological penis often foregrounds the unique subjectivity of particular kinds of men, throwing into relief the uneven conjunction of male sexuality and historical contingencies; the phallus-by-itself, on the other hand, is often presented as symbolically distinct from the male who owns it, even though it might represent masculine power. These two modes are frequently juxtaposed in the discourses ca. 1650–1750, and their jostling suggests uncertainty about what kind of symbolic equations ought to prevail: defining maleness against a relatively narrow phallic emblem? or broadening the typology so as to reflect a greater variety of maleness? The second option entails much greater range, of course, but also a higher probability of problems or failure. And yet the writers of this period frequently eschew an exclusive equation of the unitary Phallus-as-Man and write instead about the rising-and-falling penises-of-men. From the urinary to the ejaculatory, from the limp to the poxed, from the hormonal vigor of youth to aged impotence, from satyriasis to due benevolence, from cantharides to flagellated readiness—the Enlightenment yard was often a problematic emblem of male identity because its function could be related to the psychological and physical complexities of individual men.

      A good place to begin is with the pornographic tradition, the genre we most often associate with an uncomplicated phallicism. The period’s most famous pornographic novel—John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49)—illustrates that phallic modes were frequently attended by the variable and sometimes idiosyncratic realities of penises. While the powerful erection is at the center of the three-dozen scenes which make up his plot, Cleland is not unmindful of the penis, and the novel offers a typology of yards suggesting a far greater range of male subjectivity than the always-hard, symbolically-ready erection represents. Moreover, as Peter Sabor has pointed out in the introduction to his edition of the novel, “Cleland’s world is assuredly not the ‘pornotopia’ that Stephen Marcus defines [in which] ‘All men in it are always and infinitely potent’ ” (xxi–xxii). Fanny’s epistolary account presents a sequence of men who are largely defined by the variable connection of their yards to their mental constitutions: the impotent older male (15–16) and premature ejaculator (19); the “shortliv’d erection” (139) of Norbert, the thirty year-old debauchee; the punishingly-achieved erections and emissions of Barvile, the young flagellant (143–52); the “sickly appetite” of “a grave, staid, solemn, elderly gentleman,” whose fetishes include hair-combing and biting off the finger-tips of Fanny’s gloves (153); the “middle-siz’d … red-topt ivory toy” (158) of the teenaged mollies.⁶⁴ That some of these examples turn the men into objects of satire or negative treatment at the same time as they exist for the purpose of prurient titillation, is clear enough. But one must also ponder the larger implications of these representations in which the process of tumescence and detumescence—whether frustrated or deviant—characterizes the identity of these men.⁶⁵ Why it is that the phallic imagery of Enlightenment pornography is so often bracketed by the unstable psychological and material conditions upon which male sexuality and erections depend?

      It seems to me that the presence of these two modes of representation is typical of the period, and the sign of a larger cultural hesitation about how to give symbolic substance to the new equations of male minds and genitalia. Something similar can be found in the popular tradition of facetiae, bawdy songs, ribald jests, riddles, and extended metaphors which take the yard as subject. The “arbor vitae” treatises, for example—those not so subtle analogies of the penis as shrub, tree, or sensitive plant⁶⁶—contain predictable gestures of phallic competence and over-sized glory set against sodomites, fumblers, or the poxed; but noteworthy is how frequently a “history” of the penis/phallus is made a part of these humorous treatments, making space for descriptions of the process of tumescence and detumescence as well as for often matter-of-fact references to aging, impotence, flagellation, aphrodisiacs. The culture of Pope’s day seems interested simultaneously in glorifying the potent erection as a self-contained symbol and yet representing the yard as playing a sometimes problematic role in the history of individual men.

      The presence of both modes can be found in other kinds of narratives and discourses as well, in which the relationship of the yard to blunt realities of money, beauty, or the unpredictable world of sexual desire is the subject. For example, in his satirical argument in favor of dildoes—objects which, from one vantage-point, are a mock-perfect instance of the symbolically-detached phallus—Samuel Butler’s outrageous Dildoides (written in the 1670s; first published in 1706) makes the non-satirical point that “Woman must have both Youth and Beauty / E’re the damn’d Ρ—ck will do his duty, / And then Sometimes he scarce will stand too / Tho’ you apply your Misses’ hand to.” Stirrings of the yard can be fussier and even more venal than this, however, “For wicked Pintles have no mind t’her / Who