More specifically, the first two sections of Chapter 3 examine the cultural underpinnings which might explain why the inner site of male creativity was so frequently imagined as a uterus, and why the male author’s entrance into, and public status within, the republic of letters was so often metaphorized as a young lady’s precarious position in a male sexual economy. Indeed, reproductive tropes—whether of pregnant male brains, the birth of the child-book, the begetting and birthing of the male writer himself—are so common that their presence has been largely taken for granted. Similarly, male self-projection as female—whether as woman about to give birth, eroticized Muse, chaste or prostituted young country lass—is so frequent and casual a rhetorical gesture in the period as to seem trite and without significance, except perhaps as evidence of a thoughtless male appropriation of matters female, or worse, of a systemic misogyny. I will be arguing instead that the implications of these well-known tropes and analogies have much to tell us about the deep-level constructions of male creativity as cultural subject within a newly-commodified world of letters, as well as about the competitive structure of male literary communities. These two sections will offer a variety of answers to a difficult question: why is the female Other in her reproductive and erotic capacities so often the metaphorical terrain onto which an entire male literary culture would map a symbolic understanding of itself? As we will see, these related metaphors allowed male writers to articulate a positive identity about themselves, their art, and their relationship to literary traditions and readers. But in a rapidly expanding print culture in which devaluation of various kinds was frequently decried, these metapoetic narratives were also used to sustain and dramatize a hierarchy among male writers, providing familiar allegorizations and rhetorical codes by which a logic of inclusion and exclusion would prevail. I will argue that tropes of male brain-wombs and female Muses allowed several generations of writers to respond to changed perceptions of the value and status of their literary labor.
The companion trope—the male mind as somehow about male reproductive parts—is so much a part of our own gender slang and stereotypes about men today (“dickhead,” “he’s got balls,” to take two examples) that one might assume the Enlightenment conjunction has been well studied. And yet, curiously, it has so far not engaged serious or sustained scholarly attention despite the fact that cultural connections of male imagination, wit, fancy, the poetical character and the genitals—especially the penis—constituted one of the most important revised and expanded discourses on male creativity as it was conceptualized in the period. Classical images associating mental creation with male genitalia are outnumbered by brain-womb/Muses before the seventeenth century, but the newer physiological models explaining male mind/body interrelationships would dramatically open up the ways the poetical character would be seen as an aspect of male embodiment. The last three sections of Chapter 3 are about the literal and figurative uses of male genitalia to characterize something about the male imagination, a male writer’s public status, or his response to his own commodification in a newer, capitalist print-culture. Self-conscious narratives about the poetical character were frequently invested with yard-wit equations or with reference to the stones or seed and, not surprisingly, these links were part of the larger set of cultural formations and reflective of its ambiguities. The creative imagination as yard could take several forms: wit could be metaphorized variously as getting it up, as coitus, masturbation, ejaculation; the male poet’s head might be imaged as a displaced privy member; the written work could be figured as male genitalia, something subject to expurgation which in turn was figured as a castration; pens and quills could be hard or soft yards spilling ink, semen, or urine; occasionally, the underlying subject of male writing itself was represented as a non-procreative phallus. Complex exchange principles sometimes prevailed in which yards had to be traded, lost, or denied for male wit to appear at all. Male writing might be linked to a heterosexual copulatory power or an apparently homoerotic exchange. In some instances, poet-yard equations provided an idealized mythos of an independent creative power under the sign not of Apollo and the Muses but of Priapus or some heightened epicoene begetting. In others, poet-yard tropes might circulate within the larger literary community as a kind of rhetorical prop or identifying shorthand which could be purloined maliciously or used combatively to enter the lists in which hierarchy, reputations, and collective standards among male writers might be fashioned and fought over. Tropes of poet-as-pintle or wit-as-yard were also used to figure an autonomous, self-generating male creativity which sometimes replaced heterosexual myths of the creative act with an exclusive homosocial drama which included ideas of autogenesis, autoeroticism, or male-male begetting. And of course male genitalia were used literally or figuratively in disputes between literary antagonists in the public realm, providing an accessible vehicle for sometimes preposterous comedy or vicious humiliation, as for instance in Colley Cibber’s whorehouse anecdote which so deeply embarrassed Pope in the early 1740s. Predictably, the record of literary usage is varied and often contradictory, reflecting the differential equations and oppositions of non-literary discourses.
Heads and groins: associations of the two constitute an important rhetorical record of the collective response by authors to the history of their own commodification. What is striking about an inventory of creativity-sexuality conjunctions for male writing is the breadth and variety of vehicles drawn from contexts of masculinity and the male body. Genitalia, reproductive function (or dysfunction), transvestite gestures, birthing tropes, sexual engagements with Muses, erotic inclination, urinary flow, emasculation, libidinal deviance, and so forth—all these embodiments played a role in an authorial self-fashioning that informed the response of several generations of male writers who defended the idea of authorial independence and dignity while at the same time serving a newer capitalist mode which committed them to debased notions of literary value. Taken together, however, these collective narratives reflected a variety of ambiguities, not only about the cultural position of literature, authors, and literary tradition in the new marketplace, but also about the semiotic landscape which defined and, in a sense, normalized the perceived connection between male body and mind.
The two metaphorical economies organized around female wombs/Muses and male genitalia had complex and differential functions. The most obvious was in gender matters, where the heterosexual model apparently resident in tropes of creative male brain as female groin was really about homosocial realities for male writers, with femaleness only temporarily appropriated. That is, the female principle—whether literal or figurative, whether female Muse, pregnant womb, male poet as young virgin, male friend as epicoene lover—was simultaneously deployed, appropriated, and disposed of by male writers whose eye was on the peer group of other men. The two economies were different schema for arriving at the same result: a collective mythologizing of the poetical character which served as the underlying appeal to the community of other male writers for inclusion, approval, and authentication. But other functions reveal collective anxieties, especially when it came to ideas of the transfer of creativity from the interior mental place to its plight in the public domain—a source of considerable