Paglia, Camille

Camille Paglia is well-known both for her controversial ideas and for the signature incendiary style in which she delivers them. Born on April 2, 1947, in Endicott, New York, Paglia earned a Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1974, where Harold Bloom supervised her dissertation. She is currently a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Paglia became famous as both a popular and scholarly figure with the publication of her contentious first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990). Here, Paglia reinterprets works from the early Greeks through the English, French, and American literary canons. Sexual Personae was rejected by seven major New York publishers before being accepted by Yale University Press.

[Page 1064]The sweeping 700-page text argues that paganism was never defeated by Judeo-Christianity, in contrast to the arguments of conventional histories. Instead, Paglia argues, paganism was merely driven underground and has returned during three important historical moments: the Renaissance, Romanticism, and modern pop culture. Paglia sees world history as an ongoing struggle between two principles: the Apollonian, which is associated with the male, civilization, art, order, and reason; and the Dionysian, which is associated with the female, nature, sex, chaos, and emotion.

Paglia stresses the importance of biological differences between men and women. Women, in her view, are more powerful than men because women control the sexual realm and have since antiquity. She writes, “I see the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement.” This effort to separate from nature (the feminine) and conquer it comes directly out of male biology and is responsible for all the great achievements of Western civilization, such as architecture and science: “The male projection of erection and ejaculation is the paradigm for all cultural projection and conceptualization…. Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize in order to exist…. Concentration and projection are remarkably demonstrated by [male] urination [which] really is … an arc of transcendence…. Women, like female dogs, are earthbound squatters…. If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

Since the success of Sexual Personae, Paglia has commented on a wide range of charged issues in her essays and op-ed pieces; these have been collected in Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (1992) and Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (1994). Of date rape, for example, Paglia insists that sex always carries with it the threat of violence, and women should take responsibility for their own safety by learning how to avoid or fend off unwanted sexual advances. Paglia has also authored The Birds (1998) and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems (2005).