ABSTRACT
Shelley's writing consistently reveals a fascination with the music of feminine expression. In all cases this fascination occurs within a phantasmic, or fantasy, structure involving heterosexual coupling and heteroerotic correspondence. Ultimately, Shelley's fascination with feminine expression reveals his desire to become the ideal male poet who finds a way to remain eternally present in his own words and whose unbridled, immortal voice spellbinds multitudes as it challenges the establishment. Lacan identifies voice as suited to the objet petit a label, because it operates in the same way as an image in the mirror or, to cite another illustration, as the Cartesian cogito. Subject formation intertwines with fantasy and the narrative structure that derives from it and it also creates desire. Personal circumstances must have intensified Shelley's fascination with music and they must have consequently fuelled the complex of fantasies involving feminine expression, masculine self-presence and subjectivity that informs his writing.
