Sexual personae are masks some of us put on or performances some of us act out to allow nature back into human relations. Nature is always pushed back and away by civilization but never completely. Sexual personae all have a way of dampening the civilizational forces in people and in many cases they allow us to act when decent upright civilizational forces would not let us. Sexual personae can be stand alone as in one for one person for example the femme fatale; but often they are several for each person – sometimes simultaneously such as the femme fatale vampire. And sometimes one sexual personae follows after another as when the Great Mother turns into a vampire. In all cases the sexual personae are a return to the “uncontrollable nearness of nature” – to the dangerous, the chaotic, and the mysterious – the chthonian.
The Femme Fatale is one of the most prevalent personae. She is found in art, literature, mythology and now movies around the world. The more civilized a culture the more powerful and frequently she is found. “…the femme fatale [is] the woman fatal to man. The more nature is beaten back in the west, the more the femme fatale reappears, as a return of the repressed. She is the spectre of the west’s bad conscience about nature. She is the moral ambiguity of nature, a malevolent moon that keeps breaking through our fog of hopeful sentiment.”
Men everywhere are stupid and delusional: they think they know when in fact they do not and they think they can control when in fact they cannot. The femme fatale represents a mystery men seek to solve but will never understand and a power they want to control but which enslaves and/or kills them. “The femme fatale can appear as Medusan mother or as frigid nymph, masquing in the brilliant luminosity of Apollonian high glamour. Her cool unreachability beckons, fascinates, and destroys. She is not a neurotic but, if anything, a psychopath. That is, she has an amoral affectlessness, a serene indifference to the suffering of others, which she invites and dispassionately observes as tests of her power. The mystique of the femme fatale cannot be perfectly translated into male terms.” This is because men cannot ever fully understand women. All that men can do is project their fantasy; but their fantasy is not really a fantasy rather it is the untamed remnant of nature that civilization has not ordered – natural woman with apollonian extrapolation. “The femme fatale is one of the most mesmerizing of sexual personae. She is not fiction but an extrapolation of biologic realities in women that remain constant.” The extrapolation is only possible through Apollonian technological innovations and in all cases the fantasy is that those Apollonian technological innovations get peeled away to reveal nature – the natural woman who is in fact the real fantasy in that she no longer actually exists.
“Feminism dismisses the femme fatale as a cartoon and libel. If she ever existed, she was simply a victim of society, resorting to destructive womanly wiles because of her lack of access to political power. The femme fatale was a career woman manquée, her energies neurotically diverted into the boudoir. By such techniques of demystification, feminism has painted itself into a corner.” Because feminism is trying the very masculine strategy of explaining away the unexplainable, (a feminist case of mansplaining) this makes the feminism of this variety just as stupid and delusional as men are. “Rousseauist psychologies like feminism assert the ultimate benevolence of human emotion. In such a system, the femme fatale logically has no place …. At some level, all love is combat, a wrestling with ghosts….People who believe they are having pleasant, casual, uncomplex sexual encounters, whether with friend, spouse, or stranger, are blocking from consciousness the tangle of psychodynamics at work, just as they block the hostile clashings of their dream life.”
Paglia offers a vast sweeping narrative of western art history starting in Egypt with Nefertiti who appears to be the first surviving Apollonian sex symbol. Nefertiti’s staged beauty is compared with the much earlier totally natural Venus of Willendorf; it is a comparison of Apollonian achievement versus natural chthonian receptivity.
Paglia then introduces us to the Roman femme fatale Clodia (AKA Lesbia) and goes through the poems of Cicero (who maligns her) and Catullus (who loves her). “Catullus, an admirer of Sappho, turns her emotional ambivalence into sadomasochism. Her chills and fever become his ‘odi et amo,’ ‘I hate and I love.’ Her beloved maiden, fresh as orange flowers, become his cynical Lesbia, adulteress and dominatrix, vampiristically ‘draining the strength of all.’ The urban femme fatale dons the primitive mask of mother nature. Lesbia, the wellborn Clodia, introduces to Rome a depraved sexual persona that had been current, according to aggrieved comment of the Old Testament, for a thousand years in Babylon. Female receptivity becomes a sinkhole of vice, the vagina a collector of pestilence to poison Roman nobility and bring it to an end.”
Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, “is robustly half-masculine…. Cleopatra appropriates the powers and prerogatives of both sexes more lavishly than any other character in literature. Her sexual personae are energized by stormy infusions of Dionysian nature—force…. Cleopatra is psychically immersed in the irrational and barbaric. She is voluptuously female, a rarity in Shakespeare. Her sexuality is so potent in European terms that the Romans are always calling her whore, strumpet, trull. As the ‘serpent of old Nile.’ She is the archetypal femme fatale (I.v.25). Cleopatra appears costumed as Isis, whom as queen she literally embodies.”
While reading the Marquis de Sade and comparing his heroines to romantic heroines we can see that: “The Romantic femmes fatales will be silent, nocturnal, lit by their own daemonic animal eye. But Sade’s women, inveterate talkers, retain the clear Apollonian solar eye of western intellect.” Sadian femmes fatales are rare. Paglia could only name the Papin sisters who massacred their bosses and Countess Erzsebet Bathory. “Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. Sade has spectacularly enlarged female character. The barbarism of Madame de Clairwil, orgasmically rending her [male] victims limb from limb, is the sign of her greater conceptual power. Sade’s female sex-criminals are Belles Dames Sans Merci of Romanticism.”
Paglia spends a whole chapter on the “romantic” poems of William Blake; in particular The Mental Traveller and The Crystal Cabinet. “Nineteenth-century Romantic literature and art are dominated by the femme fatale. Blake feels this coming and tries to stop it. Ironically, in grappling with mother nature, Blake has not so much laid her ghost as raised and immortalized it. Our movements against nature lock us to her….Blake sees sexual personae as false advertisement. As a moralist, Blake is a spiritualist. As a sexualist his is a materialist. Never the twain shall meet. Arguments with one’s self make art. Blake’s poetry is border strife, communiqués from the endless guerrilla war between sex and good intentions.”
Paglia then looks at some of the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in particular Christabel, a poem about a lesbian vampire named Geraldine that shatters many notions of sexuality. “That the penis is power is one of the social lies men tell themselves to overcome their fear of the daemonism of sex. That woman can drain and paralyze is part of the latent vampirism in female physiology. The archetype of the femme fatale began in prehistory and will live forever.”
The femme fatale is one sexual persona that is routinely toned down, ignored, and/or glossed over by traditional scholars who are probably embarrassed or religiously/politically motivated to discount the “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism, and pornography in great art”. Paglia continues by tracing the appearance and changes in the femme fatale (and other sexual personae) through the works of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley (both), Keats, Balzac, Gauthier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Brontë, Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, James, Amherst, and Dickinson. She aims to bring to light the emotionalism and decadence that is all around us in great art but which most people have refused to see.