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...