ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the peculiar vicissitudes of prosopopoeia or personification, the form of figurative language identified by Paul de Man with autobiography. Jacobus posits that both the self-difference involved in language or representation and sexual difference itself threaten the subject's illusion of integrity, and she traces the very diverse ways in which these threats are represented and displaced and made to stand for one another, in writings of Freud as well as in nineteenth-century texts. Jacobus makes us see the immense and complex effort that goes into the repression of sexual difference in Wordsworth's autobiographical poem. Literary history as the History of Ideas, Jacobus suggests, is all unselfconsciously a story of masculine mind and its conquests or possessions. Her alternative is a history of persons and personifications and of words. Like Jerome Christensen's book on Byron, which he calls 'post-structuralist biography', Jacobus's writing dissolves the protective divisions between persons and texts.
