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Defining self and others: Pope and Eighteenth-century gender ideology
Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Carole Fabricant
Alexander Pope, who assumed a female persona in one of his major works (Eloisa to Abelard) while devoting others--most notably, Epistle II of Epistles to Several Persons, To a Lady--to extended descriptions of women's behavior and experiences, and who, through The Rape of the Lock, became known for his feminization of the mock-epic poem, is a writer who has regularly been touted by critics for his supposed unique affinity with the female sensibility: typical are Maynard Mack's assertion that "Pope had always a special sympathy for the lot of women" and Alastair Fowler's statement that in The Rape of the Lock "Pope identifies with women to an unusual extent."(1) At the same time Pope has come to be portrayed by an increasing number of feminist critics as the voice of phallic authority, as a symbol of the oppressive power of patriarchy. Ellen Pollak, for example, argues that in The Rape of the Lock "woman is made to function as the sign not of her own subjectivity but of a male desire of which she is the object," while Ruth Salvaggio cites Pope's poetry as evidence of how Enlightenment England "imprisoned women within representational categories created by men."(2) Underlying these diametrically opposed views are conflicting answers to the question, "For whom (which is also to say, what body of interests) is Pope speaking" in his writings--particularly in those works that claim to be presenting a female voice or perspective?
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Contemporary theoretical challenges to traditional notions of representation warn us against the presumption and bad faith involved in the act of speaking for others. Hence Gilles Deleuze's insistence that "only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf" and his invocation of Foucault's prison information group, organized to allow prisoners themselves to be heard, as a model for "teach[ing] us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others."(3) And yet, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's incisive critique of this position, based on the fact that, tacit claims to the contrary, "representation has not withered away" and that only a naive or deluded stance of self-transparency on the part of the speaker can make it appear so is well taken.(4) So too is Linda Alcoff's point that speaking for others can produce positive as well as negative results, since there are times when "we do need a `messenger' to advocate for our needs."(5) Indeed, it could be argued that Foucault acted as precisely such a "messenger" through his writings on the incarcerated and the mad. Still, Deleuze's point remains compelling to the extent that it underscores the numerous instances in which speaking for someone else functions as an act of arrogance and appropriation, constituting a form of what Paolo Freire terms "antidialogic actions," whereby one person "names the world" on behalf of others and thereby robs them of their right to speak.(6)
This problem is addressed in a particularly suggestive way by Donna Haraway, through her rejection of the politics of representation in favor of a "politics of articulation." Arguing for the speciousness of the claims made by certain would-be defenders of endangered species in remote lands and by anti-abortion activists, both of whom put themselves forward as protectors of entities with which they have no direct involvement, Haraway explains what is wrong with the questions "Who speaks for the jaguar? Who speaks for the fetus?":
Both questions rely on a political semiotics of representation.
Permanently speechless, forever requiring the services of a
ventriloquist, never forcing a recall vote, in each case the object
or ground of representation is the realization of the representative's
fondest dream.... Both the jaguar and the fetus
are carved out of one collective entity and relocated in another,
where they are reconstituted as objects of a particular
kind--as the ground of a representational practice that forever
authorizes the ventriloquist. Tutelage will be eternal. The
represented is reduced to the permanent status of the recipient
of action, never to be a co-actor in an articulated practice
among unlike, but joined, social partners.(7)
It is tempting to consider possible applications of Haraway's conceptual framework to eighteenth-century literature, where we repeatedly find certain groups of beings--slaves, cannibals, children, the poor, hunted animals, satirized fools, and (most obviously and frequently) women--in effect disempowered through their consignment to the category of the "permanently represented," hence forever passive and silent even, perhaps one should say especially, about issues that most directly and vitally affect them. In a sense it is precisely this situation that is exposed in Swift's A Modest Proposal, which among other things dramatizes how, according to the politics of representation, "the power of life and death [in Haraway's words] must be delegated to the epistemologically most disinterested ventriloquist": in this case, the Modest Proposer, whose credentials for solving the problems of Ireland's mendicant population are based largely on his status as a detached observer rather than on his actual membership in this class; whose claim of being the most appropriate person to devise a scheme for the fate of Irish babies is rooted precisely in the fact that he himself has no babies (his youngest child being nine years old); and who vindicates his right to speak for the interests of Irish parents by pointing to the unlikelihood of his ever again becoming one himself (his wife being past childbearing age). The Proposer's act of "speaking for the fetus"--to the extent that his scheme is designed, among other things, to "prevent those voluntary Abortions, and that horrid Practice of Women murdering their Bastard Children; alas! too frequent among us"(8)--here reveals itself, with gruesome irony, as but the first step toward organized infanticide: a fact which becomes less incomprehensible when we consider that the act of objectifying mothers as mere "Breeders" is logically continuous with the act of objectifying the end product of their "breeding" as saleable, consumable items. The inverse relationship between the speaker's lofty non-involvement and the presumed authority of his representations of and for others, which includes making life-and-death decisions about their future, is shown to shape all aspects of the relationship between England and Ireland, so that the politics of representation is exposed in this context as an expression, on the semiotic level, of colonialist subjugation and devourment.
