Individualist Inverts: Self-Realization as a Liberatory Sexual Discourse at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

That the self could be fashioned during the Renaissance has been a topos of Renaissance historiography since its beginnings in the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance conceived of by nineteenth-century scholars, cultivated personalities were a hallmark of the rise of individualism during the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento. Even in the late twentieth century Stephen Greenblatt could open his landmark study Renaissance Self-Fashioning with the observation that ‘in sixteenth-century England there were both selves and a sense that they could be fashioned’.³ This is a perception about the Renaissance, Greenblatt finds, that has been common since Jacob Burckhardt and Jules Michelet first wrote on the subject; it is a perception that owes its existence to the fact that in the sixteenth century ‘there appears to be an increased self- consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’.⁴

Feelings, thoughts, efforts, indeed all aspects of the personality generally correspond to the unusual [eigenartigen] sexual feeling, but do not correspond to the sex which the individual represents anatomically and physiologically.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis¹

Individuality is valid in the sense that it means freeing oneself from all forms that are foreign to or have been surpassed by one’s basic nature. [...] Furthermore, I think the watchword of Individuality is valid as a motto for self-discipline, for the intensification and modification of the self’s abilities, and for its harmonious appropriation into the unity of the Ego.

Saxnot, ‘Words of the Self’²