[In the essay below, Meyers offers a feminist rereading of The Rape of the Lock.]

The Rape of the Lock has been read traditionally as a mock-heroic attack on the artificial society in which Alexander Pope lived—a society poised precariously on the edge of chaos. When the "hero" "rapes" the lock of the egotistical Belinda, he figuratively exposes—castrates—an already emasculated ("effeminate") social group. Belinda is the butt of the joke—her lock (representative of her virginity) is her most important possession; she is "lost" without it. Her lack of a lock is "funny." Readers trained in western culture consistently have interpreted The Rape of the Lock from this phallogocentric perspective. Reader-response theorists have lent credence to such readings by envisioning "the reader" as, at worst, male and, at best, neutered. But the reader of any text is always one gender or the other; to overlook that fact is, as Annette Kolodny suggests, to deny the pleasure of the text to "half the population"—it is to imply that the "other" reader "lacks" the ability to read correctly ["Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," Feminist Studies 6 (Spring 1980)]. Canonical texts like The Rape of the Lock must be re-read by women (and men) from a feminist perspective. Such a re-reading of Pope's "epic" produces a considerably different story than the traditional one and reveals a new layer in an already multi-layered text.

The basic premise of most reader-response criticism is the belief that the text, by itself, is unable to produce meaning. Meaning is produced as a result of interaction between the text and the reader. The reader is "at once interpreter and interpretation" and is always already "situated inside a system of language, inside a context of discursive practices in which are inscribed values, interests, attitudes, beliefs" [Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism, 1987]. The reader applies the intertext of her/his own experience to the text, trying to "naturalize" (make intelligible) its content by finding a "common world of reference" that will allow the text to "communicate."

Leading reader-response theorists generally assume one of two positions: either the text controls the reader or the reader controls the text. Michael Riffaterre, Georges Poulet and Wolfgang Iser acknowledge the "creative role of the reader" but ultimately believe the text to be the "dominant force" in reading; David Bleich, Norman Holland and Stanley Fish insist that the reader holds the "controlling interest" in the reading process ["Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading," in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, eds. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart, 1986]. None of these critics recognizes the role of gender in reading, ignoring the fact that, although male and female readers may seem to use the same language system, the "values, interests, attitudes, beliefs" they bring to that system often are vastly different. To discount the relevance of differences between male and female readers is to exhibit the sort of "ignorance" Hélène Cixous finds in those critics who "hesitate to admit or deny outright the possibility or the pertinence of a distinction between feminine and masculine writing" ["The Laugh of the Medusa," in The Signs Reader, 1983]. Bleich, who has at least acknowledged that the question of gender and reading deserves consideration, denies the difference between male and female readers because "associating] the idea of 'gender' with reading …[would be] saying that the readers are in some generic sense biologically defined" ["Gender Interests in Reading and Language," in Gender and Reading].—which, of course, they must be. Many of Bleich's remarks—such as "it seems almost too obvious to mention that men and women speak to one another in the 'same' language"; and "the language foundation of both sexes is maternal"—are simplistic and patronizing. More important, such remarks beg the big question: of course they can speak the same language; of course they are both born of woman and learn language from her, but whose language is it? It is the phallogocentric language of the Fathers, used to perpetuate the "powerlessness" that "characterize[s] woman's experience of reading" [Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction, 1978].

Women, as readers, teachers and scholars, have been "immasculated" by their training in the academy. They have been taught, as Judith Fetterley says, "to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny." Rather than "impartfing] virile power" to the woman reader by allowing her to participate equally in a dialogue with male critics, [Schweickart States] the centuries-long process of immasculation has actually "double[d] her oppression." She not only experiences the "powerlessness" that "derives from not seeing one's experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art," she also experiences [Fetterley notes], the powerlessness that "results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male …is to be not female." Though she learns to speak with the "logic of 'phallic' discourse" [Susan Suleiman, "(Re)Writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism"], the woman who knows the difference must always struggle against her training, wondering, like Nancy K. Miller [in "Rereading as a Woman," in The Female Body in Western Culture, 1986], what it is possible for a woman to read "in a universe …where the rules of aesthetic reception and indeed of the hermeneutic act itself are mapped onto a phallomorphic regime of production." Keeping in mind that literary history is a "fiction," that what is engaged in reading are not "texts" but "paradigms," and that the "grounds upon which aesthetic value [is assigned] to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal" (Kolodny), feminist readers, who know that the meaning of a text is dependent upon the interpretive strategy applied to it, must take control of the reading experience, "reading the text as it was not meant to be read, in fact reading it against itself (Schweickart).

"Every writer," says Edward Said, "knows that the choice of a beginning for what he will write is crucial not only because it determines much of what follows but also because a work's beginning is …the main entrance to what it offers": the beginning is "the first step in the intentional production of meaning" [Edward Said, Beginnings: intention and Method, 1985]. A close feminist rereading of The Rape of the Lock, one that illustrates both feminist "resistance" to the text and the feminist ideal of recuper-ating female value in its human configuration through sympathy with the heroine, must begin, then, at the real beginning—the letter to Arabella Fermor that precedes the text of the poem:

It will be in vain to deny that I have some Regard for this Piece, since 1 Dedicate it to You. Yet You may bear me Witness, it was intended only to divert a few young Ladies, who have good Sense and good Humor enough to laugh not only at their Sex's little unguarded Follies, but at their own. But as it was communicated with the Air of a Secret, it soon found its Way into the World. An imperfect Copy having been offer'd to a Bookseller, You had the Good-Nature for my Sake to consent to the Publication of one more correct: This I was forc'd to before I had executed half my Design, for the machinery was entirely wanting to compleat it.

The Machinery, Madam, is a Term invented by the Criticks, to signify that Part which the Deities, Angels, or Daemons, are made to act in a Poem: For the ancient Poets are in one respect like many modern Ladies; Let an Action be never so trivial in it self, they always make it appear of the utmost Importance. These Machines I determin'd to raise on a very new and odd Foundation, the Rosicrucian Doctrine of Spirits.

I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard Words before a Lady; but 'tis so much the Concern of a Poet to have his Works understood, and particularly by your Sex, that You must give me leave to explain two or three difficult Terms.

The Rosicrucians are a People I must bring You açquainted with. The best Account I know of them is in a French Book call'd Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its Title and Size is so like a Novel, that many of the Fair Sex have read it for one by Mistake. According to these Gentlemen, the four Elements are inhabited by Spirits, which they call Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs, and Salamanders. The Gnomes, or Daemons of Earth, delight in mischief; but the Sylphs, whose Habitation is in the Air, are the best-condition'd Creatures imaginable. For they say, any Mortals may enjoy the most intimate Familiarities with these gentle Spirits, upon a Condition very easie to all true Adepts, an inviolate Preservation of Chastity.

As to the following Canto's, all the Passages of them are as Fabulous, as the Vision at the Beginning, or the Transformation at the End; (except the Loss of your Hair, which I always mention with Reverence). The Human Persons are as Fictitious as the Airy ones; and the Character of Belinda, as it is now manag'd, resembles You in nothing but in Beauty….

Addressed to Arabella, the letter is undoubtedly intended as an apologia to Pope's feminist readers. Following what Susan Schibanoff calls [in "Taking the Gold out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman," in Gender and Reading] the "well-established topos of manuscript literature," Pope hoped to "relieve the problems that the anti-feminist text [might cause] the female reader." But, rather than relieving problems, the letter actually makes the poem more offensive:

Authorial apologies to the female reader for anti-feminist texts are …something other than heart-felt laments. They are attempts both to intimidate her and …to immasculate her. They warn her that the written traditions of antifeminism have contemporary guardians and custodians who will not allow these texts to disappear.

Pope's duplicity is apparent from the first sentence. His claim that the poem is written for Arabella is false. The person to whom Pope actually addresses the poem is his friend John Caryll. Arabella's story, told to Pope by Caryll, may have "inspired" the poem, but it is Caryll and other males who are his "intended readers." Pope's anti-feminism appears full-blown in the second sentence: the poem is intended to "divert a few young ladies, who have good sense and good humor enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own." The choice of "divert" is perfect: Pope hopes to divert attention away from his act of misogynous judgment and focus it on what he calls the "folly" of female nature. Like the more or less formalist readers with whom reader-response criticism argues, Pope attempts to present activity and relationship as some reified, unchanging "nature." At this point the feminist reader must begin the "succession of decisions" that ultimately will determine her interpretation of the text. She must resist the text's seduction by referring to her own field of experience, becoming what might be called an "unintended reader"—the reader the text is designed to mislead.

Pope claims that his intention in revising The Rape of the Lock is to complete the poem by adding the "Machinery." Rather than simply explaining the change, Pope uses the revisions as an excuse to position and define his female readers in such a way that their only recourse is to imagine themselves as male readers—to "immasculate" themselves. He explains to his uneducated female readers the workings of " Machinery," which he uses in imitation of the "ancient Poets," whose tendency to blow trivialities out of proportion is reminiscent of "modern Ladies." His audience for such a statement is not Arabella; rather it defines the readers as men who will appreciate the joke. When he explains the "hard Words" that women readers probably will not understand, this "male" laughter increases. The resisting reader knows, however, that Pope's humor illustrates the fact that women did not know the esoteric terminology of epic machinery because they were denied the opportunity to learn it. Only a small percentage of Pope's female readers could have had any training in the classics. Pope is not doing women readers a favor; he is openly ridiculing women for a lack created by the patriarchal society he represents and inviting all his readers to join in his misogyny. The laughter becomes louder as the "lessons" continue. Pope cannot identify his Rosicrucian source without a condescending reference to women's novel-reading, an activity that has made them so silly they might read non-fiction with a novelistic title and not know the difference.

Buried near the end of the letter is Pope's most revealing comment—a comment that ties him, and his poem, to [what Ellen Pollak calls] the eighteenth-century "cult of passive womanhood." His linking of Belinda to the Sylphs can be read as a warning to all women that they will only enjoy the protection of male society as long as they co-operate in the "inviolable preservation" of their chastity. The woman who strays loses the protection of the same society that led her astray in the first place.

Ironically, it is the strength of Pope's determination to preserve the status quo that most clearly reveals his weakness. He does not insult woman because she is inferior but because he fears the power her "otherness" symbolizes—those "secret Truths" known only to "Maids and Children." The site of her chastity is a dark place that men can only visit, leaving fragments of themselves and getting momentary pleasure in return. Woman's "chastity" represents a gap in her access to the mysterious powers of Nature. As long as she is kept chaste, the object of male desire, woman cannot know her own innate power as subject. If, as Sherry Ortner convincingly asserts [in "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture, and Society, 1974], "Culture" is associated with the male and "Nature" with the female, the greatest fear of a phallocentric Culture, with only a tenuous hold on its power, must be that Nature will someday regain her supremacy. This is why Pope must stress such points as the artificiality of Belinda's "purer" blushes, created by rouge, not by Nature. It is crucial that woman be separated from Nature—kept in her place, threatened with ostracism, convinced of her ignorance, denied knowledge of her strength beyond cultural forms.

Once the phallocentric code of Pope's letter has been broken, reading the text of the poem itself produces a field of meaning quite different from the traditional interpretation. Rather than identifying with the "hero" who restores order to the (male) text and disapproving of Belinda, as the immasculated reader might have done, the deimmasculated reader's allegiance is reversed. She no longer reads against herself as "other" but with Belinda, the "other" against whom Pope writes.

To read "with" Belinda is difficult—everything in Pope's poem resists such reading—yet such a reading can reveal what Patrocinio Schweickart calls the "dual hermeneutic" of feminist reader-response: "a negative hermeneutic that discloses [male writers'] complicity with patriarchal ideology, and a positive hermeneutic that recuperates the Utopian moment …from which they draw a significant portion of their emotional power." In Pope, the feminist negative hermeneutic is quite easily deployed because, in part, the mock-epic is a layered text that self-consciously uses its own negative moment satirically. In mock-epic, one layer, the "story" (or stories), is applied on top of a second, the "epic" implied by the form of the "discourse." In The Rape of the Lock, the primary story concerns an attack on the person of the vain Belinda, who worships at the altar of her toilet. Belinda goes on a day's outing—after spending hours in preparation. She expects a relaxing day of cards and gossip. In the midst of an innocent game of ombre, Belinda is attacked by an "admirer" who snips off one of her locks—one of two designed to show off her "smooth Iv'ry Neck." Pandemonium reigns. Belinda demands the return of the lock; she appeals to her foppish beau, Sir Plume, for assistance, but he, of the "unthinking Face," can only rap his snuffbox and mumble to himself. Ultimately, after much ado about nothing the lock rises magically into the heavens, to inscribe "mid'st the Stars" the name of Belinda. The uppity woman is put in her place; the status quo is restored.

At the level of the discourse, however, this rather unextraordinary plot is elevated to a higher plane. Belinda is not an ordinary woman but an earthly goddess, watched over by a "Guardian Sylph," who is able to enlist the aid of all modes of divine "machinery." From the Vergilian invocation ("What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, / What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things, / I sing") to the Ovidian metamorphosis of the lock at the end of the poem, Pope superimposes the trivial story of Belinda onto the classical epic format. Belinda's toilet, for instance, has religious significance and magical powers. As Aeneas was "armed" with the power to conquer his enemies, so Belinda is armed with "Files of Pins" that "extend their shining Rows" and regiments of "Puffs, Powder, Patches, Bibles, [and] Billet-doux." As Aeneas was protected by his shield, Belinda is protected by her petticoats—a "sev'nfold Fence," "arm'd with Ribs of Whale." Canto III contains the epic digression of the Games, followed by the fatal attack on the lock that forces Belinda (as Achilles was forced by the death of Patroclus) to take arms and rally her troops against the sea of trouble stirred up by her attacker. Canto V is the final battle:

Fans clap, Silks rustle, and tough Whalebones crack;
Heroes' and Heroines' shouts confus' dly rise,
And bass and treble Voices strike the Skies.
No common Weapons in their Hands are found;
Like Gods they fight, nor dread a mortal Wound.

Finally, the gods intervene and, in imitation of the story of Romulus who ascended to the heavens during a rainstorm, carry the sacred lock heavenward.

On this level, the story is trite; attaching it to a classical form of discourse makes it seem even more superficial. Society has proved to be vain, frivolous, wasteful, lazy, and shallow. Waging "war" over a lock of hair highlights the effeminate character of a social system peopled by emasculated men and uppity women, all of whom have forgotten their "natural" places. The popularity of The Rape of the Lock has lasted for nearly three centuries because of Pope's masterful use of the heroic couplet, because of the cleverness with which he layered the trivial, momentary story onto the universal, timeless epic, and because the poem is based on a phallogocentric "joke" that readers of both sexes have been taught to understand as "funny"—a reading perpetuated in the twentieth century by the New Critics. Cleanth Brooks, for example, suggests that Belinda's "histrionics" are merely a "passing show, the product of an overwrought virginal mind whose hypocrisies her male admirers …can afford to treat with humorous indulgence."

The negative satirical reading of Pope's poem, however, can be resisted by a self-conscious feminist reading that aims, through its negative hermeneutic, to uncover the more or less unconscious misogyny that governs The Rape of the Lock. The immasculated reader is easily seduced by Pope's phallogocentric satire. Taught to read as a man, she unwittingly elevates "male difference" to the level of "universality" and reduces "female difference" to "otherness" (Schweickart). Because her interpretation of the text is regulated by her need to belong to a male-dominated academic/intellectual community, she reads against her self—against her otherness. In reading The Rape of the Lock the immasculated reader identifies with the "hero" who restores order to the (male) text, rather than with Belinda, the other who refuses to be silent. Even the most "liberated" immasculated reader may be victimized by her own liberation. Belinda is, after all, hardly a sympathetic figure—she is the epitome of unliberated womanhood; her values run counter to any sort of "feminist" ideology. Perhaps, in some way, she deserves what she gets. By thus indicting Belinda's otherness, condoning her loss of power, the immasculated reader increases her own lack of power. She participates, figuratively, in her own castration.

The feminist reader must develop an even more powerful instrument than the "lost" phallus—a double-edged sword with which she can resist the text's intention and read it from both phallocentric and gynocentric perspectives. Just as the coded "apology" of Pope's letter to Arabella can be understood beyond the literal apology, so the poem itself can be reread from the perspective of its heroine. By running her sword between the layers of the male text, the feminist reader can locate the sub-text(s) that evade the immasculated reader.

A feminist re-reading of The Rape of the Lock exposes a sub-text layered in between the primary story and the epic form of the discourse, a sub-text that articulates female power in its very otherness. Belinda, whose locks give her a great deal of power, is raped (with scissors) by a "hero" who lacks power. By figuratively castrating Belinda—the "other" who (at least in western culture) should lack power—the "hero" regains control of his society. This is the root of the phallogocentric joke: Belinda, the woman who has appropriated masculine power, is put in her place; the threat to the eighteenth century's "myth of passive womanhood" has been eliminated. From the feminist reader's perspective, however, the joke is not on Belinda but on the "man's man" who thinks he can destroy her power by merely cutting off an imaginary penis. Or, rather, there is no "joke" at all, but rather the marked difference between human desire (including blushes) and the narrow and life-denying range of possible articulations of that desire presented in the poem. Pope moves epic contests to the arena of sexual relations as a joke, but within this joke there is, I will argue, an unrealized "utopian" possibility of humanizing, by sexualizing, human relations.

Such lost possibilities are suggested by the very insistence of Pope's negative hermeneutic. The Rape of the Lock seems to be centered around an insignificant battle in the war between the sexes. Both men and women characters are made to look foolish; no one is actually hurt physically. But that center does not hold: the "joke" is played out at the expense of Belinda, and all women who forget their "places"; the underlying message of the joke is deadly serious. Belinda has learned well the lessons taught her by a male-dominated society. She is vain, lazy, superficial, and artificial. She knows it is only her outward appearance in which men are interested, and she gains power by making herself as attractive an object as possible. Like the women Luce Irigaray describes in This Sex Which is Not One, Belinda has been conditioned to believe that "the penis [is] the only sexual organ of recognized value," and, thus, she has taken advantage of "every means available to appropriate that organ for herself." She knows that her power lies in an outward display of sexuality, figuratively represented by two locks which "graceful hung behind"; Pope's negative hermeneutic is grotesque in its insistence: rather than one sex organ, Belinda has grown two. Like the "universal," supposedly "ungendered" reader Pope's discourse implies, she not only has the sexual power of the female, but she has appropriated that of the male as well.

Such grotesquery calls for the "mock" violence of the poem, which reveals the powerful violence that is the price of the "universal" man lurking below the joke: the Baron, the hero who refeminizes Belinda and restores the fictive community to its "rightful" order, is applauded for his action because his victim "asks for it." Such violence is so usual that a critic like Brooks can say, "Pope knows that the rape has in it more of compliment than of insult." In this way, in mockery, we are taught that the Baron is not "predestined to be a rake at heart"; he is just momentarily overwhelmed by Belinda's female beauty, which Pope feared as a form of "sexual aggression," believing that female sexuality inspired desire in members of both sexes.

But rape is not a "compliment"; it is, as Margaret Higonnet asserts [in "Speaking Silences: Women's Suicide," in The Female Body in Western Culture], an attempt to destroy a woman by attacking the thing that gives her her identity as a woman:

Much like love or lost love, rape has been affiliated with the breakdown of a woman's identity. The focus on chastity, of course, involves that precisely which distinguishes woman as woman, and does so in terms of possession by a man, fetishistically. If woman is taken to be a commodity, rape means total devaluation: reified, then stolen, she has no essence left to justify her continuing existence.

The "hero" realizes that the only way he can possess the most prized possession of the powerful Belinda is through "Fraud or Force"—a solution Pope (and his masculine and immasculated readers) presumably condoned. The Baron takes out his scissors—an instrument that unites in its design the phallus (closed) and the vagina (opened). Imitating his version of the female power he so fears—the woman who can cut him off from Nature, just by closing her legs together—the Baron "spreads the glitt'ring Forfex wide, / T'inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide." In a sort of reverse rape, the hero castrates the too-powerful female, returning her to a position of powerlessness. She will not even be allowed to retain the remaining lock, which now hangs limp and "the fatal Shears demands." What the negative hermeneutic reveals is a kind of Hobbesian reduction of all nature to warfare, all power to control.

Toward the end of the poem, the "nymph" Clarissa steps forward to deliver a sermon on the theme of carpe diem, reminding Belinda that

To patch, nay ogle, might become a Saint,
Nor could it sure be such a Sin to paint.
But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay,
Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey;
Since painted or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid;
What then remains, but well our pow'r to use,
And keep good Humour still whate'er we lose?

This would seem to be a good lesson—why should women worry about anything so silly as their hair? And from the male perspective—in this world of war of all against all—it is silly. Men grow more powerful with age; grey hair becomes a sign of maturity, experience and increased value. When a woman's hair changes to grey, however, she loses value in the eyes of those same men. She is old, used up, less valuable as a commodity. It is not the lesson of carpe diem but that of the age-old double standard that Clarissa's speech teaches and Pope's readers have accepted. Jove, the male god (of course), is sent to decide the fate of Belinda and her lock. He "[w]eighs the Men's Wits against the Lady's Hair; / The doubtful Beam long nods from side to side; / At length the Wits mount up, the Hairs subside." In defiance, the women still insist on the return of the lock, but Jove's "machinery" intercedes to remove it permanently from woman's grasp. The raped lock will hang forever in the heavens, a "universal," unattainable prize. Intended to remind women of Belinda's heavenly reprimand, the astro-lock becomes, for the resisting reader, a symbol of the lengths to which the guardians of a phallocentric culture will go to retain control of the "sex which is not one."

This reading of The Rape of the Lock as a story of reverse penis envy is "resistant" in that it turns the violence and almost palpable misogyny of the poem back on itself. Thus, it is hard to imagine how a positive and sympathetic feminist reading might recuperate a more generous vision of human life in Pope's narrative. Readers could, as Fetterley says, identify with the male power of Pope's world, but now more widely conceived in its "utopian power." That is, the feminist reader can find within Pope's mocking violence the possibility of imaging "nature" very different from the dominant discourse of Pope's age. Such a reading is negative in that it seeks to outline "the thing which was not" (to quote Swift's Houyhnhnms) in the way Pope saw the would—but in imaging a sexual rather than a bloody epic as the overriding metaphor for human life (as Blake did later in the century), it is possible in Schweickart's "utopian" sense. In other words, the very fact that Pope translates epic warfare into sexual warfare contains within it the possibility of reconceiving human life and "nature" in terms of "utopian" love rather than universal strife. Of course, Pope literally cannot conceive of such a reading, but a feminist rereading can apply a positive hermeneutic even to Pope.

Such a reading suggests what Schweickart calls "domination-free discourse." In her essay "Engendering Critical Discourse," Schweickart re-evaluates, from a feminist perspective, the "ideal speech situation" outlined by Jürgen Habermas in "Wahrheitstheorien." According to Habermas, the ideal speech situation exists if "the opportunity to select and employ speech acts [is] equitably distributed among all the participants of the discourse," with "no internal or external structures that impose nonreciprocal obligations on the participants or allow some of them to dominate others"; and if there are no "constraints on communication …[e]verything—specific assertions, theoretical explanations, language-systems, and theories of knowledge—must be open to question." The result of discourse occurring under these circumstances is, Hebermas believes, as close to truth (or at least true consensus) as it is possible to come.

The difficulty Schweickart finds in this model is that it is based on the ideals of the Enlightenment, with the "universality" that is the foundation of Pope's irony:

It links rationality and truth with liberty, equality …and fraternity. It is, in short, an ideal that has been abstracted from the discourse of the brotherhood …[embodying] masculine interests and intuitions—a masculine sense of self and the intersubjectivity or man-to-man relationships.

Habermas, like Pope and most male reader-response theorists, supposes a commonality of knowledge, a supposition that does not take into account the question of sexual difference. In the critical discourse surrounding reader-response theory, gender must be recognized as [what Schweikart calls] a "locus both of difference and power" in the act of interpretation. Sexual difference must be acknowledged as legitimate grounds for literary interpretation; the power of validation must be distributed equally among all participants. The recognition of gender as a major factor in the reading process will help capture at least a glimmer of a different world—Schweickart's "utopian moment." It will also help generate the kind of "playful pluralism" Kolodny sees as crucial to recognizing the "various systems of meaning and their interaction" within a text. Such pluralism will not only aid in the de-immasculation of women readers but will help make up for anything that might be lacking in the male reader's reading experience as well.