ABSTRACT
Much of this essay will have to do with walls or partitions; so we begin with a rhetorical partition, a division of the subject into parts. The first, which might be called “ The Body in Question,” comes in several sections and is perhaps appropriately by far the largest. The concluding will be a kind of appendage under the rubric of “The Genitive, or Jinny’s Case” and “The Vocative, or the Story of O.” The Postscript-which goes beyond the Renaissance instances primarily foregrounded here-takes this story into the subsequent history of linkages between female copia, of body and of word, and the copiousness of texts.
