A short life of the author
Camille Anna Paglia (born 2 April 1947) is an American academic, social critic, and cultural commentator whose work stands at the combustible intersection of feminism, classical scholarship, pop culture, and deliberate provocation. Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) — a 700-page study arguing that Western art and culture are driven by pagan sexual forces that Christianity, liberal feminism, and academic postmodernism have tried and failed to suppress — was rejected by seven publishers before Yale University Press brought it out to enormous controversy and, astonishingly, commercial success. Paglia became the most polarising intellectual figure of the 1990s: adored by cultural libertarians, despised by mainstream feminists, courted by the media, and dismissed by most of the academic establishment she had spent her career attacking.
Life and Career
Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, to Italian-American parents. Her father was a professor of Romance languages. She grew up Catholic, Italian, combative, and intellectually ambitious. She attended Harpur College (now Binghamton University) and then Yale, where she earned her PhD in English literature under Harold Bloom — whose influence on her thinking about the Western canon and the anxiety of influence was enormous. Her doctoral dissertation, which became the core of Sexual Personae, took her twenty years to complete and publish. During those two decades, she held various academic positions and accumulated the resentments and grievances that fuelled her later public persona.
She has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984 and has remained there, pointedly outside the Ivy League establishment.
Sexual Personae (1990)
Sexual Personae is Paglia’s magnum opus — a sweeping, erudite, deliberately outrageous reading of Western art and literature from ancient Egypt to the late nineteenth century. Its central argument is that Western culture is a dialectic between two principles: the Apollonian (form, order, reason, the sky-god, Western civilisation’s official self-image) and the Dionysian or chthonic (nature, chaos, sexuality, violence, the earth-mother, everything civilisation tries to repress). Art, she argues, is the arena where these forces meet, and great art is always produced by the tension between them.
The book ranges through Spenser, Shakespeare, Blake, Sade, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wilde, Swinburne, Pater, and Dickinson. Paglia reads each through the lens of sexual personae — the masks and archetypes of sexual identity — and argues that the history of Western art is a history of pagan assertion against Judeo-Christian repression. Nature, she insists, is not the benign mother of Rousseau but a cruel, indifferent, and sexually voracious force — and art exists to confront that reality, not to prettify it.
The writing is electrifying — dense, allusive, aphoristic, and deliberately provocative. Paglia writes as if channelling Nietzsche through a megaphone, and the effect is either exhilarating or exhausting depending on the reader’s tolerance for intellectual maximalism.
The Culture Wars
Paglia’s public profile exploded after Sexual Personae. She positioned herself as a dissident feminist — pro-sex, anti-victimhood, hostile to what she called the “date-rape hysteria” and “politically correct” orthodoxies of campus feminism. She argued that women are not fragile creatures who need protection from male aggression but powerful beings who should embrace their own sexual agency. She defended Madonna, attacked Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, praised drag queens, and insisted that pop culture (particularly rock music, Hollywood, and television) was a more vital expression of human creativity than anything happening in university literature departments.
Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994) collected her essays, reviews, and polemics from this period. They are uneven — Paglia’s journalism can be shrill and repetitive — but at their best they are bracingly original. Her essay on Madonna as “the true feminist” was a landmark of cultural criticism; her demolition of the academic study of popular culture (by people who, she argued, understood neither the academy nor popular culture) was devastating.
Later Work
Break, Blow, Burn (2005) — a collection of close readings of forty-three poems from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell — was a deliberate change of register: quiet, attentive, pedagogical. It demonstrated that Paglia’s close-reading skills are formidable when she is not performing for an audience. The book was her most warmly received work.
Free Women, Free Men (2017) collected her feminist writings from four decades. Provocations (2018) gathered cultural essays and reviews.
Critical Standing
Paglia’s reputation depends entirely on who is judging. Academic feminists regard her as a reactionary provocateur who gave ammunition to anti-feminists. Cultural libertarians consider her one of the most important American intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Literary scholars generally admire Sexual Personae while finding its claims overblown. Media critics note that Paglia is a better writer and a more original thinker than most of her detractors — and that her detractors include most of the people whose approval would make her respectable.
The truth is probably that Paglia is a genuinely important critic with a self-destructive addiction to combat. Sexual Personae is a major work of cultural criticism; Break, Blow, Burn is a fine collection of close readings; and the intervening polemics are a mixed bag.
Collecting Paglia
Sexual Personae (1990, Yale University Press) in first edition brings $40–$100 in dust jacket. Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992, Vintage) and Vamps & Tramps (1994, Vintage) were published as paperback originals and bring $10–$25. Break, Blow, Burn (2005, Pantheon) brings $15–$30. Paglia signs generously at events; signed copies of Sexual Personae bring $60–$150.