Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia

Author:Camille Paglia
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2001-01-14T23:00:00+00:00

34. Thomas Phillips, Lord Byron, 1814.

35. Elvis Presley in the film Speedway, 1968.

Byron and Elvis Presley look alike, especially in strong-nosed Greek profile (figs. 34 and 35). In Glenarvon, a roman à clef about her affair with Byron, Caroline Lamb says of her heroine’s first glimpse of him, “The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt.”19 Presley’s sneer was so emblematic that he joked about it. In a 1968 television special, he twitched his mouth and murmured, to audience laughter, “I’ve got something on my lip.” The Romantic curling lip is aristocratic disdain: Presley is still called “the King,” testimony to the ritual needs of a democratic populace. As revolutionary sexual personae, Byron and Presley had early and late styles: brooding menace, then urbane magnanimity. Their everyday manners were manly and gentle. Presley had a captivating soft-spoken charm. The Byronic hero, says Peter Thorslev, is “invariably courteous toward women.”20 Byron and Presley were world-shapers, conduits of titanic force, yet they were deeply emotional and sentimental in a feminine sense.

Both had late Orientalizing periods. Byron, drawn to oriental themes, went off to fight the Turks in the Greek war of independence and died of a mysterious illness at Missolonghi. A portrait shows him in silk turban and embroidered Albanian dress. The costume style of Presley’s last decade was nearly Mithraic: jewel-encrusted silk jumpsuits, huge studded belts, rings, chains, sashes, scarves. This resembles Napoleon’s late phase, as in Ingres’ portrait of the emperor enthroned in Byzantine splendor, weighed down in velvet, ermine, and jewels. Napoleon, Byron, and Presley began in simplicity as flaming assertions of youthful male will, and all three ended as ornate objets de culte. British legend envisions a “westering” of culture: Troy to Rome to London. But there is also an eastering of culture. We are far from our historical roots in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor; yet again and again, collective emotion swelling about a charismatic European personality instinctively returns him or her to the east. Elizabeth I also ended as a glittering Byzantine icon.

Another parallel: Byron and Presley were renowned for athletic vigor, yet both suffered chronic ailments that somehow never marred their glossy complexions or robust beauty. Both constantly fought off corpulence, Presley losing toward the end. Both died prematurely, Byron at thirty-six, Presley at forty-two. Byron’s autopsy revealed an enlarged heart, degenerated liver and gall bladder, cerebral inflammation, and obliteration of the skull sutures.21 Presley suffered an enlarged heart and degenerated colon and liver. In both cases, tremendous physical energy was oddly fused with internal disorder, a revolt of the organism. Presley’s drugs were symptom, not cause. Psychogenetically, Byron and Presley practiced the secret art of feminine self-impairment.

Discussing Michelangelo’s Giuliano, I noted the statue’s swanlike neck, strangely contrasting with the massive knees and calves. Countess Albrizzi said of Byron, “His neck, which he was in the habit of keeping uncovered as much as the usages of society permitted, seemed to have been formed in a mould, and was very white.” (Shelley also appeared with “his white throat unfettered.

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