The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson

tumescent majesty void of thought, Cleland presents this yard as the mechanically aroused flesh of “the man machine” (163), the La Mettrian figure whose gargantuan yard functions not as sign of mental preeminence but as meaty object serving the erotic convenience of lusty Louisa.

      Like Cleland’s novel, the arbor vitae tradition includes both direct and inverse relationships, the latter associated in particular with the boorish and ill-educated Irishman, whose prominently large “tree of life” is compensatory for his other deficiencies, social and intellectual. Thus, according to The Natural History of the Arbor Vitae (1732), “The height here in England rarely passes nine [inches] … whereas in Ireland it comes to far greater dimensions, is so good, that many of the natives entirely subsist upon it, and when transplanted, have been sometimes known to raise good houses with single plants of this sort” (5).⁸⁸ Rochester’s “Signior Dildo” includes the same principle—“Our dainty fine duchesses have got a trick / To dote on a fool for the sake of his prick” (11. 37–8)—as does Defoe’s Roxana: “for I had now five Children by him; the only Work (perhaps) that Fools are good for.”⁸⁹

      But inverse relationships went beyond the association of well-hung but stupid, short, long-nosed, deformed, or Irish men. Importantly, the man who was impotent or small-yarded or castrated could also be linked to an aspect of mental ability or creativity which was sometimes viewed as natural compensation for a phallic deficiency. S. A. D. Tissot’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (English trans. 1768) is one instance of the inverse mind-genitalia relationship in a literary context. Writing of the various deleterious effects brought on the body by excessive intellectual or creative application, Tissot observes that