SOURCE: “The Bifurcated Female Space of Desire: Shelley's Confrontation with Language and Silence,” in Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism, edited by Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, pp. 92-109.

[In the following essay, Claridge investigates Shelley's use of a female poetic voice in Alastor, The Cenci, and Epipsychidion.]

In The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope sets out to rape Belinda/Arabella of her threatening excess of meaning—the artifice out of which she creates herself—and to make her into a virgin, a blank page. Paradoxically, that is, accession to eighteenth-century male society will “virginalize” her, the female equivalent in this poem to the castration that Pope fears to be the potential of the art-full female. Such a dangerous creature explodes beyond the law, beyond the word, and she embodies a jouissance capable of taking its pleasures in a lapdog or a husband—the differences notwithstanding. Popean, or conservative, fear suggests the male Augustan writer's tendency to bring the woman back within the law, to achieve comedic endings.¹ The canonized British Romantic poets, however, attempt by and large to use this mythical unbridled female power as a space that engenders authentic poetic voice, a method that allowed for the enabling literary illusion that the male poet could pass over his father, over the Law of language that bound him to a tradition unable to speak his infinite (and therefore inevitably fragmentary) desire. There are two obvious dangers to such an experiment: (1) The poet can mystify “woman” so that the female as goddess becomes the hidden theme; and (2) he can appropriate the female in his quest for a male self-definition that incorporates what he sees as his opposite.²

Certainly, Wordsworth might seem to approach a “closet” deification of the female. Though it did not produce a feminist poet, however, the complexity of his attraction to the female, coupled with his Romantic revolutionary impulse, produced a sexually sensitive one who would take the possibility of the virgin, of the blank page, as a potent form in which to envision the language of desire, a language of original and—the penultimate oxymoron—procreative virginal capacities. The whiteness of Emily in The White Doe of Rylstone and the transparency of Idonea in The Borderers, both women loyal to fathers who though clearly loving are obviously their moral or intellectual inferiors (with the narrative deliberately creating this imbalance), prefigure Shelley's Beatrice and Byron's suggestion of the-woman-in-Juan in Don Juan. These figures all function as a transparent medium through which corrupt meaning enacts itself even as the medium begins to point to an uncorrupt moment of silence beyond all fathers and beyond all lawful desire; they approach, that is, a Romantic jouissance, exceeding what language can accomplish, even as it is important that a fidelity to the law help actualize this new silent language. I would hold that, as a rule, the Romantic poets neither mystify nor appropriate the female (though Wordsworth comes fairly close); they usefully invoke her potential as function of meaning, as signifier of cultural contradiction instead. Exciting feminist critique of just this tendency is currently under way, with Anne Mellor's already well-established volume on feminism and Romanticism having provided crucial paths to explore.³ I therefore want to situate my own discourse as deliberately swerving from such significant and even redefinitive analyses, much of which would maintain the dependence upon appropriation of the female for production of the male Romantic ego or consciousness. There is yet another way to conceive of the textual play of gender in Shelley's poetry, for example, a negotiation of voice that might be present in the other male literary lions of the period as well—though a matter to be pursued outside the confines of this essay. I wish to posit that Shelley explores ways to escape “maleness” through trying to articulate that part of “femaleness” which remains (he mythologizes) outside the “benefits” of the patriarchal language that he would disavow.

Percy Shelley may well be the Romantic poet who takes fullest advantage of the opportunities open to male writers who can hypostatize the female as a bisexuality that seeks “the (w)hole phallic thing” while dependent upon difference and distinction, a kind of impossible desire that has it both ways. In a reciprocal sexual economy, Shelley speaks the female—in hopes that she will voice him—as functional conduit of meaning, as a marker of the inevitable slippage of meaning that inheres in language, even as we assure ourselves of having fixed the terms of our match between mental intention and graphic or oral representation. In the remainder of this essay, I shall follow Paul Fry's suggestive observation that “In the Defence, and everywhere in the poetry too, there is much that could be called a Lacanian psycholinguistics in embryo.”⁴ We can conceptualize, for instance, Shelley's use of the female in terms of Lacan's paradigm of the phallus: Both posit that their chosen representational mark is not distinctly gender-bound but functional instead, intersecting with the gender it appears to replicate only insomuch as resonances of that gender strengthen our understanding of its bisexual inscription. The phallus, insists Lacan, is not the same as penis, but as representation of that which everyone wants and no one has, its suggestions of male sexuality remind us of (1) the pressure of the Father's Law in patriarchal cultures, and (2) the repetitive nature of desire as tumescence versus detumescence: the metonymic condition of being. Woman, as Shelley uses the figure in much of his poetry, represents the limits of exerting pressure against an irretrievably inflected, unoriginal language: Woman as function enacts a desire whose possession of the absent phallus seems more plausible than that of a man's chance, and whose incongruity—the woman as phallus, or with phallus—threatens (the poet ecstatically hopes) to penetrate as other-than-the-father the very limits of patriarchal language. Thus Shelley uses this representation of woman to get himself to another place—the closest to a space anterior to language that he can achieve and still remain a poet.

I now wish to suggest the ways in which the females help to engender poetic voice in three texts by Shelley: the early Alastor and the more mature works, The Cenci and Epipsychidion, all of which record the poet's near obsession with achieving self-expression through language that is inevitably inauthentic and anterior, at the same moment that it is self-constitutive. Most recent attempts (brilliantly in such cases as Susan Brisman, Jerrold Hogle, Daniel Hughes, William Keach, and Stuart Peterfreund) to deal with these linguistic concerns have concentrated upon Shelley's belief in the metaphoricity of language and origin. I instead want to locate moments where Shelley applies women to the task of helping him to escape the patriarchy of language, as he explores the production of meaning through a double rendering of the female, who will function as both saturated and empty signifiers;⁵ and I wish thereby to imply, incidentally, the danger of feminist criticism that would take as its major operative term the guilt of male authors who “use” the idea of woman as enabling them to write. Without relying upon the obvious possibilities of androgyny or homosexuality as good fights, at least, against patriarchy, Shelley shores his battle for poetic freedom upon a refusal to thematize consistently the female as a maternal space of preoedipal bliss, in a position prior to the eruption of the Law.

Alastor is the quintessential Romantic poem of death and desire. It is also the text that puts most clearly into relief the dilemma of the poet abdicating his claim to a social, phallic voice in order to remain true to himself—and not, as some recent critics might suggest, merely to relocate himself on the side of the mother, in a preoedipal world which, Shelley knows better than such readers, is itself already implicated in the genealogies of language. In Alastor, Shelley alerts us as early as 1815 that he is willing to embrace Hegel's Pyrrhic victory of mastery over the slave by killing that slave—language. Yet the death the poet seeks is not that entanglement of treachery and despair which some psychologies of the text have suggested but a final location of jouissance.⁶

Citing the omission of fire in Shelley's cataloguing of the elements as the narrator invokes Mother Nature, Harold Bloom concludes that Shelley as narrator-poet was assuming the identity of the fire; he is brother to the other elements.⁷ Fire becomes for Alastor's narrator-poet an emblem of maleness, a phallic giver of life—an equivalent of the fictional poet's real-life creator. Thus there is mutual illumination of both character and creation through the conspicuous absence of fire in the invocation. The conflation of fire and phallus is an easy one, with the waxing and waning of both objects, with their penetration of darkness. Since the Mother does not possess the phallus, it is the poet's potential gift to her. But there is always the suggestion of indebtedness that clings to fire and phallus; the Promethean son stole it from the gods. The Law continues to step in and thwart the “lover's” offering, so that finally neither nature nor the male poet can arrogate this originating metaphor without acknowledging its belated possession, its diminished authority. Shelley is different from Wordsworth in accepting that a male poet lacks the phallus as does the mother; it is Wordsworth's covert awareness of this dilemma that provokes the greatest tension in his corpus, but in Shelley the knowledge underwrites the poetry's dominant structure versus its status as Wordsworthian subtext.

Alastor's living poet (the narrator left behind to record the vision of the true, solitary poet) will use as the necessary fiction to engender his pen the belief that he is a poet-son who achieves the big bang of death, who gives his mother the fiery phallus and therefore antedates the father:

          Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favor my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries.

[18-23]⁸

The narrator tells of strange encounters with the vagaries of death, all calculated to give answers to primal questions “of what we are” (29). His search for knowledge has been mixed “With my most innocent love, until strange tears / Uniting with those breathless kisses, made / Such magic as compels the charmed night / To render up thy charge” (34-37). The erotic language points to the typical Shelleyan linkage of sex and death. In death, one transcends the Father as mediator and achieves instant union of subject and object. Thus sexual union (the collapse of ego boundaries in the orgasm of love) assumes its metaphorical function for outsmarting language and creating original meaning.

Shelley offers in Alastor two alternatives: the dead poet's quest for reunion with an earlier and unalienated self that in its refusal to be overruled by the father will conflagrate in death; or the narrator's borrowed existence as a poet, framing another's story in a language inherited—but at least alive. The initial engendering of the narrator's voice is his attempt to give the phallus to the mother (Mother Earth at the poem's beginning), to develop a rationale for needing to write: a space that would seem to call for the presence of his pen. Thus the potency of the female-outside-the-Law (what much French-inspired feminism might talk of as the semiotic or fluid maternal space) at first appears necessary for Shelley to enact his appropriation of language, of what we typically term the patriarchal space of writing or, even, the tradition. I will suggest that Shelley instead recognizes quickly that his writing depends upon a more complex myth of a female both already full and simultaneously empty: lacking the phallus, yet constituted by it (in language).

In opposition to the authorial tradition of writing the woman, inscribing her, much of British Romantic poetry acknowledges the urgency to write for her, to her, not to gain access to a magical, maternal moment but quite the reverse: to gain access to the order of language. It is as if Shelley entertains the one momentous possibility that recent feminist criticism and psychoanalytic theory rarely consider: Woman—as well as man—may “be” language and Law, precisely because she (as he) lacks the phallus, is in a constant state of desire. The very collusion of procreative biological powers with social powers of language (powers of the pen[is]) might well be too much for either women or men to entertain given the apparently intractable preference to construct theories based on binary oppositions of separate powers. What if woman does have it all—and thus the virulent discrimination against her throughout culture? But then again, what if man has it all too? In both cases, I’m suggesting, however oddly, that we translate the psychoanalytic truth that neither male nor female has the phallus into the possibility that both genders can pretend to having it.

The preface to Alastor emphasizes a dialectic of desire that moves from the child stage of object relations to the human desire born when the infant enters the symbolic world of the cultural father:

So long as it is possible for his desires to point towards objects thus infinite and unmeasured, he is joyous, and tranquil, and self-possessed. But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length suddenly awakened and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves. … He seeks in vain for a prototype of his conception. Blasted by his disappointment, he descends to an untimely grave.

Nonetheless, of greater importance to the possibility of poetic vocation that Shelley was working out than the solitary poet is the poet-left-behind, the inauthentic poet. Enslaved by language, he notes (with words, of course) the sleep that the authentic poet images even in death (701)—and if we connect this sleep with that which prevented annihilation with the veiled maid, we have a conflation of identities and subjects that manages to contain it all: a dead “real” poet who never writes, who knows the consummation of death, but who is survived by a mirrored poet in language who keeps the real poet's desire alive—by repeating the dead poet's desire even as he strives to record it.

Shelley's Augustinian epigraph to Alastor—“Not yet did I love, and I loved to love. I sought what I should love, loving to love”—expresses the drama of desire that becomes, after the text turns from the Mother, the narrative motor of this poem. “Loving to love” or desiring desire ensures that desire infinite life. Complete consummation kills it. When Shelley translates consummation of desire into consummating his desire of the Other, the Law, he reaches the silence of death that is the end of Alastor. Articulating one's own desire fully is proof of authenticity in Alastor. The narrator-poet may be a scribe for another, but the vision that attends the solitary poet in his sleep is an extraordinary expression of one's encountering one's own desire, a therapeutic session that would have been a triumph for Lacan himself; and for Shelley, a complicating of the earlier myth of desire for the Mother. When the poet questor's “strong heart” sinks and “sicken[s] with excess of love” (181), as he gazes upon the visionary maid of the “ineffable tale” (168), we can do far better than to note the classic description of narcissism. What is more important as this passage constitutes a poet or enables a voice—perhaps even an entire poetics—is the extent to which the epipsychidion union becomes an ascesis even as it becomes a saturation; it becomes a blanking out of the word, of meaning, even at the moment of one's apparent achieving of selfhood. And the agent of this poetic enabling, the creation of the blank page, is a woman. The blank page that we often lament as the mark of woman's blotting out by literary history rebounds as the very source of poetic strength in Shelley, and not, I hasten to add, as the back over which he must climb to write as a freed man. Regardless of Shelley's failures in his real life as a feminist, he liberates gender in his poetic use of it.

This poet must encounter his own desire in a female form because the mythic female both escapes the phallus and retains it; she gives birth to the word as a procreative agent even as she can refuse to name the father of that word; she escapes the phallus precisely because she admits her castration more dramatically than does the equally castrated male. Furthermore, the “veiled maiden” teaches the narrator two conflicting truths about desire: that there is only lack behind the veil, a lack which is the very form and content of language itself, the vehicle and tenor; but that at the same time, if language is desire, that desire can, at the unconscious or dream-world level, know itself as its own and cease talking. Thus the need for the two poets of this story: One keeps talking at the end (similar to the Julian in that other frame tale, Julian and Maddalo), and the other is silenced (as is Julian's madman, entombed with his female half). Negotiating his desire in his own way at a level that escapes language, the mute poet of Alastor yet achieves articulation. The Arab maid who visits the solitary poet (ten lines before his vision of the veiled maid) was merely Real—carrying food from her father's tent and made of the very flesh and blood Shelley would later disavow as bearing upon Epipsychidion, a poem he nonetheless acknowledged as autobiographical. The Real is never enough, for it is only a part of the equation of desire; the Real is acted out in the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, those orders which constitute desire even as the Real passes through their defiles. Still, if the Real is necessary to constitute desire, desire is necessary to stutter at—to repeat—the act of articulating the Real. So it is that Shelley the poet seeks for his poetic persona a figure that collapses the Imaginary and Symbolic modes of coming to one's identity: This female figure is not a sentimentalized other half, completing an organic whole, but the Lacanian Other where mother and father intersect, the Law encompassing both, even as each depends upon a mirrored ego to become a subject.

The Imaginary by itself represents a regression, a return to Mother Earth; the Symbolic, a too easy accession to tradition and the chains of language. Combining the two, we have the sexualized veiled woman of Alastor, who will urge the poet to his conflagratory end—the consummation of silence—but who will pull back beneath the cover of the veil just in time, so that her yielding becomes illusory as her substantiality “dissolves”: The poet will still be left yearning.

He reared his shuddering limbs and quelled
His gasping breath, and spread his arms to meet
Her panting bosom: … she drew back a while,
Then, yielding to the irresistable joy,
With frantic gesture and short breathless cry
Folded his frame in her dissolving arms.
Now blackness veiled his dizzy eyes, and night
Involved and swallowed up the vision; sleep,
Like a dark flood suspended in its course,
Rolled back its impulse on his vacant brain.

[182-91]

It is precisely this tease of near consummation that impels the solitary poet forward “eagerly” to pursue “Beyond the realms of dream that fleeting shade” (205). Shelley foregrounds the literary association of “dying” and sexual orgasm in the question immediately subsequent to his “Does … death / Conduct to thy mysterious paradise, / O Sleep?” (211-13). That is, the dream maiden is the visionary's desire, his excess of self-love, that, once consummated and dying in its own way, will not have to repeat itself (to enter language) again. But Shelley would never have it quite this simple, so that even the sexual “dying” is withheld, in order to leave room for the conclusion, imbricated with both poetic authenticity and indebtedness: The “true” poet in his death-in-sleep will be outlived by the poet framer, the poet in language at the end.

What is exciting about the way Shelley situates the female is precisely his lack of gender thematizing. It is the epipsyche who helps him get beyond language, and since he assumes a heterosexual perspective, for him that epipsyche will be female. From this perspective, a woman, presumably, would have access to a space that would liberate her too—to the heterosexual woman, this space would be male. In this manner, Shelley complicates the current critical implication that male equals patriarchy and female an innocence of it. Such an equation has led to the notion that to undo the bonds of language and patriarchy one need only “write as a woman” (whatever that is) or “write in the place of woman” (wherever that is). Shelley plots his escape by writing from a projection of the fantasized self outside the ego, the displacement of excess self-love that Freud insists underlies any love of another and that Shelley locates in the epipsyche.

If the visionary maid in Alastor allows Shelley to experiment with a “pure” achievement of self, Beatrice in The Cenci is a philosophical compromise who presents the paradox of desire and the moral poet's dilemma. In the Defence, Shelley clearly states the extraordinary power he accords the imagination as the great instrument of moral good: “Imagination is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion.” But where Beatrice's imagination fails (if we can even admit failure in the face of what she suffers) is in allowing itself to be robbed of its singularity through the insistence of a Jupiter-like patriarchal language, a language of curse that in Prometheus Unbound must be unsaid. Trapped in language that becomes more and more ominously metaphoric for the patriarchy that controls the world of this play, Beatrice is part of a master-slave dialectic that makes escape from contamination impossible for anyone. “And what a tyrant thou art, / And what slaves these; and what a world we make, / The oppressor and the oppressed” (5.3.73-75). Yet, to the extent that the woman gives up her femaleness (the blank page that lacks the phallus and, in Shelley's poetics, thereby has a greater chance at authentic voice than the male) and assumes the phallus, she loses.

It is not the literal rape, however, the penis, that undoes Beatrice; Shelley's drama depends upon this point: She is pure until she accedes to the phallus instead, a patriarchal language of revenge.⁹ Shelley believes that Beatrice has a chance to be neither oppressor nor oppressed and that she gets caught up in the cycle anyway. Still, different from her oppressors, Beatrice encounters a particular end: She will become the virgin that Pope thought he wanted Belinda to become, that he hoped would castrate her of the threatening excess artifice. A blank page on which no one else can write except as on a palimpsest, Beatrice is another Romantic transparent signifier, through which all things pass but which never results in the final meaning that tormentors such as Count Cenci would locate in her. Beatrice (like Emily in Wordsworth's White Doe), betrayed by the men all around her and by a political system that betrays them as well, becomes silent. It seems an odd value system that privileges silence, but certainly it is one familiar to twentieth-century artists—to Samuel Beckett, to the musician John Cage, even to James Joyce, whose violent forcing and contorting of language finally share a real affinity with Shelley's pushing of language to its limits in order to experience the saturation of silence, the first moment subsequent to jouissance. It is in the violated woman of The Cenci that Shelley locates this purity.

Shelley's task in The Cenci is to unname the father, just as it was in Prometheus Unbound, a play he left after act 3 in order to write The Cenci, before concluding his cosmic epic of unsaying the chains of language. Naming, of course, carries extraordinary weight to Shelley; it is the secular equivalent of divinity, as his Defence, if nothing else, makes clear. By refusing to name the rape, both author and Beatrice escape a certain slippage of self that always occurs in the castration of language. Unspeaking the word represents to Shelley an individual's truest integration with an unstained world. To name is to acknowledge, and if Shelley at once identifies the poet as true legislator of the universe in Plato's sense in the Cratylus—that is, legislator as namer—he at the same time affects a provocative textual speed and accretion of wrenched images¹⁰ aimed at foregrounding the metaphoricity of language. Such a style so effectively at the same time defamiliarizes language that he gives the illusion, at least, of an unnaming of the old and a creation of a blank page that enables, not enervates.

Shelley appears to be saying, we must become as woman, not gender but function, which term he defines only as possible when one can unname the language that would seem to pin down, rather than uplift. And the first step in that unnaming involves emasculating language of its pretense at full signification. “What are the words which you would have me speak,” Beatrice asks Lucretia:

                                                            I, whose thought
Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up
In its own formless horror. Of all words,
That minister to mortal intercourse,
Which wouldst thou hear? For there is none to tell
My misery …

[3.109-14]

Even as Beatrice is penetrated, she remains transparent, no mere vessel to contain the phallus but structured somewhere else—the Lacanian equivalent of “in another place”—in a desire that effectively, fantastically—if only temporarily—escapes the phallus. She situates her desire in a singular way; and if it seems violent that she must be raped incestuously to be free, potentially, of patriarchy, remember that it is his own father, mythologically, who tortures Prometheus and whose penetration Prometheus must encounter and reject by becoming transparent to it, by allowing paternity to pass through him without fertilizing patriarchal procreation.

But in one important way this stain of patriarchy is necessary, for it allows Beatrice to assume her castration along with all subjects who would become part of the generation of language, of stories that have a reason to remain extant, of lives that still need to be lived. Until the organism achieves desire in its own way, total satisfaction is deferred and desire remains alive, to be told and retold, in a repetition that seeks satisfaction even as it knows that consummation will prove it no longer necessary. Beatrice is the newly translated veiled/unveiled maid from Alastor, who here takes up with the narrator-poet, rather than the poet questor, so that her murder of the father makes of her an erotic text still in need of writing. Similar to the poet left to tell the story of the dead one in Alastor, she becomes a signifier not yet so saturated that its independence can be total. In this drama of desire Shelley implicates us the audience even if against our will, so that the real function of the text is to determine not Beatrice's guilt or innocence but our own as readers and interpreters.¹¹ “It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered consists,” he says in his preface. Beatrice is dramatic because we contemplate her actions, because we interpret; we give meaning. Her saturation into silence in effect demands it. We become again that poet framer of Alastor, whose desire has not yet been recognized but who can at least stick around to tell the story of one whose desire, in this case, approaches knowing itself as authentically its own. As with Byron's Cain, for example, and actually as is true of so much Romantic poetry, renovation through interpretation seeks to displace the killing act of interpretation that merely repeats without understanding. The need constantly to interpret anew promises to keep poetry alive, as language becomes a new language if we choose to read with imagination—with desire—that escapes the patrilineage of old formulas.

If the female characters in Alastor primarily act out the voicing of a poet through silence, while Beatrice achieves through her suffering and subsequent parricide a kind of saturation that gestures toward undoing patriarchal speech, the slippage of such basically discrete functions which are often, though not always, programmatic in these poems becomes the economy driving one of Shelley's most complex invocations of the female, Emilia Viviani in Epipsychidion. Emily clearly embodies the two positions of language and silence in one person; but then, as I’ve deduced from Alastor and The Cenci, the two positions from which Shelley's poetic persona would write are one: They are both the poet who is writing this poem and the one who desires his desire to be recognized and fulfilled. Against language as guarantee of desire, then, and woman as the desire that binds the poet to the word or the real, we juxtapose again the silent female, the saturation of the Arab maid, or of Emily outside her prison. In fact, Emily is the veiled maiden whose total possession was denied the poet questor years before in Alastor, but who is now accessible because they both have doubled their identities in the expanded Shelleyan negotiation with silence and speech:

I stood, and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light:
I knew it was the Vision veiled from me
So many years—that it was Emily.

[341-44]

No words effect this vision; it is the satiation of the perfectly heard ineffable; but equally significant, it is penetration of the male through female fullness—the light; and through absence—the lack of patriarchal linguistic signifiers. This full-but-empty female merely figures the poet himself—with the benefit that a silent, spent poet cannot record his vision, and hence the sated, silent female stands in as his double, inscribing his vision through her silence, even as he inscribes her silence through his pen. This epipsyche becomes the medium of saturation, the recognition of desire and death, but with all the accretions of meaning that culture has bestowed upon “dying,” not least of which is the sexual suggestion of postorgasmic spentness. One of Lacan's favorite images, St. Thérèse in ecstasy, would function well as a Shelleyan epipsyche, either as her desire is recognized, in jouissance, or in the next moment, in which we envision the martyr's death. That a woman frequently refurbishes and recodes that spent desire, thus enabling poetic voice and vocation, testifies more to Shelley's sense of the bisexuality implicit in identity or desire than to any particular attention to gender. Gender and even sex work as helpful metaphors to en-gender the linguistic repetition of himself, of his desire, with Shelley becoming a poet as he writes. In some ways, Shelley may well be one of our least phallic writers, if we understand Lacan's rendering of phallus to mean all-knowing, all-powerful, promising closure. Lacan's belief that no one has the phallus—that both men and women are castrated—is a tenet, perhaps the major psychological premise, upon which Shelley's writing depends.

Thus Emilia, “Thou mirror” as the speaker addresses her, is the position to which Shelley aspires in Epipsychidion as the escape from the bondage of language. Yet those chains are necessary to leave behind the trace of the Real poet who has spoken. Shelley accepts the being-in-patriarchy necessary to engender voice as a condition for all poet-prophets, as Emily as epipsyche also equals poetry or language. There is Shelley himself—the authentic visionary—and his epipsyche, poetry, which records his vision. No preoedipal silence here: the woman, Emilia Viviani as occasion for this poem, forces what would be poetic silence instead to be recorded in the genealogy of language.

But how to make of language an instrument of great moral good? Epipsychidion is not a poem about flesh and blood; it is a poem about language and love and how the two are related. As Shelley writes John Gisborne, it is not his “own”—because it aims at knowledge of the Other where he comes into being. Listen to how the narrator addresses Emilia, or the “Sweet Spirit” of the poem's opening line: “too gentle to be human, / Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman / All that is insupportable in thee / Of light, and love, and immortality!” (21-24). Already we encounter the oddest of forms—irradiant, yet veiling something as well as radiating it; woman is merely the form. The speaker continues:

                                                                                Thou mirror,
In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!
Aye, even the dim words which obscure thee now
Flash, lightning-like, with unaccustomed glow.

[30-34]

Appearing to be contingent upon thought as prior to language, his dim words (which obscure the true poetry that the mirror's association with the sun suggests) are illuminated by the very radiance of the form that veils. What is flashing, lightninglike, however, is not a language that is renewed now that it is in touch with an essence or thought preceding words but because it cohabitates with the generative nature of desire. Here is the lack bred precisely at the juncture where words become inadequate for expressing “true” self, even as that untrue self constituted through the inadequacy is all there really is, imagining itself in the mirror to be whole now, and fractured before. If it were not for this illusion of the mirror, convincing us that we can be unified, coherent, and self-imaged, there would be no quest, no repetition, which is the psychic drive in the human, to have his or her desire recognized. The lack that both ensures the inauthenticity of self-identity and constitutes desire is the very stuff of which poetry, at least Romantic poetry, consists.

Language, or poetry, speaks of the repetition that Lacan redacts from Freud as the true aim of desire—to be recognized, not to be fulfilled. If consummation of desire were the true aim, there would be “a more efficient path than repeated insistence”; similarly, “if the goal of the death instinct were simply the reduction of all tension, it could surely find a quick path to death.”¹² For Lacan, desire must be conserved until it is recognized as such; and to be recognized, it must pursue its aim “only in its own fashion.” The particular achievement of Epipsychidion is its ability to have it both ways: for Emilia Viviani to represent desire confronted and desire deferred infinitely through the chains of language. In this paradox, Emily functions as antilanguage, the opposite of those chains of lead that would drag the lover/narrator and his ideal back to earth; yet the poem maintains at the same time the equation that Emily equals poetry. She either blanks out the word or assumes the rhythms of desire that would repeat themselves until recognized. But we must acknowledge that (outside of psychoanalytic status as a psychotic) there is no objective confirmation of one's desire going improperly recognized; it is the subject who makes that (inevitable) call. So we are led to inquire: Do those who desire have a stake in maintaining their desire as unrecognized? Is this the life principle—the only means of staving off death; is desire both eros and end?

Emily as metonymic desire itself, more than a metaphor of it, helps the speaker to write and to repeat and to interpret; the confusion and conflation of reference to past and present women significant to the narrator are the signifying chain that Emily puts into place, that her mythical position as enabler of voice allows to progress as poetic production of meaning. Lacan's perception about the intersection of deferral and desire in linguistic structures is suggestive: “the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it. As is seen at the level of the sentence when it is interrupted before the significant term: ‘I shall never …’” Such partial signification (all signification) still makes sense to us, “and all the more oppressively in that the meaning is content to make us wait for it.”¹³

Shelley brilliantly deploys Emily as the virgin pointing to the absence that makes us wait for full-fillment, even as he also uses her as an originating metaphor to signify yet the next female who will link with her as an endless conduit of meaning. The lover/narrator does not appropriate her in the silence of inscription that imprints the Cenci phallic act and, at times, a Wordsworthian defense: “I am not thine: I am a part of thee” (52), he claims instead. She lures him “Towards sweet Death” because she threatens to satisfy him, to allow him a recognition of his desire that ends the need for repetition, just as the visionary maid enacts in Alastor, where the poet who sees himself potentially unveiled loses the justification ever to speak. Hence it is the paradox of poets whose desire would be recognized that in such consummation is their death, the end of the need to repeat. Emily—or rather the feminist Ideal of Intellectual Beauty¹⁴ for which Emily becomes the signifier—produces a synaesthesis, a saturation of meaning:

Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress
And her loose hair; and where some heavy trees
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;
And in the soul a wild odour is felt,
Beyond the sense […] a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
And motion which may change but cannot die; …
          A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning;
A Vision like incarnate April, warning,
With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy
Into his summer grave.

[105-14; 120-23]

Significantly, the speaker follows this conceit with “What have I dared? where am I lifted? how / shall I descend, and perish not?” (124-25). This last line implies what is at stake: to descend from the regions of the skylark (where Emilia can transport him) places him back in language while it bars his “true” song; and, through coding the anxiety in a question, it implies the truth about the nature of survival as a poetic voice: language the enabler, as it leaves the poet a story to tell. For, once again, the narrator of this poem pursues not meaning but a conveyor of meaning. Rather, he seeks both, but he knows that to rest in achieved meaning is to stop writing; one need not deliver the whole truth more than once.¹⁵

In fact, in this poem the radiancy of the Intellectual Ideal Beauty protects against achieved, saturated meaning as well as potentially effecting it: She is too bright to penetrate. “She met me, robed in such exceeding glory, / That I beheld her not” (199-200); her voice comes to him from “the fountains, and the odours deep / Of flowers”; from breezes, rain, bird song, from “all sounds, all silence” (206-9), “in form, / Sound, colour—in whatever checks that Storm / Which with the shattered present chokes the past” (210-12): all conveyors of meaning, bearers of the word, though still Barers of the word, and barrers of the word that would claim to have penetrated to the bottom of things. Emily may be locked in a prison, but true Love can never be barred, and woman as linguistic signifier simultaneously, impossibly, functions here as metaphor for that which cannot be barred even as she cannot be penetrated meaning-fully against her will:

The walls are high, the gates are strong, …
                              … but true Love never yet
Was thus constrained: It overleaps all fence:
Like lightning, with invisible violence
Piercing its continents; like Heaven's free breath,
Which he who grasps can hold not. …

[396-401]

The tension created by Shelley's valuing of opposites and explosion of Western logic is perhaps the primary energy informing his work. Certainly, the ferocity with which a union of souls can bypass the ordinary productions of meaning attracts the visionary narrator, as he can approach infinity through it:

We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?
One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,
Till like two meteors of expanding flame,
Those spheres instinct with it become the same,
Touch, mingle, are transfigured; ever still
Burning, yet ever inconsumable:
In one another's substance finding food.

[573-80]

When, however, this union threatens to achieve precisely what the one who desires thinks he wants, consummation—“One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, / And one annihilation” (586-87)—the narrator exclaims, “Woe is me!”—and invokes the oppressiveness of language as his defence, even as he appears to be lamenting its oppression: “The winged words on which my soul would pierce / Into the height of love's rare Universe, / Are chains of lead around its flight of fire” (588-90). But that fire is the radiance we have heard throughout in Shelley's poetic woman, the radiance that both promises and threatens to allow the poet to see himself face to face, to know his desire as his own, to locate the lack in his subjectivity which institutes that desire. Such a moment, the “flight of fire,” is, it turns out, always implicated in the metaphors of those chains of lead, at least if there is to remain any psychological mandate to repeat oneself. The “winged words” must fail to articulate an epipsychidion union, or he will face, as he proclaims, annihilation. Emily is the medium of that failure, as well as the myth of a potential success: Emily—“Thou Mirror”—as silent reflection, luring him to death; it is the inadequacy of (poetic) language, an Emily imprisoned in the patriarchal convent walls, that also pulls him back from death. Emily can be the virgin, the blank page of seductive silence, but she is also the occasion of this poem, its language holding to earth the poet who would soar with her beyond its prisonhouse. Without her “chaining” his “flight of fire” there would be no Epipsychidion. Thus she is the word even as he would have her enact its annihilation.

Shelley's poetry is, of course, traditionally perceived as being unusually difficult: abstract, abstruse, perhaps unnecessarily complicated. A major cause of this effect upon the reader is the severe work he urges upon language in order for it to fulfill his opposite ends: Shelleyan language collapses and embodies both form and content as it seeks repeatedly to inscribe a path for itself leading outside itself, to the possibility of authentic presentation as opposed to re-presentation. Shelley writes of and in the repetition of desire seeking its own path.

This refusal to fix through gender a theme meant for woman—or man—to play out marks a subtlety to the strategies enabling what has long been noted as Shelley's brilliant versification. Our recognition of the ways in which he invokes cultural myths of the female as both too empty (in need of the phallus) and too full (consummation complete), in order to convert into an enabling paradox the crippling contradiction of authentic silence that would speak through indebted voice, suggests that we would do well to reopen to scrutiny other writers who specifically grappled with questions of language, indebtedness, and freedom. Perhaps we have too readily imposed easy schemes of gender positions, oppositions, oppressions, and appropriations on writers of the past, without affording them the chance to help us define patriarchy as a complicated third term, one far more complex than the simplistic premises of male accountability and female innocence would allow.

Notes

1. For an extended analysis of this issue too long to repeat here, see my “Pope's Rape of Excess,” in Gary Day, ed., Sexuality in Literature and Film (London: Macmillan, 1988), 129-43.

2. Clearly, to some extent I disagree with U. C. Knoepflmacher's position in his essay herein that the Romantics frequently used the female in precisely this way. His larger point, however—that Browning read the Romantics this way and converted the lyric subject into the ironic dramatic monologue—has proven extremely stimulating to my own thought on how formal innovation can occur through disillusionment with patriarchal models.

3. Anne K. Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

4. Paul H. Fry, “Made Men: A Review Article on Recent Shelley and Keats Studies,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 451.

5. As we confront the contradiction in Shelley's bifurcation of female-as-linguistic-function or enabler, we would do well to consider what William Keach, Shelley's Style (New York: Methuen, 1984), says about Shelley's apparent confusion regarding language: that “some forms of contradiction and even obscurity may be necessary to the reflections of a volatile verbal sensibility” (3). For instance, the slippage in language that is cause for both celebration and despair in Shelley's Defence also underwrites the very attempt to write a poetry. It is no wonder that deconstruction found in Shelley an auspicious host, for an enabling premise of his canon is a fluidity not essential, as in a French feminist version of the semiotic, but structurally inevitable for any verbal articulation.

   For other recent provocative readings of Shelleyan encounters with the conventions of language, see Susan Hawk Brisman, “‘Unsaying His High Language’: The Problem of Voice in Prometheus Unbound,” Studies in Romanticism 16 (1977): 51-86; D. J. Hughes, “Coherence and Collapse in Shelley, with Particular Reference to Epipsychidion,” ELH 28 (1961): 260-83, and “Kindling and Dwindling: The Poetic Process in Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal 13 (1964): 13-28; Jerrold E. Hogle, “Metaphor and Metamorphosis in Shelley's ‘The Witch of Atlas,’” Studies in Romanticism 19 (1980): 329-32, and “Shelley's Poetics: The Power as Metaphor,” Keats-Shelley Journal 31 (1982): 159-97; and Stuart Peterfreund, “Shelley, Monboddo, Vico, and the Language of Poetry,” Style 15 (1981): 382-400.

6. See, for instance, Barbara Schapiro's interpretation of Alastor as gloomily nihilistic in The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), xiii.

7. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 105.

8. Textual citations are taken from Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers, eds., Shelley's Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton, 1977).

9. John Donovan glosses Shelley's heuristic interest in the “ethical purity” potential in incest as a “freedom from fear which precedes right action and which results from the mind's clear gaze at the contrarities of nature, without and within” (90) in “Incest in Laon and Cythna: Nature, Custom, Desire,” Keats-Shelley Review, Autumn 1987, 49-90. For Shelley, incest, if freely chosen, can function sexually as a potent imaginative union of the identical-yet-different, a union where, in a sense, one experiences collapse that still insists upon a return to separation and distinctness. This model is hardly recognizable, of course, in Western familial arrangements, where incest imitates instead Cenci-like possession. And, of course, since the mode of sexual intercourse in The Cenci is rape versus consent, the sexual act there is the antithesis of “ethical purity.” That the transgression is rape by the father allows for the sexual construction to serve violently as a metaphor for patriarchal ravage.

10. See esp. chap. 5 in Keach, Shelley's Style.

11. Julia Kristeva, “Within the Microcosm of ‘The Talking Cure’” in Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), claims as Freud's legacy the proposition that “interpretation necessarily represents appropriation, and thus an act of desire and murder” (33).

12. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 104.

13. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 153.

14. Nathaniel Brown, “The ‘Brightest Colours of Intellectual Beauty’: Feminism in Peacock's Novels,” Keats-Shelley Review, Autumn 1987, 91-104, reminds us that for the Shelley circle, his vaunted phrase “intellectual beauty” carried feminist connotations, particularly in its support of Mary Wollstonecraft's premise, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that “intellectual beauty” in women is too often met with indifference, versus the almost universal appreciation attending a woman's physical beauty (91-92). It is very important, then, to position the feminist connotation of this key phrase in Shelley's “Hymn” within the other and primary philosophical context in which he uses it—a “Humerian scepticism, though with affinities to both Berkeleian idealism and Plato's philosophy of Ideas” (91). Such a program insisted upon the immaterial nature of reality—finally, if implicitly, the role of interpretation in naming reality. In other words, Shelley deliberately casts this already philosophically awkward amalgam into the form of the female, that which represents also a more complicated cultural engagement with the phallus, with the law, and with language than does the son. It is this very excess of meaning that Shelley locates in woman which motivates him to have her mark the place of the infamous “fading coal,” his mythic space of previously unapprehended vision and the linguistically indebted interpretive acts its conception en-genders.

15. Thus Shelley comes very close to creating an écriture féminine, a plural, fluid movement that, to use Catherine Clement's phrase, is a “coming” to writing, though Shelley always is careful to defer the climax, to tease language to its near breaking point instead.