At the beginning of A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf writes
At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial -- and any question about sex is that -- one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies of the speaker.
Few since de Beauvoir's The Second Sex have been as comprehensively true to this ideal as has Camille Paglia. The cancelled preface to her first work appears in a new collection of essays called Sex, Art, and American Culture. As critical key to Sexual Personae, it is perfectly representative of a spasm of life -- one would almost like to dare to hope, a spasm of rebirth -- in the grotesquely prolonged critical "Wake of the Author" (or rather the authorized "Wake of the Critic"). It is suspect in that it tells us what we most want to hear: "To be a scholar is the greatest of vocations: to compose a devout commentary, a Talmud, on the created world." It rings authentically in that it tells us what we least want to hear, that American academe is diseased by the small: "American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs." We need to hear both. The experience of the preface is at once an evocation of the feelings of celebration and jubilation about art that brought us into the field to begin with -- and, I believe, a vision of the sort which can deliver us from the death the field has become. If not as theory, at least as method -- method passionate and personal.
Her infusion of the personal into the theoretical perhaps explains (but does not justify) our rejection of her ideas on purely personal grounds. We dismiss her in the same fashion that (say) Bertrand Russell dismisses Nietzsche, on the grounds of dislike. Indeed, most of the critiques that I have heard of her work are in the name-calling mode: Camille Paglia is Nostalgic; Camille Paglia is Conservative; Camille Paglia is Not A Feminist; Camille Paglia's World View Is Bleak and (most damningly) All of Camille Paglia's Fans Are Men. I find little justification for -- I find little truth in -- any of these assaults. Well, okay, Bleak. But the fact that she denies all of them in her writings would seem to at least indicate a conflict in terminology which would be useful and fruitful to explore. I myself find "Conservative" to be a nostalgic term and "Nostalgic" qua term to be far more applicable to most so-called Radical -- but in America almost invariably institutionalized -forms of Feminism. I have had French Feminism, Liberal Humanist Feminism, and Materialist Feminism defined for me in somewhat uncertain terms, but have yet to come across a definition of just Feminism that -- even excluding Camille paglia -- seems to be a matter of general accord. I myself know of Paglia fans that Are Women. I myself find the world view of (say) Catherine MacKinnon to be far more bleak than Paglia's.
I myself find the literary method and theory of (say) Cixous or Irigaray to be far less useful, far less stable that Paglia's, but I have heard very, very little in the Academy to convince me otherwise -- very, very little about Paglia's literary theory and method from anyone other than Paglia. No one seems to know it. The big-name feminists won't touch it. Despite the best-seller status of Sexual Personae, it is difficult to find anyone who has read much of it -- though everyone has an opinion about it. Many have read Paglia articles on Madonna and date rape, few have read her chapter on Balzac.
I would like to meekly propose that academics read the first few chapters of her major work. (And, if they have the energy, its cancelled preface.) We may ultimately dismiss her -- and perhaps even for the same reason we dismiss her now, because of dislike. But it will be a dislike informed by a partial reading of a work every bit as brilliant, as provocative and as important as The Birth of Tragedy.