Cambridge, Massachusetts -- Camille Paglia seizes the podium at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater and ignites. Her topic this evening: What’s wrong with Harvard. That’s with a period, not a question mark.
For the next two hours, the frenetic and fearless author, who teaches humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, unleashes the attacks that have made her an enemy of feminists and literary theorists and a cause celebre on the interview circuit. She trashes prominent scholars, tenure, academic conferences, the department system, and, again and again, the French literary theorists Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan.
She’s an academic guerrilla, a firestorm of energy, and above all a performer. Her voice is like an automatic weapon spitting out bullets: She sneers. She taunts. She mimics. She hurls insults. She tells critics to shut up.
And she names names, starting with professors at Harvard -- Marjorie Garber, Barbara Johnson, Susan R. Suleiman, and Helen Vendler. But why stop at Harvard? She names more names -- Stanley Fish and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick of Duke University, and more.
Charlatans, she calls them. Toadies. Conference groupies. Pseudo-feminists. Hustlers. Sleazebags. Ass kissers.
The whole time, here in the polished-wood splendor of the Victorian-Gothic theater, standing beneath three crimson plaques that bear the Harvard motto Veritas, Miss Paglia -- she prefers “Miss” to “Ms.” -- is pounding away at her message. Which is this: Academe is being corrupted by trendy feminists and literary theorists who have abandoned scholarly standards and who don’t care about beauty or truth or history or nature. While liberals stand around doing nothing, conservatives are taking control of academic reform.
“Today it’s like, get a gimmick, get a critic,” she tells the crowd of about 800.
“What are we doing wasting our time with these stupid and vulgar theorists? ...
“It’s such crap.”
She recites her mantra: Hate dogma. Love art. Love learning.
A woman in the audience tells Miss Paglia that some of her remarks sounded like something Joseph Stalin might have said. Miss Paglia brushes her off like a mosquito. “Absurd,” she retorts.
Catching the show from the front row is Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University philosopher who also has something of a reputation for skewering her fellow feminists (The Chronicle, January 15). “I’m such a nice girl compared to Camille,” she says later, with a sigh of admiration.
Like many others, Ms. Sommers never heard of Camille Paglia before 1990, when Miss Paglia’s first and so far only book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was published by Yale University Press. (Vintage Books later published it in paperback.)
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That’s because Miss Paglia had spent the last 20 years “in the wilderness,” researching her book and being rejected, as she tells it, by mainstream academics and feminists who couldn’t handle her dissident views on feminism. The recipient of a doctorate from Yale (her mentor there was Harold Bloom), she taught at Bennington College, then held a string of appointments in the early 1980’s while searching for a permanent job and a publisher.
Her book has given her the fame she feels is due her. But she says elite universities would never hire her now, either -- she’s too vicious.
The book is a 718-page treatise that attempts to present a unified theory of Western culture from ancient Egypt through the late 19th century. A second volume and essay collection are in the works.
Chief among the ideas expressed in her book and elsewhere is this: That innate sexual differences mean men and women will always be different -- so different that “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Similarly, her views on date rape -- she calls it “the leading soap opera among middle-class white women” who fail to recognize that women are always in sexual danger, and says the police, not universities, should deal with genuine rape charges -- have incensed those pushing for campuswide education on the issue.
Madonna is her ideal feminist.
Miss Paglia only recently began taking her ideas to campuses. She goes next to Smith and Williams Colleges.
Last month she spoke at Brown University -- a place so politically correct, she says, that “of course the feminists boycotted me, okay, right? I loved it.”
If academic feminists have ignored her, as Miss Paglia contends, conservatives have not. It was Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard government professor who says his reputation as a “neo-conservative” is fair, who invited her here tonight. He was the only Harvard professor to vote against the creation of the women’s-studies program because, he explains, “it wasn’t really women’s studies, it was feminist studies.”
The crowd at Sanders Theater smells of wet wool. It is a polite crowd, a mix of older, tweedy academics and students wearing fringed Russian-peasant scarves and carrying huge bookbags.
Mr. Mansfield introduces Miss Paglia as “an enemy of the namby-pamby, the hoity-toity, and the artsy-fartsy.” In fact, she has numerous enemies -- and appears intent on making new ones tonight. After she establishes her credentials -- she believes prostitution, pornography, abortion, and drug use should be legal, and is a bisexual who believes in full political and legal rights for women -- she opens fire on the feminists.
“The idea that there is any open debate in academic feminism today is a lot of crock,” she sneers.
Unlike many feminists, Miss Paglia says, “I respect the past, okay? I don’t see history as an endless series of victimizations.”
She also accuses certain feminists of keeping their lesbianism secret until they became prominent. “When it would have cost them something, did they do it?” The crowd applauds loudly.
By now it is apparent that Miss Paglia’s style is not exactly one of collegial criticism.
Her first target is Helen Vendler, a Harvard English professor who, she says, has given in to trendy scholarship (and who has criticized Miss Paglia’s book). “Everything from Chaucer to Wallace Stevens, I respect,” Miss Paglia says. “But after Wallace Stevens, she has been a disaster.”
Next comes Barbara Johnson, head of Harvard’s women’s-studies program, who is accused of toadying to male professors, including the late Yale deconstructionist, Paul de Man.
As for Marjorie Garber, a Harvard English professor whose book on cross-dressing Miss Paglia has slammed, she could have written a major book, Miss Paglia contends. “But you have to put in the effort. You have to go to the library.”
Next comes Susan R. Suleiman, a comparative-literature professor here whom she calls “one of the great conference groupies of all time.” One of Miss Paglia’s arguments is that the “deal making” at academic conferences has led to tenure for trendy scholars who will be around long after their work is outdated.
“Now, let’s see, who haven’t I maligned yet?” She calls Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a Duke gay-studies scholar, a “charlatan and opportunist who latched onto Foucault because she had no talent.” Stanley Fish, a prominent literary theorist, is “a sleazebag” and “a phony.” And there are others.
Miss Paglia’s targets apparently weren’t at the lecture. But when contacted later, Ms. Suleiman, the “conference groupie,” is eager to fight back. “The difference between a conference and a one-woman show,” she says, “is that at conferences people engage in discussion.” Miss Paglia engages only in “totalitarian discourse,” she says, adding that feminists would be happy to listen to her ideas “if she had any.”
Ms. Garber calls Miss Paglia’s version of feminism “a caricature” that ignores all new scholarship. She also questions whether Miss Paglia is worthy of more publicity, and suggests Mr. Mansfield was “uncollegial” to invite such an attack on his colleagues.
Mr. Fish and Ms. Sedgwick did not want to comment; Ms. Johnson and Ms. Vendler could not be reached.
Miss Paglia concludes her lecture by proposing that literary conferences be abolished and that shoddy scholarship be exposed. And she suggests that she is the perfect role model for women since “I have no self-esteem problems.”
She ends with her mantra: “Hate dogma. Love learning. Love art.”
The performance has left some here stimulated but mentally exhausted, and others outraged.
“Make sure you put this in -- she’s a demagogue,” says Jane Margolis, who teaches education in the extension school here. “She’s missing an important aspect of power realities.”
Miss Paglia, meanwhile, continues holding court on the stage. It’s 11 p.m. She has been talking non-stop since dinner, and will continue until 1 a.m. at a post-lecture reception at Mr. Mansfield’s home.
She could go on forever.
The next morning finds Miss Paglia in her hotel suite, already in her frenzied-performance state. (“My normal state is a cocaine state. I don’t need drugs.”)
She’s wearing the same outfit -- knee-length black dress, well-cut red jacket, black patent-leather, high-heeled pumps. Should anyone question whether her clothing is relevant, it’s very relevant to her. Appearance, projection -- it’s all part of her argument that women must take control of the image and sexuality they project. She calls her outfit “my performance drag.” Normally, “I’m totally dowdy.”
She’s talking about her sudden fame, the importance of teaching freshmen, the need for lust, her admiration of nuns, the vindictive pleasure she gets from “torturing” Harvard, and, once again, those feminist “toadies.”
The phone rings just as she is reopening her attack on Ms. Johnson, the women’s-studies head. Mr. Mansfield is on his way? Okay, good, all right. She slams down the phone without missing a syllable.
Mr. Mansfield enters bearing several of the lecture posters, a copy of her book, and that morning’s Boston Globe. “Everybody’s buzzing,” he says with a grin.
Miss Paglia grabs the newspaper and shrieks. “Oh, The Globe covered it? Great!” She’s calling her publicist now and simultaneously scanning The Globe and The Harvard Crimson, squealing, waving her hands, stamping her feet, snorting, and rolling her eyes when her call won’t go through. “Oh my God! I don’t believe they reported it! All right, yes, Brown University mentioned -- great! Yes, this is a collect call. Oh, I love this: `She singled out Susan Suleiman, Barbara Johnson ... ‘ Aaaaah! This is not a flattering picture. Oh, my legs came out well, though ... `Slams Harvard.’ Okay, all right! `_Trendy people in cultural studies ...’ Hello, what is the problem? `_We need to liberate the young from this French theory crap ... ‘ All right! Aaaaah! Hello? Hello!! This is Camille ...”
She could go on forever.
