Sexuality in the Apocrypha

This piece examines references to sexuality in the diverse writings of the Apocrypha. It uses the term “sexuality” broadly to encompass matters pertaining to sexuality, rather than in the more confined sense that is found in discussions of sexual orientation and sexual theory. It will therefore consider a range of ways in which sexual drive or desire finds expression in various contexts, from marriage to sex work, same-sex relations to celibacy, and beyond. It will do so by examining such references in the particular context of the writings being considered and in the light of the broader social context. It discusses each writing or set of writing in turn: 1 Esdras, Baruch, Judith, the Books of the Maccabees, 2 Esdras, Ben Sira/Sirach, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, Susanna, the Additions to Esther, and the Letter of Jeremiah. There are sexual elements common to many of these works: male stereotypes about women in their sexuality as dangerous, associated with mockery of men who lose control to women; male predatory behavior; rape and sexual violence in war; linkage of idolatry to profligate sexuality; gender role reversals, which as exceptions confirm the norms; affirmation of sexual attractiveness when not abused and of (arranged) marriage and the processes of procreation and nurture; and disapprovals of sex work and marriage to foreigners or exogamy.

The Problem of Value and Other Outstanding Issues in Freud's Sexual Theory

The author takes up Freud's sexual theory and examines several key issues—narcissism, infantile sexuality, heterosexuality, and gender—in order to reassert the radical aspects of Freud's epistemology. These areas are explored in two broad and interrelated themes, which are characterized loosely as a genealogy of morals and a philosophy of the will to power. Although this moves substantially beyond the formulations used by Freud, the underlying issue in all this material is the problem of value, and the author demonstrates the truly radical arc of Freud's thinking in the way he addresses value in his sexual theory.

Plant Nuptials in the Linnaean Era

The primary preoccupation of eighteenth century botany was taxonomy, a field dominated by Carolus Linnaeus’s sexual system based on counting stamens and pistils. Linnaeus also developed a proto-evolutionary theory based on hybridization. Few eighteenth century botanists were experimentalists. In Italy, Guilio Pontedera compared nectaries to breasts that nourish seeds, dismissing male flowers as “useless appendages.” In France, Jean Marchant elaborated Malpighi’s uterine analogy of the flower, and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort espoused the classical interpretation of pollen as a “vessel of excretion.” However, Sébastien Vaillant and Claude-Joseph Geoffroy focused on plant sex. In 1717, Vaillant’s sensational lecture (denounced by Geoffroy as suitable only for “Priapic festivals”) celebrated steamy nuptial encounters between stamens and pistils. In England, Philip Miller discovered bee pollination, and Thomas Fairchild produced the first hybrid, although tampering with nature by creating “monsters” was still considered distasteful, even blasphemous. Richard Bradley tested the sexual theory on hermaphroditic flowers.

Flora Unveiled

Sex in animals has been known for at least ten thousand years, and this knowledge was exploited during animal domestication in the Neolithic period. In contrast, sex in plants wasn’t discovered until the late seventeenth century. Even after its discovery, the sexual “theory” continued to be hotly debated for another 150 years, pitting the “sexualists” against the “asexualists.” Why was the idea of sex in plants so contentious for so long? In answer, Flora Unveiled offers a deep history of perceptions concerning plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. Evidence suggests that an obstacle far beyond the mere facts of pollination mechanisms stymied the discovery of two sexes in plants, and then delayed its acceptance. This was a “plants-as-female” paradigm. Flora Unveiled explores the sources of this gender bias, beginning with women’s roles as gatherers, plant-textile makers, crop domesticators, and early horticulturists. In myths and religions of the Bronze and Iron Ages, goddesses were strongly identified with flowers, trees and agricultural abundance. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this tradition was assimilated to Christianity in the person of Mary. The one-sex model of plants continued into the Early Modern Period, and staged resurgences during the eighteenth century Enlightenment and in the Romantic movement. Not until the nineteenth century, when Wilhelm Hofmeister demonstrated the universality of sex in the plant kingdom, was the controversy over plant sex finally resolved. Flora Unveiled chronicles how persistently cultural biases can impede discovery and delay the acceptance of scientific advances.

Wars of the Roses

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, opposition to the sexual theory intensified among social and religiously conservative asexualists who felt threatened by the political theories of the Enlightenment. For some, the Linnaean system was a stalking horse for libertinism, radical Jacobinism, feminism and anarchy. They maintained their ideological purity citing philosophical, religious and pedagogical reasons for rejection. Among the opponents were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hans Möller and William Smellie. Lazzaro Spallanzi and Charles Alston tried, but failed, to repeat Camerarius’s experiments. Flowers were so feminized symbolically the idea that most flowers were hermaphroditic seemed perverse, but Mary Wollstonecraft attacked hyper-feminine poetic metaphors for women as inimical to the struggle for equality. Meanwhile, hybridization experiments by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter eliminated the last rational objection to the sexual theory and demolished the preformationist theory, in both ovist and spermist versions. Christian Konrad Sprengel laid the foundation for floral ecology.

Behind the Green Door

Chapter 14 explores literary and scientific reactions to the idea of sex in plants. England experienced a fashion for “phytoerotica”: bawdy verse, in which plants represented human genitalia, and classically inspired poetry, in which stamens and pistils were personified as husbands, wives and lovers. The former had little to do with plants. The latter served to teach the Linnaean sexual classification system. In reaction, some botanists rejected both the sexual theory and the Linnaean system. Two camps developed, the “sexualists” and the “asexualists”. J.G. Siegesbeck railed, “[Who] will ever believe that God Almighty should have introduced such…shameful whoredom for the propagation of the reign of plants.” The negative impact of the sexual system on the morals of women became the asexualist’s rallying cry. In 1759, the Pope banned all Linnaeus’s books and ordered them burned. Nevertheless, Erasmus Darwin’s “Loves of Plants,” with its fascinating female plant characters, was a hit.

Idealism and Asexualism in the Age of Goethe

The resurgence of asexualism in Germany in the nineteenth century coincided with the Naturphilosophie movement associated with Romanticism which arose in reaction to mechanical models of the universe, among them Baron d’Holbach’s. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a Kant disciple, claimed that the “absolute ego” creates it’s own reality, which we mistake for the “real world”. Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, the “philosopher king” of the Romantics, attempted a balance between Fichte’s subjective idealism and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (relative) objectivism. In general, nature philosophers granted equal weight to reason and to the imagination, and adopted a pantheistic theology, influenced by Baruch Spinoza. Franz Joseph Schelver believed the production of seeds was a vegetative process. August Henschell dismissed Koelreuter’s hybrids as artifacts resulting from experimental damage. He thought the release of pollen freed the spiritual essence of the plant from base matter. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also challenged the sexual theory of plants.

Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels

When May Sinclair started to write fiction and read psychoanalytical papers in the 1890s, case histories were emerging as a crucial medium that helped Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, as well as the other founding fathers of psychoanalysis to address the new and singular questions raised by their most puzzling patients. Indeed, the case proved to be a valuable tool in the epistemology of psychoanalytical research: writing case histories enabled pioneer psychoanalysts to challenge existing theories, set up new approaches and develop new discourses. But the case study is also a textual object that relies on dialogue, deixis, narrative and analysis, in ways that are quite similar to fictional writing. Sinclair’s key psychological research papers – “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), “Clinical Lectures” (1916) and “Psychological Types” (1923) – suggest that she favoured a more Jungian-based eclectic approach to psychoanalysis, which she also integrated into her two philosophical books A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922), over Freud’s sexual theory. Yet, even if she distanced herself from some (but not all) of Freud’s theses, as we shall see, his influence remained central to her fiction and non-fiction, and more particularly to her textual strategies and character depiction.