unsex

Bellm's poems are upsetting by design, filled with troubling realities from which there is no deep and richly textured natural world into which to escape; even the icy water of Shirley Lake weakens and unsexes rather than invigorating and restoring, and no amount of sunning himself, "naked as a siren on the rock," seems able to fully warm the speaker again ("Siren Song").

Cymbeline, for example, unsexes and revirginates Imogen at the end in order to free Posthumus from his contamination by the "woman's part."

In so doing, Rachilde writes the conventional novel of a writer who unsexes the female plot.