But beware! Paglia, like Bloom, is reductionist. Bloom's ultimate take on more or less the same subject matter with which Paglia treats is Gnosticism, thus ultimately spiritual. Bloom sees a sort of warfare going on between the earthly and chthonian and the spiritual. He resolves this in Gnosticism, an heretical sect that flourished in the early centuries A.D. and maintained that this world is evil, created by a "demiurge" and that the visions of poets like Shelley are nothing less than emanations from another realm. For Paglia, all this is sexual, and Bloom would not deny a sexual element in all of it, but he goes a bit further in explaining it. Prime example: Paglia's "womb/tomb" of the Chthonian is simply a given. In Bloom, it is the prison of our Fall fom the Gnostic other realm. It fits into a cosmology.
There's a very weird realization that comes over the reader (at least this reader) when we come to the Coleridge section on his poem "Christabel" and the vampire Geraldine and continues creeping over him or her until the final chapter on Emily Dickinson. I know no other way of saying this than that Paglia BECOMES Geraldine to the reader. - I agree with her that Emily Dickinson is an extremely powerful and misunderstood poet and, indeed, have spent several ultimately worthwhile hours poring over her short poems to discover the sexual/spiritual depths. But, sorry Camille, Dickinson is just not another Sade altogether. But in the way Paglia presents her, with Sadean snippets of her poetry, the reader who is unfamiliar with the rest of Dickinson's work cannot fail to come away with this conviction. - For the record: I think part of Dickinson's persona is sadomachistic, but it is only a piece of a complex puzzle.
What we are witnessing and in danger of becoming engulfed in (It happened to me.) is Paglia' own mythopoecism. At some point between Christabel and Dickinson, Paglia becomes the subject of her work. We fall in love with her (I did.); but in the way that Christabel does with Geraldine. She lures us into her own imaginative fixation on the Chthonian womb/tomb of the female, and we identify HER with IT.
In conclusion, READ THIS BOOK, if only for the transformative effect it will have on you. In the last page of the book, Paglia says of Emily Dickinson that "She is frightening!" Yes, Camille,.....YOU ARE!
