The value of Halperin’s “partial identity” and Breitenberg’s “nascent interiority” is that they foreground the problems of historical variability, fluidity, and unevenness in the very categories we attempt to grasp. As current scholarship tries to trace the various ways an interiorized sexuality-as-self emerged, we must be wary of simplistic before-and-after concepts: i.e., before 1800 sexual acts did not necessarily reflect a sexual identity or orientation, and after 1800 they did; or, before 1700 or 1750 or 1800 male identity was social and reputational, and after one of these dates it was interiorized. Even the common-sense position that male identity always has and continues to reveal a dynamic rather than stable exchange between external and internal identificatory structures is also prey to sophisticated anachronism which assumes there is a core identity inside. Such assumptions must also be tested against the fact that eighteenth-century notions of selfhood and identity, as E. J. Hundert has argued, also included analogies of the self as actor, masquerading theatrically in a newly commercialized world which offered a variety of moral and psychological roles to be enacted: “Eighteenth-century thinkers were thus faced with the argument that character itself was in essence a social artifact, a construct existing in an intersubjective space of the demands of others, and within which a person’s identity was of necessity devised.”20
I set forth these complex historical issues at some length because a study of male discourses about the poetical character can contribute to our understanding of developments and changes in Enlightenment masculinity. A working assumption of this book is that the “literary” does not merely issue from or come after “history,” the text-world of the creative imagination serving as convenient mirror or second-order reflector of a historical real-world. And male literary communities—whether high or low, Scriblerian or Grubstreet, Whig or Tory—are no more separable or sealed off from the making of cultural history than scientific, political, religious, or military communities. Both the poetical character and the male writerly cadres with which I am concerned were in some important ways constitutive of cultural reality and its most typical habits of perception, and we do well not to underestimate the anthropological evidence which resides in the literary record. What remains still largely unexplored territory are the ways in which male literary communities reveal (perhaps more clearly than other homosocial groupings) the dynamic interplay of socially- and internally-located concepts of masculinity and manliness. Because male creativity itself was already conceptualized as having the double aspects of interior mental activity and public status, the links between notions of creativity and masculinity were situated at the nexus of social and psychologized constructions. That is, the poetical character was collectively understood as both an internal site of creativity within the male writer’s mind, as well as a commodity within the competitive marketplace of letters which situated and ranked authors publicly in hierarchies of worth or monetary value. In turn, this double sense—of internal and reputational status—was accompanied by a parallel formation in which the interior place of male creativity was imaged primarily as a sexual site, and one’s relative position in the public hierarchy of male authors was importantly connected to one’s perceived manliness as a writer within a network of homosocial connections. For historians of the Enlightenment, these collective representations of the poetical character as an aspect of masculinity offer a rich archive about how male identity, sexuality, homosocial relations, and creativity intermingled in the cultural imaginary both as social and interiorized realities.
One of the most far-reaching implications of the gradual shifting from masculinity as reputation to masculinity as sexualized interiority is the new importance of the male body. There is perhaps nothing surprising in this: as notions of masculine identity were increasingly derived from constructions of a sexualized inner self, the male body and its sexuality became more than ever the sites where masculinity would be registered. And yet there is an astonishing lack of work on these issues, which seems clearly related to the general academic reluctance to make the history of the male body a legitimate scholarly subject. Taken for granted in ways the female body never is, and too often dismissed or reduced to simplistic notions of embodiment-as-patriarchy, the male body would appear not to have had a history at all until very recently; or so the academic record would imply. An emerging scholarship has already begun to fill in some of the blanks,21 although very little work has been done on the reconfigured links and widespread associations between genital physiology and male mind—newer associations that Chapter 2 will explore. The ways in which young men learned to acquire a masculine identity involved many contexts of experience, behavior, and appropriate social interaction; maleness depended on one’s birth, economic station, and on one’s work status or professional pursuit. Increasingly, however, a newly-sexualized brain or male character would supply an important marker of masculinity as well, but one understood as an interiorized identity dependent on a specifically male physiology which originated in a revised set of cultural symbols for the male organs of generation, sexual and erotic inclination, and reproductive potency. The shift in the ways male genitalia were understood helps to explain why a sexual sensibility came to be seen as a dominant category of mind or a masculine identity. In short, the constitution and condition of the male body itself came to be increasingly essential categories in how maleness and masculinity were defined, and have much to tell us about the historical transition from primarily social and reputational contexts to internal identifications of the uniquely sexualized male self.
The new physiology, as Laqueur and others have shown, intensified the connections between masculinity and male sexual function. At the heart of this historical reconstruction is the claim that it is not until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a biological notion of male sexuality was widely imagined as constitutive of masculine psychological reality. Reproductive biology, in other words, appeared more than ever one of the primary sites of an essentialized maleness whose consciousness and experiential history might be understood as linked to the condition and activities of the sexual parts. This gradual reconceptualization of masculinity in relation to the male body is evident not only in the histories of medicine ca. 1650–1750—both scientific and popular manifestations—and in pornography,22 but also in self-conscious commentary about male creativity. Detailed analysis of these somatic and sexual discourses will be offered in Chapter 2, where a handful of important historical questions will be answered: How were male organs of generation understood in medical traditions and in the non-scientific population at large? Were the cultural associations and symbols for this period different from earlier cultural systems? In what specific ways were male genitalia linked to the brain and ideas of masculinity? Why is there such a remarkable increase in public references to male genitalia in this period, especially to the penis? Is there an underlying logic or single structure to this period’s literal and symbolic use of male genitalia?
That the very seat of male thought or identity could be shaped by a man’s physical condition or sexual organs is arguably one of the most significant results of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical and non-medical developments, not least because it helps to explain the early formation of the concept of an essentialized male consciousness as sexually defined—the model inherited by modern western culture. The refashioned links between male brain/mind and body were part of the newer symbolic terrain within which one might have internalized one’s sense of identity as a man or imagined such an interior identity in other men, and these Enlightenment equations reflect a variety of reorganizations of the concept of masculinity as a biological and social entity. However, male mind/male genitalia associations were no simple matter. Newer notions of masculinity-as-sexualized-embodiment were characterized by ambiguity and differential symbolizing, especially when it came to the penis, or, what the period also called the yard, the privy member, tarse, pintle, or pego. Medical, pornographic, legal, and other non-literary discourses tell a similar story, that there was a perceived instability of male subjectivity as it might be grounded by reference to “the yard.” The penis-mind connection was especially vexed, being understood as either a direct or an inverse relationship, with mental capacity either the result