CRITICISM

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CRITICISM

(a) POPE AND POETRY

Pope was right enough to declare with studied casualness that ’The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth’ (PWl: 292), for there was little in contemporary criticism of his poetry which was not motivated by opposition and envy. Nonetheless, Pope’s actual publishing career was immensely successful and he was unquestionably the leading poet of his day: Warburton’s edition of his works (1751) accorded him the status of a classic. But it was not long before depreciation began to set in, partly because Pope’s hard-won facility in verse produced many imitators, and partly because his complete dominance of the poetic scene was intimidating for successors who would do more than imitate. Cowper claimed that Pope had corrupted poetry by making it easy: he ’Made poetry a mere mechanic art/And every warbler has his tune by heart’ (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971: 121-2). The poet and scholar Joseph Warton produced the first major critical work on Pope in 1756, revising it through several versions and adding a second volume in 1782 (Barnard 1973: 379-407, 508-21); and though he paid due tribute to Pope’s abilities, he advanced the fatal case that Pope was in effect a moralist rather than a poet, that he lacked ’a creative and glowing IMAGINATION’: ’the Sublime and the Pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy. What is there very sublime or very Pathetic in POPE1?-’. It was a damaging question, despite the fact that Warton kept (almost by accident) finding examples of exactly that which he claimed that Pope lacked. In The Rape of the Lock, according to Warton, ’POPE principally appears a POET; in which he has displayed more imagination than in all his other works taken together’ (Barnard 1973: 399); the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady he found ’as it came from the heart, is very tender and pathetic’ (400); Eloisa toAbelard was ’truly poetical, and contains … strong painting’ (404). The Essay on Man almost made him change his mind: ’I feel myself almost tempted to retract an assertion in the beginning of this work, that there is nothing transcendently sublime in POPE. These lines have all the energy and harmony that can be given to rhyme’ (513). But in his conclusion, Warton argued that basically Pope’s work was didactic, moral, and satiric, ’and consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry’; ’He gradually became one of the most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote’, but ’Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled’ (520).

Pope did not lack defenders. Arthur Murphy vigorously debunked the category of ’Invention’ which Pope was supposed to lack as mere singularity and affectation, and asserted ’The three great primary

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branches of composition are finely united in the writings of Pope; the imagination is delighted, the passions are awakened, and reason receives conviction; there is poetry to charm, rhetoric to persuade, and argument to demonstrate’ (Barnard 1973: 447-52). Samuel Johnson took a measured view of the controversy in allowing a good deal of Warton’s particular criticisms of Pope, but dissenting from the overall assessment that Pope was merely the poet of ’Good Sense’. In a remarkable testimony to Pope’s power, Johnson writes:

Pope had likewise genius; a mind active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.

,, .,,     ,       ,       (Johnson 1905:217)

; • ; .!   ’(^<”   .^ii.-’\’

Pope, in fact, had everything:     ’^a rvi* •u?,; t>r:

Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had Invention, by which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in the The Rape of the Lock, and by which extrinsick and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism; he had Imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer’s mind, and enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest, and the Ethick Epistles; he had Judgement, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and, by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality; and he had colours of language always before him ready to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression, as when he accommodates his diction to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer’s sentiments and descriptions.

’After all this’, Johnson proposes, ’it is surely superfluous to answer the question that has once been asked, Whether Pope was a poet£ otherwise than by asking in return, If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be foundi’ (Johnson 1905: 247, 251).

This was, however, precisely the question which was asked in the coming generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, when Pope was accused of sticking to the low ground of ethical writing (when he should have been exploring the heights of mental life). The Romantics sought

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a new definition of the poet’s role in society, a less theologicallycontrolled view of Nature, and a return to earlier, more magical models of English poetry (Shakespeare and Spenser in particular). Pope’s translation of Homer was decried as a poisonous source of ’poetic diction’ and artificial language, his versification was deemed to be monotonous and ’sing-song’ and Pope was demoted to the ranks of non-poets: ’Pope is a satirist, and a moralist, and a wit, and a critic, and a fine writer, much more than he is a poet’ (the influential critic Francis Jeffrey; Bateson and Joukovsky 1971:178). DeQuincey claimed: ’I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment’s life within them’ (230).

Griffin (1995) has reexamined the literary history of ’Romanticism’ and argues that Wordsworth’s depreciation of Pope is not a neutral judgment but a functional separation of his own poetic identity from Pope’s dominant mastery; the separation also leaves a number of traces of anxiety in Wordsworth’s self-formulation. ’Romanticism’ itself is founded on a negation of Pope, on the attempts of writers like Joseph and Thomas Warton, Edward Young, and William Cowper, to free themselves from Pope’s poetic dominance. The literary history of early nineteenth-century England was more complex than a sudden and revolutionary sweeping away of the poetry of reason by the poetry of powerful feeling, for Pope continued to be a major poetic presence, admired even by those who would disparage him, such as Hazlitt. For Hazlitt, Pope was a master of the ’artificial style’, not the sort of poet who ’gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart’; he was rather ’a wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation’. And yet,

within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy, what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a microscope, where everything assumes a new character and a new consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed.

For Hazlitt, Pope’s best work was the ’filigree’ of Rape of the Lock, where The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The

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little is made great, and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep’ (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971: 195-6).

But the stoutest defender of all was Byron, who asked: ’If you search for passion, where is it to be found stronger than in the epistle from Eloisa to Abelard … £’. Byron found in Pope (and Dryden) all the ’invention, imagination, sublimity, character’ that could be wished, and denounced the envious depreciation of contemporary poets:

It is this very harmony, particularly in Pope, which has raised the ’:; vulgar and atrocious cant against him – because his versification is

• perfect, it is assumed that it is his only perfection; because his

truths are so clear, it is asserted that he has no invention; and

because he is always intelligible, it is taken for granted that he has ’ no genius. We are sneeringly told that he is the ’Poet of Reason’, as

if this was a reason for his being no poet. Taking passage for passage, « I will undertake to cite more lines teeming with imagination from

Pope than from any two living poets, be they who they may. : (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971:202)

’ Byron claimed he would ’show more imagery in twenty lines of Pope than in any equal length of quotation in English poesy, and that in places where they least expect it’, instancing the Sporus portrait from Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot: ’Now, is there a line of all the passage without the most forcible imagery… <?• Look at the variety, at the poetry, of the passage – at the imagination: there is hardly a line from which a painting might not be made, and is’ (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971:

208). But his claims for Pope were also founded on the very point for which Warton had initially decried him, that of being ’the moral poet of all civilisation; and as such, let us hope that he will one day be the national poet of mankind’ (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971: 206-7).

But moralistic biographies of Pope tended to emphasise his spite, meanness, hypocrisy, and badness of heart, a sense of inauthenticity which tainted criticism as a whole. Matthew Arnold’s famous essay of 1880, on the question ’Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics^’ maintained their subjugation in the literary hierarchy: ’We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of their missions and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable’. But: ’do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from men with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism of life has a high seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness, has poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity1?-’.

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Answer, No: ’Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose’ (Bateson and Joukovsky 1971: 249-52). This is, of course, to define poetry in a certain unquestioning way and then to miss everything in the poetry which might approximate to the definition. Interestingly, Arnold wrote this rallying cry against what he took to be a resurgence in interest and respect for the eighteenth century and a growing disrespect for the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the twentieth century, with Modernism displacing the emotional cast of Victorian and Romantic poetry, Pope was ripe for reassessment. Some of this came in biographical terms: Sherburn (1934) offered a sympathetic and properly-researched biography of the first part of Pope’s career, and the same scholar edited Pope’s correspondence in

1956, providing an immense store of new material for students of Pope, alongside the battery of scholarship presented in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. (1939-69). Ault (1949) took Pope’s side in many of the controversial and murky issues of his poetic career. General critical revival began with Warren (1929), which took Pope seriously as ’critic and humanist’. But the best of the early work was in the area of ’practical criticism’. In 1930 the poet Edith Sitwell roundly denounced as deaf those who took Pope’s couplets to be unvarying and monotonous and showed, by means of close reading, how variable Pope’s texture was, and how significant its variety was (Sitwell 1930). In the same year Empson invented, elaborated and celebrated the poetic effects of ’ambiguity’, and Pope was one of the authors whose verbal textures appeared much the richer. Quoting, for example, a couplet about Dulness, ’Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs/And solid pudding against empty praise’, Empson proceeds to track our implied readerly weighings and vacillations:

Neither truth not gold, neither praise nor pudding, are to be despised, and the pairs may be connected in various ways. A poet is praised by posterity for attending to what Pope called truth; whereas gold and pudding are to be gained by flattery. Gold may be the weights of the balance with which truth is weighed, so that the poet will tell any lie that he decides will pay; or all four things may be alike and equally desirable, so that, though the author is hungry and sensible, he is also truthful and anxious for his reputation; his proportion of praise and pudding has to be worked out with honest care. This spectacle, in its humble way, is taken to be charming; so that this version is contemptuous but without the bitterness of the first one. For these versions, praise is that of good critics, and it is empty beside pudding in a sense that would sympathise with the

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f poet’s hunger, or as an imagined quotation from him so as to bring him into contempt. But it might be empty as unjustified, as being the praise of (that is, from or to) the rich patrons who had bought the compliments; gold then takes on the suggestion of contempt, never far from it in Pope’s mind, and means ’shoddy poetical ornament’; pudding is paired with truth, in the natural order of the antitheses, and means either the cheap food which is all he would be able to buy, or the solid reality of his dull but worthy writings. At any rate, the epithets solid and empty contradict the antithesis Venal’ and ’genuine’; it is gay and generous of Pope to have so much sympathy with pudding; and it is this detachment from either judgment in the matter (the truth such men could tell, the praise they could win, is nothing for Pope to be excited about) which

<;     makes the act of weighing them seem so absurd.

(Empson 1961: 126-7)

Less virtuosic, but equally appreciative, was the work of F. R. Leavis. Reacting against the emotionalism and fake solemnity which he saw as poisonous to the literary culture of the late nineteenth century, Leavis (1972) reinvented Pope as a late metaphysical, the agent who transformed the ’line of wit’ inherited from Donne and Jonson into the meaningful and authentic correctness of Augustan values. Leavis refuses to see these values as some sort of arid formalism, mere arrangement of words and metre; ’Politeness was not merely superficial; it was the service of a culture and a civilisation, and the substance and the solid bases were so undeniably there that there was no need to discuss them’ (76). ’When Pope contemplates the bases and essential conditions of Augustan culture his imagination fires to a creative glow that produces what is poetry even by Romantic standards. His contemplation is religious in its seriousness’ (81). Pope’s handling of seemingly opposed modes (insolence, elegance, majesty, the ludicrous, pathos) is not only a sign of wonderful versatility, but is the mark of a truly creative engagement with the world. His seriousness, experienced in surprising variety of tone and imagery, is not the solemnity of the Victorians (to whom Pope seemed frivolous, rationalistic, or disgusting), but ’a play of mind and a flexibility of attitude’ which demand a corresponding ’play of the critical intelligence in the reader’ (71). The art is the feeling:

;     There is, indeed, evidence in the satires of strong personal feelings,

’      but even – or, rather, especially – where these appear strongest,

what (if we are literate) we should find most striking is an intensity

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of art. … His technique, concerned as it is with arranging words and ’regulating’ movements, is the instrument of fine organization, and it brings to bear pressures and potencies that can turn intense personal feelings into something else

(80, 82)

Leavis’s response to the Twickenham edition of The Dunciad was to celebrate the poem’s ’astonishing poetry’ (Leavis 1962,91), its sureness of transition between Miltonic grandeur, Augustan values, and imaginative wit. Again he sees an underlying sense of order as a kind of depth rather than repressiveness: ’As the antithesis of triumphant Chaos it informs the prophetic vision of the close with that tremendously imaginative and moving grandeur’ (92-3). Leavis disputes the value of the label commonly applied to Pope, that of satirist, by discovering a kind of genial appreciation within satiric attack, a ’predominance of creativeness, delighting in the rich strangeness of what it contemplates’ (94). The Dunciad offers not ordered progress but a ’packed heterogeneity’ (95):

What fascinates him are effects of fantastic incongruity; effects that at the same time seem to evoke a more exciting reality than that of common sense…. The relation between his interest in these qualities and his concern for Augustan order constitutes one of the most striking aspects of his genius…. there is nothing repressive about the Order that commands his imagination. His sense of wonder has been richly and happily nourished, and can invest what offers itself as satiric fantasy with the enchantment of fairy-tale…

(95-6)

Tillotson (1938) offered a more comprehensive sense of Pope’s worth as a poet, grasping the nettle of his supposed ’correctness’ and glossing it under four aspects: Nature, Design, Language, and Versification. Tillotson finds positive virtues in all these areas of Pope’s art, but perhaps particularly in the language, which he considers to have ’an almost surreptitious conciseness’ and a brilliantly condensed forcefulness (103). In versification too Tillotson celebrates Pope’s virtuosity of effect: in rhyme and particularly in manipulation of the couplet, he sees Pope as essentially offering a kind of poetic responsibility which the reader trusts, within which effects of surprise are continually expected and exploited: he uses to the full ’the privilege of variety when once uniformity has been established’ (132). The complex variations of effect (sudden bathos, sudden sublime, irruption of conversational

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idiom, tensions between high and low) are deployed across a couplet art which is nothing like mere music or clever trickery. Its antitheses, inversions, parallellisms, balances and imbalances, pauses and deferrals are all harnessed to the expression of a moral or creative content: ’a vision of men and things which is as elaborate as intense’ (131). This line was followed by a number of critics: Mack (1949) was a classic exposition of the ways that verbal devices played around with the surface meaning of poems; Parkin (1955) provided a more strictly formalist account of the technical devices of Pope’s work: implied dramatic speaker, irony, parallelism, paradox, metaphor, and tonal variation are considered as they function in the individual poem and in his work as a whole (3).

Pope was now established as a poet whose work repaid analysis along formal lines towards the discovery of essence and meaning. Tillotson’s subsequent book on Pope (1958) transferred its attention from manner and form to content and analysed a number of the different senses that ’Nature’ has in Pope’s work. To a large extent, Pope studies have been marked by a search for unified thematic content, though this can mean a variety of things. For Wilson Knight (1955), Pope’s work is quasi-religious in seriousness: he discovered ’profound metaphysical importance’ in Pope’s ’vision’ of the world: ’In Pope religion and society, God and politics, spirit and body, converge. His world is compact, but burning: within its present humanity lies its eternal Catholicism’ (14). Rogers (1955) saw Pope’s work primarily in relation to the world it was criticizing, as does Dixon (1968). For Brower (1959), however, it is Pope’s classicism which provides the metaphysical context for the poetry, and his reading constitutes a very full and persuasive reconstruction of the ’poetic voices that Pope heard as he wrote’. What Pope alluded to, what he changed from conspicuous sources, what he left out, what he left unacknowledged, can be rediscovered to provide an enriching intertextual field in which to read the poetry. The saturating presence of classical writers like Virgil and Horace grounds the poetry in an aesthetic and moral order. Thomas Edwards (1963) sees Pope’s work as attempting to mediate between the ’dark estate’ of the actual world and ideal visions of imagination and intellect; a precarious but humane balance eventually gives way to satire and disorder. For Spacks (1971), the imagery of the poetry can be read in terms of recurrent patterns to yield a moral discipline: Pope’s images ’are means of conveying his ideas about the value of ethical control, or they embody principles of aesthetic control’. Keener (1973) also sees Pope’s work as a unity, possessing overall design. Lerenbaum (1977), however, shows that Pope’s desire to put his work into a consistent

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philosophical framework could not be sustained against his pragmatic and flexible practice as a writer (Rogers 1995 offers a more recent commentary on this aspect).

For other critics, the content of Pope’s work is an exploration of subjectivity and world: Pope’s conception of himself in relation to literary tradition is presented in Russo (1972); his self-fashioning through letters and their publication is examined by Winn (1977) and Jones (1990). The most important of these accounts, however, is Griffin (1978), an analysis both of the ’poet-protagonist’ who figures so conspicuously in the poems, and whose private poetic and psychological concerns emerge into the poems in somewhat more clandestine fashion.

By reestablishing and clarifying the nature of this intimate link •’•:\. not quite an identity – between ”Pope” and Pope … we can recover ••?,: some of the personal energy that invigorates Pope’s greatest poems

and makes them vividly self-expressive products of an imagination

1 : intrigued with and often at odds with itself, and yet more sharply .:.; at odds with the world.       A .’•••• ;>^ :.< .•••-•••  ;; ,-’,v :>    •”-•  ’;’<!’»    .•••’. (xiv)

Jackson (1983) offers a difficult but richly suggestive account of Pope’s work as a unity, relates the imagistic patterns of Pope’s major works as an expanding and reflexive vision, to be read almost as myth, as one might read Milton or Blake. ’Pope’s central subject of order and disorder (the breaking away from and returning to divine design) necessitates sustained acts of mythopoesis that over and over again invoke metaphors of division, possession, obsession, and usurpation, which in turn are opposed by figures of unity, freedom, dedication, and authority’ (12). However disjunct £/c/stf to Abelard is horn the Essay on Man in generic terms, as ’myth they are interdependent parts of a unified vision, which is forged by extending the initial design into further and more elaborate contexts’ (13). The poems invert and reinvent each other in startling ways; the poetry ’displaces and reconstitutes its own myths, thereby signifying its principle of growth and vitality’ (18). The poetry is always, as Johnson had claimed, questing and aspiring; ’His dramas are those of man fulfilling or subverting the divine design, and thus they commonly focus on the authority that may (or may not) be invested in such recurrent terms as knowledge or power’: ’At its most intense, Pope’s poetry confronts the ego brimming over with the ambition to flood the possibilities that lie at the periphery of perception, to become its own image of itself, to fulfil itself in various acts of transgression that constitute a raid on the possible. It is for

1

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such reasons that Pope enters his own dramas of internal subversion and betrayal, alert to those confusions of identity and purpose that baffle the aspiring ego’ (18). Pope stands between Milton and Blake because of his nervously vigilant sense of impending fall: Tope’s entire existence as a poet depends upon summoning criteria that contextually contain and limit the performing self while simultaneously indicating that such a performance is self-consumptive … his primary vision is the forms of alienation precipitated by the egotistical sublime’ (177). Hence his rejection as a mere tool of restrictive law by the romantics.

Most critics of the 1980s were in some way or other committed to an idea of Pope’s imaginative vision. Morris (1984), one of the most solid and appreciative humanist accounts of Pope, is interested in the flux and reflux of themes and images from a more traditional perspective; he finds an ultimate unity of purpose and theme in Pope in his privileging of refinement and his continual attempts to promote ’the correction of nonsense by sense’ (12). In a different way from Jackson, he sees the ’visions and revisions which mark his work – including its blindnesses, lapses, failures, and contradictions – ultimately compelling and coherent’ (13). Pope’s relation to emotion, passion and unreason has attracted some comment; Shankman (1983) studies his Iliad translation as a key document in ’the Age of Passion’; Fairer (1984) sees Pope as attracted by the possibilities of a roving and passionate imagination but always keen to establish mental and moral control; Ferguson (1986) sees Pope rather as exalting emotion with a conscious extravagance, valuing the strengths of urgent response and the discordant elements of mental life. Damrosch (1987) offers a Pope who is concerned with the problem of representing experience at the beginning of the modern age; Lockean developments in psychology suggested that knowledge might be a merely private, mental affair, and Pope is seen as committed both to the details of lived experience and to pre-Lockean certainties about the nature of perception and identity.

Humanistic accounts of Pope continue to be produced. Plowden (1983) extends the field of Pope’s classical reading; Quintero (1992) revisits Pope’s classical inheritance and attempts to reconstruct the ’rhetorical sensibility’ which Pope expected of his readers, and defends the coherence and structure of the works (up to The Dunciad of 1729) by reference to literary codes derived from classical models which were implicitly available in Pope’s day and which have now become more or less invisible. But there is increasingly a sense that Pope’s work can be (or ought to be) viewed from something other than the perspective of an ’ideal contemporary’, capable of reading each work ’With the same Spirit that its Author writ’ (EC, 234). The great waves of political and

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feminist criticism, which give short shrift to authorial intention and humanistic coherence, have not left Pope untouched; nor has that branch of materialist criticism which reads significance into the ’sociology of the text’, or the actual forms in which literary works are produced. It will be appropriate therefore to review some main developments in these more specialised fields.

(b) POLITICS

’Still Dunce the Second Reigns Like Dunce the First’

Pope’s supposed political allegiances were always a ready handle for his enemies. His name itself offered a convenient opportunity to associate his poetry with Catholic absolutism, as in Pope Alexander’s Supremacy and Infallibility Examin’d (1729; see Guerinot 1969: 166-70). John Oldmixon’s The Catholick Poet (1716) succinctly demolishes Pope’s Iliad translation with the charge that This Papish dog… has translated HOMER for the Use of the PRETENDER (Guerinot 1969: 40). Such comments as these, so obviously deriving from vested interests, were largely ignored in later reception of Pope’s work: the poetry has been taken more or less at its own estimation, as the work of one who attempted to transcend party divisions and speak from a principled independence. More recently, however, political (and politicised) analysis of Pope’s oeuvre has become a distinctly animated area of study. Mack (1969) began the work of reanalysing Pope’s later career (1731-

43) in political terms. In a volume plentifully illustrated with pictures of Pope’s house and garden and satirical and political engravings, Mack sought the ’enabling myth’ (vii) of Pope’s Horatian stance, his appropriation of Horace’s rural virtues of independence, frugality, and hospitality into a focused image in the house and grotto at Twickenham. Finding that ’certain aspects of Pope’s abode and life at Twickenham become luminous with implication’ (25), Mack describes the way Pope turned a forced exclusion from London into the ’pursuit of politics from the vantage of retirement’ (116). ’Twit’nam’, as Pope familiarly calls it in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, was both a place of retreat and psychological safety, and a sign of his success in overcoming political obstacles. From this platform it was possible to indict Walpole’s regime in the Horatian poems [119-30] and revised Dunciad [130-49], to the extent that Pope could figure himself and Walpole as ’mighty opposites’, warring for the soul of Britain. The garden and grotto ’supplied a rallying point

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for his personal values and a focus for his conception of himself – as master of a poet’s ”kingdom,” a counter-order to a court and ministry that set no store by poets’ (232). Though the throne of Augustus is no longer filled by a virtuous and responsible ruler, ’there remains an alternative center, and a power of a different kind: the poet-king-philosopher in his grotto… Under his magisterial wand… lords and rich men, ministers and society-wenches, kings, courtiers, Quakers, clowns, and good Ralph Aliens move through the paces of an intricate satirical ballet, which combines the features of reality and dream’ (236).

A complementary guide to these movements can be found in ErskineHill (1975). Arguing that ’Literature is at once a social action, a product of society, an imitation of society and a criticism of society’, ErskineHill finds that Pope’s work fulfils ’each of these roles equally clearly’ (4). The Epistle to Burlington [105-9], for example, is a social act in that it is like conducting a conversation which is designed to be overheard; it is a product of those economic and political forces which brought into being wealthy aristocrats who transformed their landed estates; it imitates social life in the visit to Timon’s Villa, and criticises that Villa and its values by comparison with an expressed noble ideal. Erskine-Hill argues that Pope is more engaged than most poets in the social and political reality of his time:

Perhaps no body of verse in the language expresses such detailed and specific concerns with the people and events of its time as his later epistles and satires. These poems are filled with proper names and allusions. Pope seems to derive from the very acts of naming and allusion a peculiar and various poetic energy which, while certainly communicated to the reader, may yet remain somewhat mysterious.

(Erskine-Hill 1975: 5)

In order to explore the poetic force of these mysteries, Erskine-Hill offers detailed miniature biographies of six individuals from Pope’s ’social milieu’, including his close Catholic and Jacobite friend John Caryll, the Whig-inclined Ralph Allen, and the original of the ’Man of Ross’ from the Epistle toBathurst, among heroes; and Peter Walter, attorney and money-lender, and Sir John Blunt, financial projector, among villains. These form ’a balanced selection of evidence as to the nature of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century society’ (9) to which Pope’s work can be seen as a response. Erskine-Hill reads the poetry in themed relationship to the individuals: images of false stewardship of the land and of national corruption are opposed to redeeming visions

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of the country house ideal, and of civilisation in general, grounded in Pope’s awareness of these divergent biographies.

Analyses of Pope’s political affiliations have become more specific and far-reaching as the historiography of politics in the period has itself become more dynamic. The period was once seen as one of relative political stability; this view stressed the basic acceptance of the ’Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, which displaced the Catholic autocrat James II in favour of a constitutional monarchy, and saw politics as a matter of the shifting loyalties and individual personalities of those involved. The two-party system of Whig and Tory (which derives from the political debates surrounding the Revolution) appeared to be of less pressing importance. To some commentators, groupings of a ’Court’ party (valuing the City, financial institutions, trade) against a ’Country’ party (valuing land and agriculture as the basis of national wealth) appeared more useful as indicators of political thought (Kramnick 1968). ’Country’ values implied that the only true political path was publicspirited action by men of landed property to preserve civil society; the true citizen is he who possesses an actual stake in the land and is thus established as both independent of financial corruption and responsible for the localised order of society. Such a citizen is of obvious relevance to the Pope of the Horatian period, when the whole question of the politicisation of culture was in vigorous debate (Goldgar 1976). Even The Essay on Man has its political aspect (Hammond 1984; Erskine-Hill

But the most contentious and provocative area of recent political study has been the rediscovery of Jacobitism as an active political force. The adherents of the exiled Stuarts were for a long time regarded as hopeless idealists, doomed to defeat. But recent research indicates that Jacobite activity, and fear of Jacobite activity, underlies much of the political agenda in Pope’s lifetime, and there have a number of modern attempts to co-opt Pope to the Jacobite cause, or to defend him from it. In 1972 John Aden could offer Pope as initially reluctant to enter the political field at all, courted by both parties. Events after the death of Anne in 1714, however, gradually pushed him into political action: harassment of Catholics, the exile of Bolingbroke and impeachment of Harley, the trial of Atterbury, and the banishing of Swift to Ireland, affected Pope’s relation to the political scene profoundly, and as Walpole’s power increased Pope was ineluctably aligned with opposition politics. The returned Bolingbroke provided a political theory of nonpartisan civic duty and loyalty to the mixed nature of the constitution which offered an attractively positive identity to one of Pope’s proscribed religion, and he was able to voice opposition views on the Walpole administration without openly renouncing the principles of

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1688 (Aden 1972). But six years later Aden revisited Pope’s early, preDunciad work with a sort of political geiger-counter, detecting anti-

1688 sentiments coded into such apparently innocuous pieces as the Pastorals, Essay on Criticism, and imitations of Chaucer. Pope himself wrote A Key to the Lock, as if by a Whig commentator, translating the action of The Rape of the Lock [17, 65-76] into a political allegory; but this appears to be less a joke than a deflection of attention from the actual political allegory encoded in the poem. The translations from Statius, and in particular the translations of Homer, afforded Pope considerable opportunity for covert comment on power, the succession of kings, foreign invaders, the uses of political argument, and the significance of war: perhaps Pope did translate at least some details of Homer for the use of the Pretender after all. Aden begins to make a serious case for Pope’s Jacobite sympathies:

By birth and breeding, to be sure, Pope was, if not at least a nominal

Jacobite, certainly a Stuart loyalist. Whatever the shortcomings of

>**.   that House (and he was not unaware of them) it was the most

’dft    congenial to his needs and instincts. Though Anne was clearly his

sv;   ideal, better a Stuart in any case than an unknown factor, especially

?v   an alien, more especially if a Protestant champion, and more

…i-   especially still if a Whig appointment.

.1L (Aden 1978: 178).

’ Aden argues that Pope’s loyalism was ’based on dynastic convictions and a deep distrust of interruption, violent or otherwise’, and that this dislike of disruption allowed him to accept the revolution as a fact even though he disapproved of it in principle, and to withhold support for any sort of militant Jacobitism.

Erskine-Hill (1982) has made the strongest general case for actual Jacobite content in Pope’s work, reading the images of rape, seizure, invasion and restoration mRape of the Lock and Windsor-Forest as metaphors for William Ill’s occupation of the English throne, and suggesting that Pope might not have been averse to reversing Walpole’s command of culture by a Stuart Restoration. In 1984, the same critic offered a reading of the card-game in Rape of the Lock [65-76] as a possible (if untidy) political allegory, perhaps speaking to those in the Jacobite coterie attuned to resonances of colour, gesture and allusion. BrooksDavies (1983) argued that The Rape of the Lock constituted a slightly different sort of Jacobite allegory, based on the iconography of magical, redemptive, but absolutist kingship. In Brooks-Davies (1985) he produced a startling allegorical interpretation of The Dunciad [130-

I

49] which saw the poem through the light of post-1688 Jacobite propaganda: in a poem published on the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, ’Dulness is England choosing an unlawful successor to the kingdom’ (Brooks-Davies 1985: 3); the elected heir is not so much Theobald or Gibber as William III and his Hanoverian colleagues. Allusions to Virgil and Milton are not just there for mock-epic gravity but for dense political allusion; the rituals of coronation in the poem can be read as a highly-charged parody of biblical narratives, aligning William with Saul and the ’true’ king with an absent David (96). Because most Jacobite propaganda was (for obvious reasons) highly coded, Brooks-Davies has to delve very deep to align the poem with Stuart values: he links signs and symbols in the poem with the mystery cults of mother-goddesses such as Isis and Ceres and to alchemical cryptograms to discover a hidden pattern of allegiance to true lines of succession against false ones. The poem also reaches back emotionally to a true ’nursing mother’ in the figure of Anne, which Pope holds out, in a knowingly futile gesture, as a model to the exiled Stuart king. For this is ’emotional Jacobitism’, and Pope is master of the irony of producing a covert Jacobite epic when it is far too late:

Equally preposterous is Pope’s evident commitment to the Stuarts as an ideal while, except for Anne, rejecting almost all that they represented in terms of administrative inadequacy. In other words, his Jacobite Dunciad offers little, if any, consolation to the naive adherent of the king over the water, and whatever nostalgia there is in the poem is immediately qualified by dizzying and exuberantly witty caveats.

(Brooks-Davies 1985: 140)

The book is, confessedly, more an exploration of a private mythology, shaped by Jacobite culture, than a political programme (viii).

Erskine-Hill (1996) has returned to the Jacobite question, revisiting the poems for further evidence of a ’political vein in their stone’ (94). He emphasises, for example, the prominence of political identities among the animated cards of the game in Rape of the Lock [65-76], Canto III:

To say the least this is full of political observation and activity: ’Spadillio first, unconquerable Lord’ (1.49), ’The hoary Majesty of Spades’ (1.56), ’The Rebel-Knave, who dares his Prince engage’ (1.59), ’mighty Pam that Kings and Queens o’erthrew’ (1.61), ’The Club’s black Tyrant’ (1.69), ’Th’ embroidered King who shows but half

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his Face’ (1.76), ’the Queen of Hearts’ (1.88), and ’The King unseen’ ’: (1.95) draw from the game a maximum amount of political variety i and excitement. When Pope adds the card-game, treated in this ;< way, to a poem already making political allusion and deploying

political language, he does so to warn the reader approaching the ;: climactic action of the poem that this act can be seen in a political

light. The card-game, in fact, supplies a political context for the ! forthcoming rape.

(Erskine-Hill 1996: 78)

Consequently, Belinda’s active resistance to the rape (her lack of acquiescence in Clarissa’s palliating advice) takes on a political significance, as does her repeated cry ’Restore the Lock’. The Dunciad, though concerned with bad writing as well as bad ruling, is based on the Aeneid’s powerful ’myth of loss, exile, wandering and restoration’ which had already been established as part of Jacobite rhetoric (106). While Pope prudently chooses a mode of ’comic obliquity’ to phrase antigovernment sympathies, there is a strong implicit identification of an absent king in waiting in the later work. However, as Erskine-Hill puts it elsewhere, ’the jury is still out’ on the extent of Pope’s Jacobitism (Erskine-Hill 1998: 24).

The notion of Pope as Jacobite, emotional or active, has not been received with complete acquiescence. Much of what Pope has to say about previous Stuart rulers is surprisingly critical: the man who can ridicule the pedantry of James I (in The Dunciad, IV: 175-88), and declare in 1735 that his reign ’was absolutely the worst reign we ever had except perhaps that of James the second’ (Spence 1966: 242) is not perhaps a natural Jacobite. Chapin (1986) sees Pope as committed to an Erasmian model of ecumenical Catholicism and the pragmatic politics of a non-partisan ’Patriot King’; he was anti-Williamite but also antiStuart, often rather rude about monarchs generally, and was temperamentally hostile to the kind of submission to absolute authority, however magical, entailed in Jacobitism’s ’Divine-Right’ theory of kingship. Downie (1990) is unconvinced by the theory of Pope’s Jacobitism, because insufficient attention has been paid to Pope’s Whiggish associates and leanings (the vocabulary of ’Liberty’ in the poetry might be open to such a reading). Pope did not establish himself in a protective Jacobite enclave, but consorted with active Whigs (and Jacobite-hunters) such as Ralph Allen; the ’Jacobite background’ is no more (and in some ways less) convincing than a Whig background. His rhetoric of ’order, hierarchy and stability’ is conservative but not even definitively Tory, let alone Jacobite (19). Dickinson (1988) sees

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Pope as attempting to stick to his own stated programme of a virtuous, non-partisan independence, while acknowledging his strong sympathies with the Tories – though even here Pope cannot be unambiguously a Tory because he could not be committed to the defence of the Church of England (12). Dickinson concedes that Pope may have had nostalgic links with Jacobite versions of history, but declares that any Jacobitism in the verse ’rarely rose above the level of innuendo’ (12) and that there is no evidence that Pope was in any sense actively working towards the diplomatic end of a Stuart restoration.

Dickinson concentrates instead on Pope’s overt links with the ’Country’ opposition to Walpole (after a period of apparent friendliness with the minister himself) and the economic forces which (according to the theory) corrupted stable civic virtues into a baseless opportunism. Pope was courted by the ’Patriot’ group opposed to Walpole, and was to an extent active in their programme to cultivate Frederick, Prince of Wales, as a figurehead, but he grew increasingly suspicious of the motives of the groups leaders. This last area has been developed in detail by Christine Gerrard (1990 and 1994). Pope was certainly attracted by the overtures of the Patriot group, and even went so far as to give Frederick a puppy from his dog Bounce, celebrating the gift in a charming ’Heroick Epistle’; but he never aligned himself with the group to the extent of writing the required Patriot epic. Pope’s friendship with Bolingbroke, who had strong if intermittent links with Jacobitism, was always a sticking point for the Whig segment of the Patriot opposition, but Gerrard doubts that Pope’s work of the 1730s could be seen as merely cloaking some more subversive Jacobite agitation (87). After the collapse of the Opposition, Pope’s unpublished diatribe 1740 [129] sprayed abuse all around the spectrum of power: ’Pope’s satiric scattergun leaves no political group untouched. This is the most cynical poem he ever wrote’ (Gerrard 1994: 91-2); its dynastically ambiguous appeal for a saviour ’Patriot King’ (in Bolingbroke’s phrase) scarcely seems an achievable ideal.

The divisiveness of these readings of Pope’s poetry as political statement is a sign of the elusiveness and ambivalence of the poems themselves: it is possible to argue them into a variety of allegiances. Another way of reading the poems politically also emerged in the 1980s in the wake of developments in literary theory. Formalist assessments of the literary text as essentially autonomous, organic, self-contained structures yielded to Marxist demands that criticism address the social and political ’unconscious’ of texts; and rather than settle for a sophisticated paraphrase of authorial intention, modern literary theory insisted on opening texts for aspects which escaped or subverted authorial guaran-

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tees of meaning. A small spate of politically hostile accounts of Pope appeared, beginning with Brown (1985), which not only refused to accept the patrician values of Pope’s poetry but suggested that the poetry itself shows reluctant signs of fracture even as it tries to present itself as timelessly unified. Brown reads the poems as

documents of the ideological structures of the period, and if we

h   read them not for what they claim to say but for what they fail to

recognise, what they rationalise away, what they carefully conceal,

,.:   and for the complex process by which they conceal it, we can begin

to identify a new basis on which to understand their significance.

(3)

The poetry’s surfaces, so committed to aesthetic wholeness, are fundamentally divided and contradictory: reading Windsor-Forest alongside The Duntiad leads Brown to subvert the ostensible values of each poem, so that the former becomes ’an exposure of the violence of accumulation in imperialist culture’ and the latter ’a celebration of the prolific energies of early English capitalism’ (156).

Taking his cue from Marx, Hammond (1986) reads the works against their surface grain to discover the workings of the ideology which was invisible to Pope, that set of ideas and practices which operated ’to disguise historically-specific social and cultural phenomena as natural, permanent and unalterable properties of the world we live in’ (3). Criticism thus has to read the gaps, the silences, and the discontinuities in literary works, looking for what Pope cannot or does not see in the world he presents and the choices he makes. Pope’s claim to moderation and independence is placed alongside his subversive opposition to Walpole’s ministry and his allegiance to quite specific forms of political organisation: ’Virtue’ is not so much a neutral appeal as a relative, political concept. The autobiographical Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is read for its ’unconscious’ disclosure of the material basis for the independence he celebrates; and The Dunciad’s mythology of hack writers is tested for class bias and set against Pope’s own status as a beneficiary of the commodification of culture. The works are unable to smooth out such contradictions and tensions fully.

Hammond remains committed to the materiality of history and culture and disdains that form of extreme philosophical scepticism about the unity of the human subject and the pertinence of historicallybased truths which is known as deconstruction (7-8). But in the same year, Atkins (1986) provided a sustained account of Pope through the

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eyes of deconstruction. Analysing the oppositional stance of the poetic voice and its uses of the couplet form of binary opposition to establish truth and identity by negating otherness and falsehood (’The strong antipathy of good to bad’), Atkins contends that Pope’s differentiations are always contaminated by elements of similarity and that Pope’s negated victims have a habit of showing up in supposedly purified areas of self-presentation.

It is possible to find contradiction in Pope without completely demolishing his credentials. Nicholson (1994) describes the various trials the Scriblerians (especially Pope) had in negotiating the new opportunities for investment and monetary manipulation afforded by the development of banking and the stock market: all were in theory opposed to a system which appeared to allow for fraud and delusion on a grand scale, and which appeared to reconstruct the way individuals conceived of themselves and their agency in new and anti-social directions; yet all were investors to some degree, who sought monetary profit from the rise of capitalism. Similar kinds of ’simultaneous’ meaning, sometimes figuring as contradiction, have informed genderbased criticism, to which we now turn.

(c) GENDER AND BODY

’In Sappho touch the Failing of the Sex’

Pope grew up in a closely-protected environment in which women (mother, aunt, nurse) to some extent dominated. Though unmarried, and probably mostly celibate, Pope embraced a kind of Restoration rakish culture in his early poems and letters [10-12]. Though always conscious that his unusual frame reduced his sexual chances, he had significant quasi-romances with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Blount sisters; the friendships with Lady Mary and Teresa went badly awry, but Martha Blount was still a close friend in his last years, and was the major beneficiary of his will. He was close to many other women of noble rank. The mysterious Arnica’ appears to have invented a romance with Pope on the basis of his poetry [19-20, 44]. Female friends were often the named recipients of his poems (they were also the recipients of some of his most carefully self-implicating letters): as well as The Rape of the Lock and Epistle to a Lady, we have the ’Epistle to Miss Blount, with the works of Venture’, and ’Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation’; ’To Belinda on the

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Rape of the Lock’, ’Impromptu, to Lady Winchelsea’, To a Lady with the Temple of Fame’, To Mrs M. B. on her Birth-day’ ’Verses to Mrs Judith Cowper’, and other occasional verses of the kind. Pope was tireless (and perhaps, officious) in his attempts to protect his female relations and aid them financially.

Women constituted, as Pat Rogers puts it in a brief but suggestive survey of Pope’s female friends, ’an order only too symbolic’ (Rogers

1972b: 136). Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady are clearly attempts to work out in individualised instances issues related to the gendering of women; Sapho to Phaon ’represents’ a strong woman strongly. Many of Pope’s abstract concepts or semi-mythological deities are also female: the largely negative forces of Fortune and Fame are (partly because of their classical etymology) figured as fickle women. Vice appears in similarly gorging and suffocating queenly triumph in the Epilogue to the Satires (Dialogue I). The representation of Dulness as monstrous goddess and travesty-mother has been much explored in recent feminist criticism (Ingrassia 1991; Francus 1994). Nature is more positively figured as female, as are the Muses of poetry, and Virtue (though etymologically, virtue is connected with maleness). Gender clearly has a part to play in Pope’s imaginative world.

Many (mostly male) critics have argued that Pope’s deformities and his political marginalisation led him to have a special empathy with the situation of women in his era. Certainly Pope could not take ’manliness’ for granted, as his letters show: masculinity had to be won, constructed, acquired through mastery of the pen, through the compensations of satiric conquest. There is plenty to show that Pope recognised that much of what reduced the autonomy of women was cultural rather than natural. He writes in the ’Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture’

Too much your Sex is by their Forms confin’d, ;:>

Severe to all, but most to Womankind …. •{

Still in Constraint your suff’ring Sex remains, ».

••,-„    Or bound in formal, or in real Chains; ,v,      : :.•…/•

&                                                           (TE VI: 62-5) i.vrjw,^. .-.!•»

He recognised that the cultural imperative to marry could be utterly disastrous for women. Nonetheless Rogers points out succinctly that for all his relative disadvantages, as a man Pope still had more automatic independence than any woman of his age (Rogers 1972b: 138). Like Pope, eighteenth-century women could not go to university or take civil office. But they were much more hemmed in than Pope in terms

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of what they could do, for they were not regarded as autonomous, but subject to male keeping. One of the main areas in which the odds were stacked against them was literature itself: only women of aristocratic status like Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu could gain significant respect, while successful playwrights and novelists like Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre and Eliza Haywood tended to be regarded as vulgar and transgressive. But literature was also one main field in which gender was produced, the binary divide between male and female, with its oppressive, positive-negative internal hierarchy, made to seem natural, anatomically-determined and unchallengeable.

Feminist theory of the last two decades has made a number of radical inroads into this ’naturalness’: by reclaiming and revaluing the work of women writers, by uncovering the historical and cultural systems of misogyny and subjection, by analysing and contesting mythic constructions of ’the feminine’, by refusing the authority of the male gaze which constructs female portraits only to criticise them (as in Epistle to a Lady) and by challenging the essentialism by which anatomical sex is equated with cultural gender. Felicity Nussbaum’s The Brink of All We Hate (1984) attempted (under the rubric of a particularly disturbing line from Pope’s Epistle to a Lady) to trace a line of development in anti-feminist satires from 1660 to 1750. Nussbaum’s study sets Pope’s Epistle to a Lady in the tradition of work by Samuel Butler, the Earl of Rochester, Restoration translations of the notorious sixth satire of Juvenal, and Swift. Pope’s poems are found to be a good deal less violent and scatological than much of this earlier tradition, though his work still rounds up the usual suspects: women as mutable, pleasure-seeking, self-worshipping, threatening and so on. Against this satiric perspective, the portrait of Martha Blount sets conduct-book regulations for positive female behaviour (self-possession, good humour, sense, domesticity, companionship). To Nussbaum this is an etherealisation, less attractive to feminist sympathies than Swift’s realistically wrinkled Stella – in fact barely female in any recognisable way at all. In the end, Nussbaum is ambivalent about Pope’s ambivalence:

Pope subtly exploits the antifeminist tradition and employs most of its assumptions, and in addition he combines that tradition with the impulse towards panegyric. When antifeminist satire begins to blend with romance, however, it brings about its own demise for a time. Pope avoids such an artistic dilemma by keeping both the desirable and the undesirable qualities of the sex alive and magnetically attractive. Women are still the object of satire because of

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characteristics inherent in their sex. At the same time he encourages •:>     our understanding of women’s situation and uses the satiric mode

to capture the contradictory impulses women inspire. Within the V     asexual ideal, he keeps them forever in unresolved conflict. ;•: (Nussbaum 1984: 158)

A year after this Ellen Pollak published The Poetics of Sexual Myth (Pollak 1985), a highly sophisticated and entertaining analysis of ’gender and ideology in the verse of Swift and Pope’. Contesting what seemed to her an over-literary emphasis in Nussbaum’s book, where individual artistic choices might mitigate the misogyny implicit in available conventions for writing about women, Pollak seeks a more complete dismantling of the ’cultural ideology’ which underlies both literary conventions and personal aesthetic choices.

Pollak works from a detailed socio-economic and cultural context to establish the existence of what she terms ’the myth of passive womanhood’. In a period of relative diminution of women’s earnings and role in production, conduct books aimed to condition young women into acceptance of a secondary, passive role by figuring assertiveness (especially in women’s writing) as futile narcissism. An accompanying idealisation of women as gentle, affectionate, domestic companions for men, entitled to (limited, and essentially ornamental) education and leisure, did not, Pollak argues, have much genuinely libertarian potential since under the guise of affection it supplanted overt misogynistic controls with indirect and hidden ones. Even the most powerful and talented women could be close to despair if they thought about their situation: as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her daughter, resignedly, mischievously: ’Let us sing as chearfully as we can in our impenetrable Confinement and crack our Nuts with pleasure from the little Store that is allow’d us’ (71). Women were encouraged to accept a spiritualised, decorative role in a myth which incorporated, protectively, its own anxieties about female ’deviance’ (figures of prude, coquette, and scold were used to define that which went beyond ’passive womanhood’). These imperatives were presented as ’natural’ through a set of literary and cultural devices (’myth’) which concealed their historically-determined status.

While Swift ruthlessly and noisily exposed the gaps between the reality of his world and its bourgeois ideals, Pope ’seemed to go out of his way to resolve that dissonance, to rhetorically accommodate the contradictions inherent in his culture’s dominant sexual codes and despite their delimiting character – to make them seem sufficient to experience, fulfilled’ (12). Thus in the Rape of the Lock [65-77] Pope is

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found to respond to the autoerotic potential of Belinda by confirming her as an object, ineluctably bound to forms of exchange and circulation in which men have the only real power, even as he ’satirises the irrational materialism of bourgeois values that objectify human beings by giving primacy to forms over substance’ (12). Belinda (a standard ’type’ of deviant) is told to knuckle under to socialisation and marriage by Clarissa, a prude (the opposite standard type), dramatizing ’choice’ as a matter of female discussion. But Belinda has already converted herself into an object in the ’toilet’ scene, as another negative type (Thalestris, the Amazon queen) reminds her: ,,, i ;

f;v JiCJ’i’I-lMii   . ;.V..      ,’•

Was it for this you took such constant Care   •,; t. • i».;•; =*• xj’,••• -o, ; v The Bodkin, Comb, and Essence to prepare; •>•.;•.. ••,*/•, i •••/ ’:>;••

For this your Locks in Paper-Durance bound,        ’•.’••.•;!:.    ’?:.;•••*> For this with tort’ring Irons wreath’d around^     md& fifl#is/-i..^

(RL, IV: 97-100)

Politically, for Thalestris, the answer is no; ideologically, for the poem, the answer is yes, since the ’nourishment’ Belinda has bestowed upon her locks ’to the Destruction of Mankind’ (1:19) actually converts her into a possessable object, the part taken for the whole (in the rhetorical figure known as metonymy), in a playful but ineluctable fusion of outward appearance with inner identity. Belinda’s quest for autonomy and subject-status, always close to the horror of female sexual aggression, is doomed from the start; ’By her very mode of being she enacts a self-destruction which, though mediated by the Baron, begins and ends with her’ (95). If in the poem she ’remains constantly resistant to the terms of female existence as Pope imagines them’ 106), this is just another illustration of his overall point, that resistance is useless. The geniality of the poem, which in the end claims the lock for itself, possessing Belinda’s sexuality even as it offers her a compensatory literary ’fame’, conceals the ideological brutality with which ’Belinda is put on the scene of Pope’s poem in extremes of pride, beauty, and virginity to be humiliated, mutilated, and raped’ (106).

Pollak also contests the bourgeois reading of the Epistle to a Lady [96-101] as a contrast between negative and positive versions of femininity and argues that in effect there is no cogent difference between them, since the whole poem depends on the ’implicit metaphorisation of the female as a work of art’ (109). In Pope’s vision, women lack meaning, essence, ’character’; they seek the forms of art only to fill them defectively, act only to defeat their own worst inten-

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tions, and commit themselves to essentially circular, masochistic pleasures.

\’<   Pope’s text denies ’character’ to women in a more fundamental

T   sense than even its own ironies would suggest. Metaphorically

’ ’’•   bridging the gap between verbal and visual modes of representation

o”   by his use of this key term, Pope establishes an essentially unitary

:.<:,   structure of sexual difference – an economy of gender in which

,; •   woman is not other in an irreducible, but only in an appropriated,

sense. She is not the sign of a separate, autonomous otherness, is

not a subject, an end in herself, but is ’his other’, the not man that

by opposition gives identity (gives ’character’) to man.

(Pollak 1985: 111)

Martha Blount appears to be celebrated as the woman rewarded for operating in accordance with the ’natural’ grammar of the gender system. But Pollak argues that the contrast between negative characters and the woman composed of the ’best kind of contrarieties’ is only superficially complex, a ’sophisticated rhetorical strategy for obscuring an ideological simplicity, for bifurcating a premise that is univocal’ (118). Addressed as quintessentially ’mistress of herself, an authentic woman after all, she is at the same time a composition, already blended, formed by Heaven to be a ’softer man’, but nonetheless in essence raw material which ’she’ is incapable of ordering herself. The lines to Martha reconstruct her, adding in husband and daughter though she was unmarried and childless, presenting her as:

•’? a fait accompli of mediation, a blended, finished ’work’ whose &• charm and moral perfection are stasis itself. The reward for her goodness is not, as for the Man of Ross, in the active’ends of being,’ but is passively contingent on the blandishments of men: by the patronage of Apollo she is protected from herself; by the patronage of Pope she is immortalised and blessed (281-92).

(Pollak 1986: 120-1)

The poem which gives her identity conceals her: ’buried in the indeterminacy of direct address even as she is personalised by the candor of a private interchange, undeciphered hieroglyph, she is ”charactered” both as woman and the artifact of man’ (127).

Pollak finds that while Pope and Swift are both committed to a phallocentric view of the universe, Swift’s explosive and uncomfortable skirmishes with the ideological system which he cannot actually

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dismantle offer more pleasure to the feminist reader than Pope’s aesthetically flawless accommodation with it. She concludes with some remarks about Pope’s colonisation of the female voice in the extreme case of Eloisa to Abelard [77-82], where once again she contests the notion that some positive exchange is being offered. What is really being indulged, she contends, is ’not the specificity of a woman’s torment, or her display of erotic and emotional intensity, but rather a voyeuristic male appropriation of female eroticism in the service of a phallocentric ordering of desire in which both excess and lack are figured as female’ (186).

Critics have tried to rescue the unregenerate Pope for more profeminist positions by various means. Rosslyn finds that in The Epistle to a Lady Pope (almost accidentally) finds himself charmed by the evanescence of female character which he satirically decries, that the satiric burden of subjugation is sabotaged by the imaginative expression in which is appears (Rosslyn 1988). Claridge (1988) uses the freelypunning subversive strategies of deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis to retell The. Rape of the Lock [65-76] less in terms of a commitment to ’the cheerful and necessary socialisation of a woman out of virginity’ than as a self-undermining victim of a ’covert psychological dynamic’, in which Pope seeks actually to virginalise/desex her; it is a contest between Belinda’s autoerotic and labile sexual pleasure and Pope’s desire to snatch (rape) the phallic sign (the lock) of her creativity

– to replace the female power of cantos I-III with the Popean art of cantos IV-V. For her ’the text suggests the inadequacy of Pope’s pen to assume authority’ over Belinda (129). Treacherously artificial, always threatening to exceed the power of male art to visualise her, Belinda must be infiltrated, voyeurised, scripted; yet she is also phallicly strong, a very Samson of the hairdressing world, guarded by gender-bending sylphs, possessing the womb which the men in the cave of spleen envy, capable of infinite desire. She can’t be allowed to get away with this:

The poet has exposed Belinda and made her vulnerable as she loses part of her artfully constructed self, in order to nullify her. Now he will use the artifice of her story to build himself up – to make potent his pen with her stolen phallic power, the rape whose economy drives this narrative.

(Claridge 1988: 137)

The couplet form itself is characterised as a male device of closure and finitude, a form of linguistic control which points to an obsessive fear of female artistic excess. In the end, Claridge claims, Belinda’s

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jouissance, ’the uncanny power that seemed to reside in a politically powerless creature’ (143), outweighs Pope’s conversion of her lock into his penned poem, her sexual creativity into his engendered fame.

Susan Matthews (1990) takes up the issue of the supposed characterlessness of women (as formulated in the Epistle to a Lady} and suggests it might be possible to read it as a kind of liberation – by denying women the ’characters’ of language Pope excludes them from the symbolic order (equated with the phallic law of the father in Lacanian psychoanalysis) and leaves them in the maternal realm of the imaginary; women novelists, however, found it expedient to avoid such protean types of female character. Steve Clark (1990) pursues the instability of gender definitions and sexual imagery through a range of Pope’s work, finding considerable identity between Pope and those characters whose gender seems particularly threatening (Sporus, Atossa). He argues that Pope’s voice is not so much manly as desexualised, that it attempts to avoid the pitfalls and contaminations of desire: ’Pope’s discursive authority … appears to be constituted through an exorcism of desire: in this case, the object of repudiation has become a female body invested with a masculine potency’ (96). That these gender terms ’may now appear hopelessly indeterminate in relation to his work’, Clark hopes, may come to regarded ’as one of its greatest strengths’.

In contrast to these highly theoretical, text-based accounts, Rumbold (1993) gives an accessible and thorough survey of what is known of the actual lives and experiences of the women whom Pope celebrated, stigmatised, or otherwise characterised in his work. By grouping a reading of each major poem with a biographical analysis of one or more of its female protagonists, Rumbold sounds out the contexts from which Pope’s constructions of the feminine emerge, and restores a voice to those partially silenced by the effectiveness of Pope’s poetic control. Rumbold details Pope’s relations with his mother, half-sister, and nurse, the gradual shift in amorous emphasis in his correspondence with the Blount sisters away from the brittle and manipulative Teresa towards the more self-effacing and put-upon Martha (’Patty’), the disillusionment of his fantasticated erotic image of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her ’Oriental’ guise, and his changing position in relation to widowed and powerful aristocrats such as the Duchess of Buckinghamshire and the Duchess of Marlbrough. Women writers such as Judith Cowper, a more deferential and less threatening literary figure than Lady Mary, and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, also emerge from the shadows, as do women in Pope’s circle involved (covertly or otherwise) in politics: Henrietta Howard, George IPs mistress, and Mary Caesar, a Jacobite activist [165-9].

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Pope’s drawing of boundaries for the behaviour of women could be wilfully crude. His half-sister Magdalen summarises his eventual polarisation of the Blount sisters: ’Patty Bl the fair one, Mr. Pope’s, the other he did not love, call’d Bitch, Hoyden’ (112), but such polarities, which characterise some aspects of Pope’s work, are revealed here as constructed ones, to be considerably modified in the light of documentary sources, which themselves point to new ways of reading the poems: the correspondence between Pope and Martha, for example, ’shows poignantly how in daily life as well as in Characters of Women [Epistle to a Lady] he idealised this touchy and indecisive woman along the lines of his archetypal unfortunate lady’ (285). While Rumbold does not call into question Tope’s primary commitment to the rules laid down for men – as writer, public figure, head of the family, friend to his male friends and protector to his female friends – it is easy to see how the opportunities (or disabilities) which enabled him to experience so wide a range of less positive and assured roles… are connected with his willingness in Eloisa and the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady to enter into the gloom and passion of female confinement’ (43). In those poems particularly, which derive partly from sympathy with women of his acquaintance helplessly oppressed by bad marriages and partly from fascination with the transgressive brilliance of Lady Mary, Pope appears to celebrate female rule-breakers: ’he had transcended the conflict between lady Mary’s self-assertion and the dutiful passivity typical of his unfortunate ladies by imagining heroines whose outrageous self-expression was offset by impressive moral strength’ (109). Such conflicts could not always be resolved, of course, and the increasing vehemence with which he denounces the creative power of women like Lady Mary in terms of personal filth and sexual aggression point straight towards the gender of Dulness in The Dunciad [130-49]:

Indeed, that Dulness herself is female is one of the most important facts about her: if her gender is a source of delight in opening up a world of capricious fantasy akin to the female world of The Rape of the Lock, it is also the key to her obscenity as … she opposes and undoes the work of God the Father … Her yawn, the formless yet potent opposite of the divine fiat, like her womb-like cave of pullulating literary monstrosities, draws on Pope’s fundamental unease about female creativity; yet her very existence at the centre of his own creation testifies to his need for such a creature. To oversimplify, she stands for what his mind abhors and his imagination craves.

(Rumbold 1993: 166-7)

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For Rumbold the section of Epistle to a Lady [96-101] which contrasts the lasting values of Martha’s modesty with the dazzling aggression of women like Teresa and Lady Mary (242-9) is a more positive attempt to resolve such a division:

>;,;< Teresa and all her glittering kind are conclusively denounced in

• •>’’ the idealistic and no doubt unnoticed falsehood that the rising ..* moon distracts attention from the setting sun. In Pope’s quixotic ,%\. defence of the self-effacing female ideal we sense the depth of his •;,: desire to respond as vividly to what he conceived of as goodness as ,’ i’’ to the brilliance which in the end would only disgust him. It is a :K moving moment, as much for the impasse indicated by the I–:., implausible conceit as for its declaration of quietly sustaining love. •s:.- (Rumbold 1993: 277)

’•’.’ • t

A useful adjunct to Rumbold’s work is Thomas (1994), an account of the wider response to Pope among women writers and readers of his day. The self-educated Pope, deprived of a university education, could in many ways offer a model of literary self-advancement to the ’unlettered’ female writer: he acted as their ’classic’ author, especially after the ’feminised’ Homer translation (19-67), to be read, imitated, quoted, celebrated, appropriated and subverted through the century. Women readers apparently felt more specifically addressed by Pope than by any other male poet, and there exists a whole canon of female responses to Pope’s work, covering the social range from aristocratic to demotic. Of course, Pope’s mastery of verse technique could be intimidating for his readers, and much of his verse constructs femininity in ways which were hotly opposed by women writers; alternately, some women writers felt Pope was not conservative enough, particularly in the Essay on Man, which some took to lack orthodox Christian apologetics. But there was ’recuperative potential’ to be discovered in heroines like Eloisa (183), despite the explicitly sexual nature of Eloisa to Abelard; there was a model of skill to imitate, innocently, in The Pastorals; and most extensively there was an education in the use of ’personae’ in the Horatian poems [119-30]:

<?f:>   Perhaps acute awareness of daily feminine role-playing aided them ,-}..•.   in fabricating personae: women wrote as women writing as Pope •<(:;   writing as Horace. Their frequent responses to Pope’s Horatian ;’{•:   poems suggest women’s longing for a share of cultural authority. It also discloses their belief in Pope’s poems as models for authoritative feminine expression.

(Thomas 1994: 226)

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Thomas concludes that ’Current analyses implying that contemporary women were somehow victimised by Pope’s gendered rhetoric should reconsider the critical acuity with which his female audience of ten read’(244).

Christa Knellwolf takes her cue from Pope’s best kind of femininity, ’a contradiction still’, and argues for the critical usefulness of unresolved oppositions as a means of realizing the ’liberatory potential’ in the poetry (Knellwolf 1998). She thus finds the poems less aesthetically successful in their ideological work than Pollak does. Starting antichronologically with Epistle to a Lady [96-101], Knellwolf looks for contradictory impulses towards women as a means to open up the ideology which oppresses them. The constructed femininity in the poem seems to suggest than women are both powerless and threatening, and she argues that this logically impossible combination derives from a contemporary shift in women’s relation to cultural production (sometimes referred to as the ’feminisation’ of culture; 15). Knellwolf goes on to examine the issue of violence in Windsor-Forest, specifically the episode of Lodona, which transforms the female figure into an object which is itself the very ’ground’ of representation, or mirror of art. She finds gender politics in unusual places, such as the Essay on Criticism, where Pope denounces obscenity and impotence with a vehemence which reinforces his ’engendering’ commitment to the symbolic association of creative potency with the virile body. In her treatment of Eloisa to Abelard, Knellwolf finds an ambivalent questioning of the conventional association between creativity and potency, though Pope undermines this by reintroducing his own image towards the end. Knellwolf argues that while Pope was unusually receptive to the idea that ’an active sexuality was a positive complement to an active mind’ in a woman, but only so long as these qualities were not aggressively used (131). In two chapters on The Rape of the Lock [65-76], Knellwolf analyses the contradictory expectations that ’women have to preserve sexual inexperience and simultaneously have to comply with the conventional courtship pattern of a heterosexual relationship’ (139). Finding in the construction of Belinda ’a knife-edge between sympathy and censure’ (179), Knellwolf relates her alternate trivialisation and heroisation to patriarchal anxieties about the nature of women, and seeks to exploit the dual nature of mock-epic (thoroughly contemporary and polite, thoroughly ancient and martial) to emphasise the subversive visibility which the poem gives to women even as it seeks to negate and subject them. Arguing that Pope’s poem shows a deeply analytic concern with the power, limits and distortions of ’representation’, Knellwolf finds that in the end, Belinda achieves not the compliment

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of fame which Pope consciously intends but a certain haunting,

indomitable presence which eludes him: •

Pope’s objective is to render an image of an existence that is void

of meaningful life. Belinda is, nevertheless, not empty: all those

elements which are offensive to Pope’s understanding of woman

may appear like horrid perversions and parodies of that which is

i     good and meaningful, but the abundance of half-real, half-living

figures that surround Belinda challenge the notion of emptiness.

They may be no more than ghostly reflections and hollow echoes

•     to begin with, but they attain to a certain independence and thus

’•     question conventional assumptions about female existence on

which the poem is based.      .-• ;JIM./

’•.’••v.v (Knellwolf 1998: 195)

\-f-n ••••&

In The Dunciad [130-49], Knellwolf finds no coherent subject beyond a vexed enquiry into women’s role in the production of culture. The ’Mighty mother’, Dulness, has a power which is both erotic and emasculating, intrusive and smothering. As inverter of the creative ’logos’ of St John’s Gospel into an ’uncreating word’ (IV: 654), Dulness negates male creation by female annihilation; yet this also testifies to a kind of actual female power beyond Pope’s imagination (212-13). This failure of conclusiveness, with a drift towards uncontainable and contradictory meanings of gender emerging from the equivocal role of the body in creativity, Knellwolf argues, forms a kind of invitation for debate and revaluation in femininst terms.

’He pleas’d by manly ways’

Recent studies of gender have reminded us that men also undergo the experience of gendering; that is, maleness is not simply an anatomical given from which masculinity ’normally’ results, but a constructed, learned system of codes and behaviour. In an important study of eighteenth-century sexual ideology, Kristina Straub argues analyses the contrasting uses of a conventional ’schoolboy’ figure in the literary war between Colley Gibber, actor and poet laureate, and Pope, in whose unofficial laureate epic The Dunciad [130-49] Gibber was made to star. The schoolboy is male but not a man, destined to authority yet subject to correction; he is implicated in various rituals of homoerotic discipline. Straub argues that Pope, disabled from obvious exertions of masculinity by his troubled body, rigorously seeks to negate and reject the figure of the schoolboy and define his own mature manliness by opposition to

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it. Gibber, associated by his profession as actor with ’unmanly’ forms of display, plays ambiguously with the figure, sometimes making Pope the boy who must be corrected, sometimes offering himself for corrective judgement, and gaining a measure of literary authority through his self-aware exhibitionism:

Gibber’s schoolboy persona functions in relation to ideologies of sexual identity and literary authority as a sort of door that swings both ways: he opens into a rigidly binary system of heterosexual roles that ground literary authority and sexual dominance in an oppositional, binary structure of gender difference. On the other hand, he also opens into a fluidity of sexual roles that threatens binary gender roles and places literary authority on ambiguous ground. Without being subversive himself, Gibber perpetuates uncertainties about the dominant versions of sexual identity and literary authority that are emergent in the eighteenth century. His schoolboy suggests a fluidity and liminality still barely possible amid the growth of a new ideology of authority and masculinity. Pope’s use of the schoolboy trope is more of a slamming than a swinging door. Confronted with his own problems of sexual ambiguity and literary authority, Pope associates deviation from verbal mastery with sexual deviation, and firmly positions both outside newly dominant definitions of masculinity and literary authority.

(Straub 1992: 78)

The association between sexual and literary authority is sometimes disconcertingly direct in the war between Gibber and Pope: one comic take on the quarrel from 1742 all but has them compare sizes (Guerinot

1969: 301-5). But the implications of such gestures are wide-ranging, as Straub’s analysis demonstrates.

Pope’s endeavours to write himself into mastery as the British Homer had a more positive goal, but the results of the claim to masculinity were again more ambiguous than he might have desired. Carolyn Williams has placed Pope’s versions of Homer in the context of early eighteenth-century gender debates and Pope’s ’quest for a masculine role in society’ (Williams 1993: 1). Homer, as the great seminal fount of Western literature, and master of the epics of war (Iliad) and questing (Odyssey}, ought to have provided an unquestioned model for a writer concerned about civic and political ’manliness’. Pope grew up among discussions of sovereignty in which the state was often figured as female, with the ruler as a male husband or head; the ruler might be corrupted, however, by contact with ’feminine’ tastes or luxurious

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practices (the opera, in which castrati singers were notable new arrivals, was a particular source of disgust for Pope). With his own manliness in question, Pope’s aspirational epic sympathies while a boy, and his subsequent development as supreme verbal athlete, look like an attempt to draw firm gender boundaries where these were perceived to be under threat. The translation itself can be seen as attempting to produce a distinction between manly Greeks and effeminate Trojans which is underplayed in the Homeric text. Yet Pope was accused of ’feminizing’ Homer by putting the epics into the music of couplets, and making it ’pretty’ (Williams 1993: 76-7). The heroes themselves failed to fit uniform standards of manly conduct (Achilles does nothing except sulk for much of the poem); a complex homoeroticism pervades the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus; even all-powerful Jove appears sometimes rather henpecked by his wife. The Odyssey is peopled with deceptive and artful women who overpower everyone except Odysseus, and even positive models of domestic virtue like Penelope (and Andromache in The Iliad) require complex attention in order to ’translate’ their roles into ’properly’ gendered terms. Williams also explores the influence of these epic genderings on Pope’s mock-epic versions of war and empire, The Raft of the Lock (with Belinda’s anomalous Achillean strengths) and The Dunciad (with a ’hero’ seduced by effeminate arts).

’Such Ovid’s nose’

Pope knew better than anyone that the human body was not merely some neutral anatomy but a complex code, another site of the struggles of interpretation. From Dennis onwards, Pope’s enemies had ’read’ his body as the sign of inner malignity, a deformed mind in a deformed body, spiteful, monkeyish, not quite human, not fully male. As Mack shows (1978), he resorted to a number of defensive self-interpretations: having his portrait painted or sculpted in ways which disguised his ’deficiencies’ or drew attention to qualities of mind (Wimsatt 1965); playfully accepting his limitations in letters and converting them into satiric advantage (as in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot}; behaving in a compensatory laddish way; narrating himself as a medical case-history (Nicolson and Rousseau 1968). In the early poems he explores in dark and sometimes grotesque detail the frustrations of disfigured, damaged or imprisoned lovers. In the Horatian poems he seeks comradeship with his audience in a way which seems to displace his demonised figure in favour of an amiable observer-figure; the perverse flattery of his body which he ironically catalogues in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot resists the

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limiting category of ’disabled’ (Mack 1978). Deutsch (1996) shows how often and how astutely Pope made his physical predicament work for him, even to the extent of producing a ’poetics of deformity’ in which monstrosity can be read as a literary method and form of conceiving.

Pope used the codes of the body in adversarial ways as well, belittling Timon as a ’puny insect’ at the supposedly masterful centre of his huge villa, querying the status of the female body in the case of Belinda, identifying the Dunces with their own excremental output. The body should be appropriately clothed and subject to rules of continence, for its signifying potential is always prone to anarchic licence. Yet Pope’s work has always itself exploited this licence. Jonathan Smedley complained that Pope and Swift were inclined, like infants, ’To foul and din each Place they came in/And to play some Pranks, unfit for naming’ (Guerinot 1969: 134), perhaps in response to the immersion of Smedley in Fleet Ditch imagined by Pope in The Dunciad (Book II). Johnson censured both Swift and Pope for their ’unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention’ (Johnson

1905: 242). It is a telling charge, not least for its own ineluctable attraction into a kind of verbal play with the filth which is being rejected.

Since Freud it has become considerably easier to construe a ’delight in ideas physically impure’ as not so unnatural after all; Norman O. Brown turned the scatological fascinations of Swift into a bona fide ’excremental vision’ in 1959, and Ruth Perry (1981) discussed the links between ’anality’ and ethics in Pope’s satires. The anal complex is the basic moment of socialisation where the infant learns to control impulse, may be punished for autonomy, resistance and pleasure, and is rewarded for observing certain rules – hence the association between bodily product and parental approval which results in the identification (in psychoanalysis as in satire) of excrement with money. While Swift seeks to remind his culture of the unspoken link between the body ’down there’ and the mind ’up here’, Pope however consciously used excremental imagery to damn his opponents and indicate his own adult, trained status. Perry cites the traces of Pope’s own anality in biographical details such as his miserly retention of his work for years before publishing it, his compositional practice of piecing together ’saved’ fragments of expression, his habit of saving paper, the defensive enclosure of his grotto. But these are also linked, intentionally, to an ethical interest in the regulation of human activity: the flow (or the spread) of money, the careful measuring out of one’s life and substance, resistance to an infantile coprophilia (exemplified throughout The Dunciad. ’That is, the judgements about behaviour implicit in his poems

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are based on standards like those of toilet training: doing the right thing at the right time, keeping an eye on the social world, getting and spending in right amounts, giving and keeping at the right time’ (145). The Dunces are characterised as violators of toilet-training, in that so far from learning when to retain and when to expel their creativity, they simply wallow in their own filth – Curll slips in a ’lake’ of urine left by one of his own stooges, but is merely ’reviv’d by ordure’s sympathetic force’. The booksellers’ idea of a heroic contest is to see who can piss furthest; the Dunces dive into Fleet ditch and indulge in fantastic mythic relationships with faeces. The muckily physical collector Mummius, in book IV of The Dunciad, is made to wait for his coins until Annius can pass them in a kind of anal birth which signifies a quite improper form of expulsive/retentive relation, a conversion of the proprieties of property into something which is merely excrement. While there is clearly pleasure in the writing of all this, since Pope takes immense pains to couch these filthy anecdotes in the purest euphemisms available, he can argue that they form a kind of genuine satiric vision: they mean something, as opposed to being mere filth. The satire itself moderates its aggressive impulses, restrains, directs, and contains them in exquisitely balanced form. Pope himself takes the argument up in the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II, where he describes his disgust at the way empty-headed courtiers recycle each other’s ’wit’ like the Westphalian hogs eating each other’s excrement (a well-known animal myth of the time). The friend responds:

r,1

Fr. This filthy similie, this beastly Line, !;>,   : :::-K

Quite turns my Stomach -P. So does Flatt’ry mine;    ^•….\*.{^-’3>.”f And all your Courtly Civit-Cats can vent, ;.,>’.   ,.•••    .

Perfume to you, to me is Excrement. :,<:,; •;;’, •’•

(Epil. ii, 181-4)

To the adult, discerning temperament, moral repugnance to false use of language is viscerally disgusting, much more so than the poetic use of obscene images which that disgust motivates and justifies. The unsocialised Dunces, conversely, have no means of regulating their appetite or judgement at all, simply floating around in undifferentiated infantile pleasures. Satire is a form of late toilet training, in this analysis.

Stalk/brass and White (1985) discuss Pope’s images of the ’grotesque body’ in relation to a new division of social space, located principally in the coffee-houses which proliferated after the Restoration and which were in Pope’s day the sites of a serious, productive leisure. There was no alcohol, no gambling, no festivity, but talk, discussion, exchange of

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views – a bourgeois ’public sphere’, as it has become known, which banished carnivalesque, festive, or libidinous elements in the interests of polite, disciplined ’commerce’ (either in the sense of financial business, as with the several insurance companies that were formed from such social meeting-places, or in the sense of the ’commerce of letters’ whereby the practice of literary criticism came to prominence). In a similar way, they argue, Pope demonised the ’low-Other’ of the irrational body and its festive entertainments into a polar opposition to rational discourse. But this exertion upon the ’grotesque body’ was always nevertheless contaminating:

Hence the apparent paradox that writers who were the great champions of a classical discursive body including Dryden, Swift and Pope spent so much time writing the grotesque, exorcising it, charging it to others, using and adopting its very terms whilst attempting to purify the language of the tribe. The production and reproduction of a body of classical writing required a labour of suppression, a perpetual work of exclusion upon the grotesque body, and it was that supplementary yet unavoidable labour which troubled the identity of the classical. It brought the grotesque back into the classical, not so much as a return of the repressed as a vast labour of exclusion requiring and generating its own equivocal energies. Quae negata, grata – what is denied is desired: Augustan satire was the generic form which enabled writes to express and negate the grotesque simultaneously. It was the natural site for this labour of projection and repulsion upon which the construction of the public sphere depended.

(Stallybrass and White 1985: 91)

For Stallybrass and White, while the Augustan project fought ’to cleanse the cultural sphere of impure and messy semiotic matter, it also fed voraciously and incessantly from that very material. It nourished and replenished its refined formalisms from the symbolic repertoire of the grotesque body in the very name of exclusion’ (104). Thus The Dunciad [130-49] persistently demonises those who ’mediate’ low and high, body and mind, by bringing ’the Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings’, corrupting high culture with the riotous demotic entertainments of street theatre. Under Theobald/Gibber, Tragedy and Comedy embrace;/… Farce and Epic get a jumbled race’ (D, I: 67-8), reducing creativity to an anarchic hybridisation of bodies which ought to be kept hierarchically apart. For Stallybrass and White, however, Pope’s doomed project forms ’a closure of identity which in

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*r

* ALEXANDER POPE

attempting to block out somatic and social heterodoxy is fated to rediscover it everywhere as Chaos, Darkness and ”Mess”;… The classical body splits precisely along the rigid edge which is its defence against heterogeneity: its closure and purity are quite illusory and it will perpetually rediscover in itself … the grotesque, the protean and the motley…’ (110). They conclude: ’The mitigating fact of Pope’s superior poetic ability could not save him from being immersed in the very process of grotesque debasement which he scorned in others’ (117).

A further analysis of the significance of Pope’s bodily metaphors is found in Ferguson (1990); for her, the images of parodic birth, breeding, generation and lineage, and the nightmare corporeality of books figured as bodies bespeak a set of key concerns: ’the nature of literary engendering, creativity and organic growth, sexual and linguistic conjunctions, and also the genealogy and behaviour of offspring (which may be passively subject to defilement, mutilation and mortality, but may equally engage in wilful rebellion and deviance)’ (138). Concentrating mainly on the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot [110-9] and The Dunciad [130-

49], Ferguson argues that ’the predominant force of these metaphors is to probe the difficult issue of what is supposedly ’legitimate’ and ’illegitimate’ in the processes of writing and reading, and to emphasise the vulnerability of the -written word and of authors themselves’ (138). Finding a different kind of vulnerability from that examined by Stallybrass and White, she concludes:

While Pope at some points links the ideas of bodily integrity and ’legitimate’ breeding with the integrity of the author and that of the work as his undisputed offspring, by his elaboration of such themes as spontaneous generation, prostitution, illegitimacy, plagiarism and the dissemination of printed texts, he effectively shows that the purity and immortality of the written work cannot be guaranteed. Indeed, it can scarcely be hoped for.

(Ferguson 1990: 149)

Dulness and her Dunces are at once logos and anti-logos, ’the enemies of writing and, in other guises, the embodiments of writing or writers themselves, expressing all the anxieties attendant on authorship’ (149).

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