Camille Paglia

Paglia is an intellectual of many apparent contradictions: a classicist who champions art both high and low, with a Hobbesian view that human nature is inherently dangerous, and yet who also celebrates dionysian revelry in the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.

Paglia reached the height of her fame in 1992 with the publication of Sex, Art and American Culture. Much read on college campuses, she became a minor media icon and published short pieces in a number of mainstream magazines. Her next book, Vamps and Tramps (late 1994), was a collection of those short pieces along with other ephemera. Much of this material was dated by the time it appeared in book form, and thus the book represented something of a falling-off. Paglia has not produced another book in the decade since, apart from a short volume in the BFI Film Classics series, but is expected to complete volume two of Sexual Personae, a study of poetry for Pantheon Books, and another essay collection within the next few years.

Her significance in the 1990s intellectual world was two-fold:

1. The seventies had seen the rise of a particularly rigid, doctrinaire "feminism" that many were finding stifling but only a few were challenging (e.g., the "sex positive" S/M lesbians, perhaps typified by Susie Bright).
2. The left was pushing for a change in the traditional focus of western universities on western culture (sometimes derided as the study of "dead white males"). For example, Stanford University was dropping its well-regarded undergraduate requirement of a year-long course in "Western Culture" in favor of a more broadly-focused study of "Cultures Ideas and Values" or CIV.

Against this backdrop, Camille Paglia appeared on the scene as a female intellectual who enjoyed challenging the left-wing position in these areas, but far from being the usual stodgy conservative, she did so by arguing from an unusual, flashy position that also embraced homosexuality, fetish, and prostitution. Her later writings in her column in Salon often use the word "libertarian," as she speaks out in favor of individual freedom, which may help explain the apparent contradiction, and the consternation she causes in crossing back and forth between the dominant political camps.

Books

• Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art (Dissertation: 1974)
• Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990)
• Sex, Art and American Culture: Essays (1992)
• Vamps and Tramps: New Essays (1994)
• The Birds (BFI Film Classics) (1998)

External Links

• Camille Paglia Discussion Group
• Salon Articles by Camille Paglia

Biography

Camille Anna Paglia was born April 2, 1947, at 6:57 PM in Endicott, New York. She was the first child of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (Colapietro) Paglia, whose parents were Italian immigrants.

(The name "Paglia" comes from the region of Italy in which her paternal ancestors lived. It translates into English as the word "pale", but more specifically describes the color of the straw that is produced in Italy, the same color that George Eliot had in mind in Daniel Deronda when she wrote of "the pale-golden straw scattered or in heaps." There is another meaning to the word paglia/pale which has little to do with either straw or color, and this appears to be the deeper origin; here, "pale" refers to a pole or stake. It's a pointed piece of wood one drives into the ground. The origin is the Italian word palo (Latin palus, meaning stake.) The root is "pal", and from this word we get words like palace, palisade, impale, and peel. It's likely that the root word "pal" is connected to the ancient warrior giant Pallas, the witch Walkures, and the great goddess Pallas Athena, who for centuries "staked" the limits of western civilization as it existed in Greece.)

The Paglia household had little money, but the parents exposed their daughter to the best of Western art and culture. She has said that the first music to leave an impression on her was Bizet's Carmen, an opera which, in her words, "struck me with electrifying force." She was three when she heard it. That same year, she also became enamored with the witch in Walt Disney's Snow White, a character she later described as elegant and imperious. Throughout her childhood, she would be drawn to several charismatic and powerful figures in art, popular culture and history, setting a precedent for her adult career as culture critic and scholar. She studied them, emulated them and even dressed as them for Halloween (she dressed as Alice from Alice in Wonderland at the age of four, followed by Robin Hood at five, the toreador Escamillo at six, a Roman soldier at seven, Napoleon at eight and Hamlet at nine.) When she was four she became fascinated with the Egypt collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Later that year, her father visited France to study at the Sorbonne and returned with a copy of Art Treasures of the Louvre, a book which puzzled her with its numerous depictions of nude figures. Around this same time, she saw the movie Show Boat (1951), and fell in love with Ava Gardner.

Her primary school years were spent in Oxford, New York, a farming community where, at the Oxford Academy, her father taught high school students. At the age of nine she produced the play Hamlet in school but became frustrated because some of her classmates hadn't learned their lines. The experience taught her that she couldn't depend on other people, and she soon became a rather aggressive child. One day, her teacher made her stay after school for "shoving and wrangling." She said, "Furious, she pushed a dictionary toward me and made me look up the word aggressive, which I did, hot tears of shame rolling down my cheeks."

Shortly after that episode, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, where her father taught as a professor of modern languages at Le Moyne College. Paglia attended the Ed Smith Elementary school, and befriended a boy named Bruce Benderson, who would become a lifelong friend and also an acclaimed writer. After elementary school, they went on to attend Levy Junior High, Nottingham High and SUNY Binghamton together.

During the summers, Paglia went to Spruce Ridge Camp, a Catholic all-girls facility. She spoke of it many years later in the New York Observer as a "prelesbian heaven. It was just so romantic. I had mad crushes on all the counselors." She took different names when she was there, including Anastasia, Ingrid Bergman, Stacy, and Stanley. In one formative experience, she exploded the outhouse by pouring in too much lime. She said, "It symbolized everything I would do with my life and work. Excess and extravagance and explosiveness. I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture...."

In August of 1957, her paternal aunt, Lenora Antonelli, died at the age of 33. She must have had a meaningful relationship with her aunt, as she dedicated her first book, Sexual Personae to her. Perhaps Paglia, a fan of astrology, saw a similarity in temperment that could be ascribed to the fate of the stars, as Lenora's birth date was just one day before her own. In Sexual Personae she wrote, "I remember my childhood feelings of chill and awe at the candle kept burning by my grandmother [Alfonsina (Signorelli) Paglia] before a photograph of her dead daughter Lenora, the small, round yellow flame flickering in the darkened room." Four years later, the Paglia household would welcome a second daughter, named after the deceased Lenora.

The year 1959 was an especially important year in Paglia's development, as it was the year her family got both a telephone and a TV set. It was television which exposed her to the movies of the 1930s for the first time, especially those of Katharine Hepburn, who made a big impression on her. She also fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor, and obsessively collected every photograph of her that she could lay her hands on. In 1961 when Taylor won for Best Actress at the 1960 Academy Awards for BUtterfield 8, Paglia's reaction was "feverish excitement the whole next day at school."

While in high school, she began research on Amelia Earhart. The research lasted three years, ending when she was 17. She said, "I spent every Saturday in the bowels of the public library going through all these materials, old magazines and newspapers, before microfilm. Everything was falling to pieces. I probably destroyed the whole collection! I was covered with grime." She planned to write a book on Earhart, but the project never came to be.

She was an excellent and devoted student at Nottingham High. Carmelia Metosh was her Latin teacher for three years, and in 1992 recalled that "She always has been controversial. Whatever statements were being made (in class), she had to challenge them. She made good points then, as she does now. She was very alert, `with it' in every way." Paglia thanked Metosh in the acknowledgements to "Sexual Personae," and in January, 2000, described her as "the dragon lady of Latin studies, who breathed fire at principals and school boards."

In many ways, 1963 was the beginning of her career. For her birthday that year, she received a copy of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex from a Belgian colleauge of her father's, Josphina van Hal McGinn. The book had a tremendous influence on her and furthered her resolve to be an important feminist writer. On July 8 of that year, Newsweek published her letter about equal opportunity for American women. And on November 24, she appeared in Syracuse's Herald American in a short profile about her outstanding achievements as a student. Also in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was released, a film Paglia would dissect at length in a book for the British Film Institute in the 1990s.

College Years

She graduated high school in 1964 and began attending SUNY Binghamton, Harpur College with her friend Bruce Benderson. There she befriended Stephen Jarratt and Stephen Feld, two gay men who would have a big influence on her. During a summer break, she worked the night shift at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse as a secretary in the emergency ward.

One semester at college she was put on probation for committing 39 pranks. When she was 19, she hit a drunken creep in the teeth with her right fist, apparently protecting a small woman whom he was about to harm. Perhaps her Amazonian antics were inspired by Raquel Welch, for in 1966, the film One Million Years B.C. was released and, in Paglia's words, "The cavewoman icon of Raquel Welch... became world famous." Also that year Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls was released. Paglia saw it and was particularly taken with actress Mary Woronov. She later remarked that "She was one of the most original, stylish, and articulate sexual personae of the royal House of Warhol. I never forgot her, and I followed her subsequent movie career with great fascination." Many of Paglia's memories of the '60s are linked to movies. For instance, in 1968 she and her friend Stephen Jarratt saw Joseph Losey's Secret Company, and Valley of the Dolls, and continued to write about the experience years later.

She graduated from college in 1968, valedictorian of her class. Around this time, apparently, her sense of her own sexuality was undergoing a shift. At Harpur, said a close friend from that time, "Camille was not out, not even to herself"; yet she's repeatedly noted she was publicly out as a lesbian at Yale, which she began attending in 1968. Paglia has never spoken of the process or any dramas associated with coming out, but she has recalled an incident in the summer of 1968 that suggests it was around that time that she began to express her sexual identity in a way she hadn't before. It was one day in New York when she happened to run into Catherine Deneuve, and found herself "stalking" her through Saks Fifth Avenue. Paglia was alone, and quickly phoned her friend Stephen Jarratt in Bennington to tell him about it. In her book Vamps & Tramps she wrote that it was "The first major incident I had to endure without my gay legionnaires...." She was a lesbian and alone.

Just a few months later, as a student at the Yale Graduate School she attended a party in the home of R. W. B. Lewis, one of her teachers, and she was insulted by a prominent Yale psychiatrist named Robert Jay Lifton for being a lesbian. Lifton, at that time, was the Foundations' Fund Research Professor in Psychiatry at Yale, a position he held until 1984. His attack seems to have emboldened her to not only be out as a lesbian, but to be in everyone's face about it. She has insisted that she was the only openly gay student at Yale for the four years she was a student. It has been reported that while at Yale in 1969 or 1970, Paglia had a crush on the scholar Marjorie Garber. Garber, who rose to prominence as an author in the '90s, later claimed that she rejected her advances. This appears to have been a troublesome time for Paglia, as she also quarreled with "a then darkly nihilist Rita Mae Brown, who came to the Yale University campus for an early feminist conference", and she fought with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band because they dismissed the Rolling Stones as "sexist."

As her personal relationships with women were strained, her study of sexuality in Western literature continued to develop with her reading of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. More loneliness would follow, though, as her closest friends, Benderson, Jarratt and Feld all moved to San Francisco. The Gay Parisian Press published Benderson's book Meet Me At The Baths the same year that Kate Millet's Sexual Politics came out in print. Paglia recalled that she "had two close encounters with Millett just after she became famous, in New Haven, Connecticut, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, but she was too morosely self-absorbed to notice." Millet became a person Paglia began to loathe and to define herself against. Indeed, her book title, Sexual Personae is likely a negative reference to Millet's Sexual Politics.

In 1971 she discovered Kenneth Clark's The Nude while browsing the shelves of Yale's library. "If ever I was in love with a book, it was with this one," she wrote in Sex, Art & American Culture; and in an article for Women's Quarterly in 2002, she called it "The best introduction by far to representation of the human figure in art." She wrote, "Students who read Clark will be safely inoculated against the worst excesses of feminist theory, with its prattle about objectification and the male gaze -- terms cooked up by ideologues with glaringly little knowledge of or feeling for art." The book influenced her writing in her Yale dissertation and subsequent works.

Of the dissertation, her mentor and adviser, Harold Bloom found fault in the draft he read in 1971. He cautioned in the margin that it was "Mere Sontagisme!". Paglia later wrote, "It saddened me, but I knew Bloom was right. Sontag, who could have been Jane Harrison's successor as a supreme woman scholar, had become synonymous with a shallow kind of hip posturing." She received a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Yale that year.

In February of 1972 she wrote a letter to Carolyn Heilbrun, praising her prose in a recent article and asking for information about her forthcoming book on androgyny, but Heilbrun never responded. It's possible that she was insulted by Paglia's criticism of Kate Millet in the letter, as she was a friend of Heilbrun's. When the book came out, Paglia gave a thoroughly negative assesment of it in an anonymous review for the journal the Yale Review the following year, 1973. It was the journal's policy for reviews to be published without attribution.

Later in 1972, she toured Washington D.C. with her mother, where she saw Edward Brooke. She later described the black Republican senator from Massachusets as "a glamorous, lordly male who, from my one passing encounter with him as he sauntered elegantly down the Capitol steps in 1972, had a distinctly roving eye." She also saw Barry Goldwater on the Senate floor. "After knowing him only in the twisted, demonic form projected by the liberal Manhattan media, I was stunned at his simple, natural dignity and air of integrity," she later recalled. "He was the most charismatic man I have ever seen off a movie screen. With his unexpected height, solid physique and flowing white hair, he had the regality of an aging lion."

Teaching Career

In the fall, she began her first semester teaching at Bennington College. There she met James Fessenden, who started teaching at the same time as Paglia. In January 1997, Mark W. Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, recalled attending Bennington while Paglia was there. "She was appointed as my faculty advisor in her first term. I went in for my advisorial visit and she was entirely herself, talking very fast about many things I knew nothing about. I ran in fear. Alas, I was too puzzled to take any of her classes, which seemed to be full of very sophisticated people from LA and from New York."

In 1973, her paper, "Lord Hervey and Pope," was published in the journal 18th century Studies. A TLS cover story on Lord Hervey, November 2nd, praised the paper as "brilliant." On April 9th, she met Susan Sontag at a lecture an invited her to Bennington. Sontag spoke there on October 4th. Paglia later commented, "I was stunned because I thought she was going to be a major intellectual," and then wrote about the meeting at length in a dishy essay in the '90s.

Another intellectual letdown was Marija Gimbutas, who published The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe in 1974. At the same time, Paglia launched "a detailed attack on an exhibit at Bennington's Crossett Library, 'Matriarchy: The Golden Age,' which used appalingly shoddy feminist materials alleging the existence of a peaceful, prehistoric matriarchy, later supposedly overthrown by nasty males."

Through her study of the classics and her reading of the scholarship of Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, Erich Neumann and others, Paglia had developed a theory of matriarchal history that was in opposition to the ideas in vogue at the time, which is why she was so critical of Gimbutas, Heilbrun, Millet and others. She laid out her ideas on matriarchy, androgyny, homosexuality, sadomasochism and many other topics in her dissertation Sexual Personae: The Androgyne in Literature and Art, which she completed in December of 1974, at the age of 27.

At the time she completed her dissertation, her friend James Fessenden, "after being forced out of Bennington," returned to New York. Likewise, her friend Bruce Benderson moved to New York from San Francisco. But gay culture had changed since the '60s, and Paglia found that she would no longer be allowed to go into gay bars with her friends, a situation which troubled her.

In March of 1965, Paglia drove from Vermont to Albany to see Germaine Greer speak. She was disappointed, reporting later that "During the question period, I nervously raised my hand from the crowd and asked if Greer, a former English professor, would be writing on literary subjects again soon. Her reply was stern and swift: 'There are far more important things in the world than literature!'" Also while visiting Albany, Paglia "nearly came to blows with the founding members of the women's-studies program at the State University of New York at Albany, when they categorically denied that hormones influence human expereince or behavior. These women (whose field was literature) attributed my respect for science to 'brainwashing' by men."

Similar sorts of fights with feminists, lesbians, chauvanists, homophobes, and academics would continue for years, reaching a high point in 1978. While at Bennington, Paglia got a girlfriend, a theatrical young woman named Patty who was a former student. The couple went to a school dance one evening when a rich student from Chicago came out of nowhere and physically attacked them. Paglia spoke about this to Heather Findlay in Girlfriends magazine several years later. She said, "I went to the police and filed a report. Then her parents went ballistic. There was an enormous to-do from her rich parents telling the administration, 'Open homosexuals shouldn't be employed by a college. We're not sending our daughter to a place where these are gays like this on the faculty.'" Paglia resigned, and the relationship with Patty ended. Karen Young's song "Hot Shot" became a disco hit during this time, a fact Paglia noted in 2003 when she pointed out that this "classic high disco... was created at the Queen Village Recording Studio" near the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She didn't know it at the time, but the University of the Arts in Philadelphia would become an institution of tremendous importance to her life in the following decades.

Unemployed at times, Paglia's career seems to have lacked focus through the early 1980s as she struggled to finish her book, get published and support herself. Her paper, "The Apollonian Androgyne and the Faerie Queen ," was published in ELR, Winter 1979, and her dissertation was cited by J. Hillis Miller in his April 1980 article "Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation," in Journal of Religion in Literature, but aside from that, not much was happening to improve her reputation in academe at a time when her peers were moving on to important positions at major Ivy League universities. In a letter of March 1993 to Boyd Holmes, she recalled: "I earned a little extra money by doing some local features reporting for a New Haven alternative newspaper (The Advocate) in the early 1980s. There was an article on the historic pizzerias of the town and also one on an old house that was a stop on the Underground Railroad."

From 1981 to 1983 she worked as a visiting lecturer in Comparitive Literature and English, Yale. In 1984 she becomes a fellow of Silliman College, Yale, and then later in 1984 got a teaching job at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. At that time, she appears to have ended her last romantic relationship until she met Alison Maddex in 1993, the woman with whom she would parent a child named Lucian, born in 2003.

A new job in a new city seems to have energized Paglia. In March of 1985, an interesting letter of hers about the Liberty Bell was published by the Philadelphia Inquirer. In April, she copyrighted a children's book, The Grocery Store Wars, with drawings by her sister Lenora. She sold Sexual Personae to Yale University Press. A chapter of Sexual Personae, "Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene," was published in the journal Raritan. In 1986, her essay "Nature, Sex, and Decadence," was published in the book Pre-Raphaelite Poets, edited by Harold Bloom; and her essay, "Christabel," was published in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also edited by Bloom.

For the next few years, she continued to teach while perfecting Sexual Personae for its eventual publication, and releasing a few additional portions of it in other journals and books. Her essay "Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene," was published in 1988 in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, edited by Bloom; Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art, was published in 1988 in Western Humanities Review; and "Sex," was published in the Spenser Encyclopedia, by A. C. Hamilton in 1989.

Finally, in 1989, she saw the publication of the book she had been working on throughout her entire adult life up to this point: Sexual Personae. Sadly, that year she learned that both her friends Stephen Jarrat amd James Fessenden had contracted HIV.

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