Ghislaine McDayter suggests that Shelley's ideal feminine functions "both as the phallus and as its phantasmal signifier of lack and castration." McDayter claims that the soul
is not, strictly speaking, a male a female, or even a narcissistic emanation of the poet. It is rather the phantom of the primordial loss that creates subjectivity in the first place. With this in mind, the satanic imagery of 'o'er leaping' the bounds and penetrating into paradise begins to make sense. While we might will imagine such a passage to suggest a fantasy of bodily integration and 'dissolving frames,' neither the poet nor Satan is motivated by a nostalgic yearning in their 'leap': the poet has never even dreamed this vision before and Satan is perfectly aware that re-entering paradise will only re-enact his fall from it. (40)
Yes, but it can be argued that that's the tragedy: the longing to go back, the temporal-fanciful admission, and then the fall back to subjectivity. The impermanence of the penetration complements potency with impotence. The Lacanian explanation is only a half truth. Potency implies impotence and vice versa.
This particular moment in the poem speaks the problematic nature of writing. As Derrida has pointed out, there are moments in every text that call attention to itself. The Lacanian reminder of castration is the writer's reminder of the artificiality of writing. It is an endeavor that is both transcendent and self-reflexive. The space between heaven and earth is representative of the Derridian "hymen, the consummation of differents, the continuity and confusion of the coitus," standing "between the inside and the outside of a woman, and consequently between desire and fulfillment" ("The First Session" 165).
Derrida, Jacques. "The First Session." Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York : Routledge, 1992.
McDayter, Ghislaine. McDayter, Ghislaine. "O'er
Leaping the Bounds: The Sexing of the Creative Soul in Shelley's Epipsychidion."
Keats-Shelley Journal:
52: (2003): 21-49.