Sexual Personae

Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson came out in 1990 from Yale University Press. She had finished the manuscript in 1981, and seven major New York publishers turned it down before Yale took it on. The title came from Ingmar Bergman's film Persona, which reached the United States in 1968, and the project had its beginnings in essays she produced as a student in the mid-1960s, after she came across Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and wanted to write something larger in scope.

The argument the book follows is Nietzsche's. Paglia treats Western culture as a contest between two forces, Apollo and Dionysus, lining up order, symmetry, culture, reason and sky on one side and disorder, chaos, nature, emotion and earth on the other. She calls her method psychoanalytic, acknowledges a debt to Freud and Jung, and names among her other influences Frazer's The Golden Bough, Jane Harrison on Greek religion and Spengler's The Decline of the West.

Reading the tradition through that lens, she takes up Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Spenser, Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, Byron, Emily Brontë and Oscar Wilde, among others. The book became a best-seller and won praise from a good many literary critics while also attracting fierce disagreement from a good many feminist scholars. One casualty of its length was the original preface, which her editors asked her to leave out; it appeared in her 1992 collection Sex, Art, and American Culture.