JOHNSON'S OWN feminist revisions of deconstructionism, meanwhile, take up where deMan left off in trying to rethink the implications of literary history for hermeneutics. Nowhere is this radical project illustrated better than in the humorous and ingenious, "My Monster/My Self", in which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is read as an autobiographical confession of maternal rejection. The literary monster is analyzed as product of "a single parent household," the unwanted brainchild of a mad (pro)creator, who in childhood was abandoned by her own mother.

In these interpretive schemes, biological assumptions of gender are overcome by examining the sexes as socialized functions, so that "it is not true that literature contains no examples of male pregnancy," just as it is equally untrue that all women want to have babies. Moreover, the theoretical wordplay is reoriented, so that one now discusses literary themes in terms of matricide and womb-envy, that is, in terms of the woman's experience.

The powerful final essay, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" asks:

Is there any inherent connection between figurative language and questions of life and death, of who will wield and who will receive violence in a given human society?

The analysis of power relations between men and women, between mother and child--as they are sedimented in grammars of address--and of the rhetorical assumptions of personhood contained within poems and Constitutional amendments offers no answer to the ongoing abortion dilemma among feminists. Rather, Johnson warns how the complex issues too easily become locked into the rhetorical limits of dead-end polemics. Her refusal to intervene between pro-life and pro-choice factions, and wish upon them "a single voice," offers intellectual self-questioning as an alternative to political violence.

The reader is offered no conclusion other than an ethics of "undecidability." Instead, one keeps alive the complexities of the issue in the understanding that the real crime is killing debate.