Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire by Laura Claridge (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review feminist critique. This identification helps to define just what "space" Gaskell as a writer occupies in relation to patriarchal power, though Bonaparte does not claim to be engaged in a specifically feminist project. Bonaparte presents an extensive analysis of a great deal of these shorter works, including many of Gaskell's less known—and unfortunately, less available—short stories. Gaskell's longer works, however, are not neglected. Bonaparte's approach offers a way to unify all these vastly different works—the early industrial novels, her "charming" novels of manners, even the rather enigmatic historical novel, Sylvia's Lovers—something many critics in the past have failed to achieve. Bonaparte's "metaphoric" reading allows her, in addition, to unify these disparate novels with the equally wide-ranging short stories, while constructing an image of Gaskell that unifies her identity as an artist with that ofthe private, inner Gaskell. The result is a fresh study of this Victorian woman writer that could have larger implications for Victorian studies—that is, it could provide a better understanding of more "conventional" women writers, including those writers who, unlike Gaskell, have not found their way into the canon. Bonaparte's example forces us to undergo a "reassessment" of our own critical practices when we talk about women writers of domestic fiction. It suggests the need for more critical approaches, like Bonaparte's, that offer fresh ways to talk about Victorian women writers, approaches that avoid identifying them merely in terms of public/private dichotomies which, even when applied to the Victorians, are limiting and false. HEATHER M. GARONZIK Indiana University LAURA CLARIDGE. Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992. 280 p. ? rofessor Claridge places Romantic Potency, her study of selected works of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron, in the context of "poststructural playfulness " (x). For example, following the introductory chapter, she heads the book's three parts, each containing three chapters, "Wordsworth: Flirtations," "Shelley: The Frustrated Intercourse of Poetic Ecstasy," and "Byron: Art of the Perpetual Tease" (vii-viii). Thematically, one of her concerns involves "jouissance," described as "Barthes's slippery pleasure of the text" (31), and the access each poet has to it, Wordsworth having the least, Byron the most. The author apparently experienced enjoyment writing the book, evidenced in part by the energy with which she discovers and incorporates the ideas and methods of the theories behind her criticism. She hopes "to imbricate the Romantic poets with the rhetorical suggestiveness of Lacan," to use as "a tendentious probe—Lacanian language" (5) in investigating "libidinal Book Reviews251 energies" (6) governing their poetry, driving them to seek the impossible, i.e., to reach the "lost Eden of a unified self . . . with their voices intact" (2). In addition, while cautioning in a footnote that "the whole story of poetic identity in language is more complicated than the necessary Realpolitik of feminism sometimes allows," she develops a feminist perspective over her subjects, postulating that their work drew upon "the special potency that accrues to marginalized forces, in this case, woman as that which is not already written" (17). At this point, Claridge adds another organizational principle to accompany jouissance. Combining the feminist and Lacanian perspectives in her own way allows her to recognize "an opposition of Byron to a linguistic conception in Wordsworth," the latter's discomfort with "linguistic instability" (18), with Shelley located in between. The nature of linguistic instability and how the three try to deal with it in their hope to experience jouissance in their texts and in their lives form the bases of Claridge's commentary on selected dramatic, lyric, and narrative works, early and late. The impossible task they have set for themselves, in her opinion, sustains her "interrogations of desire, silence, and sexuality in the male Romantic poets" (17). Professor Claridge writes with an authority derived, first, from extensive research into the many critical approaches brought to bear upon her subjects , seen in her extensive and insightfully utilized citations, and second, by her conscious efforts to value a range of critical approaches, seen earlier in her approach to feminism and in comments such as the following: "It is such a commonplace of older...