Camille Paglia’s writing is dense and compact; the reader wonders if she’s chiseled each sentence out of marble. She distills and refines the most wide-ranging ideas about art, human nature, and sexuality. Sexual Personae is not only physically heavy (673 pages), but philosophically weighty as well.

Sex, according to Paglia, is inherently violent. Western civilization was born in Egyptian aesthetics, philosophy, and ideals. Liberalism gives human nature too much credit; conservatism not enough. Steeped in knowledge of Greek mythology, Paglia’s Sexual Personae is in essence a broad theory of Western civilization. All art battles between the disordered “chthonian” and hard-edged “Apollonian,” chaos and order, female and male. She wields her pen widely, touching on Shelly, Shakespeare, Goethe, pagan beauty, Emily Dickenson, and beyond.

Paglia’s close readings of are fascinating; she dissects text and image efficiently, splaying them on the table for our examination. Her critique is at its heart very, very Freudian, reading latent psychoses, desires, and disorders into some of the most hallowed and established artists and writers. There’s a voyeuristic quality to reading Sexual Personae that is in no way disturbing. However, at times I found myself wondering, “Can we distill human consciousness down to sex? Can we really read that far through the text?”

WhileSexual Personae is limited to literature, visual art, and some historical events, it is nonetheless an impressive theory; Paglia accumulates a massive pile of proof and argues eloquently for her point of view. But she seems a little too self-assured, presenting her ideas as brand-spankin’ new, rather than a mishmash of ancient philosophy and postmodern thought. Her writing lacks the sense of humility that can disarm a reader; her confidence makes me skeptical.

Challenging and invigorating, Sexual Personae is a worthwhile, if difficult trek. Paglia may make readers uncomfortable at times, but she stimulates, provokes, and endears.

Recommended: Yes