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Defining self and others: Pope and Eighteenth-century gender ideology
Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Carole Fabricant
Montagu, for her part, judging from her epistolary responses, was unmoved by Pope's romantic and erotic fantasies about her, as well as unimpressed by his strenuous efforts to elevate her to saintly status. Politely sidestepping them, or even ignoring them altogether, her letters quietly insist on a connection of friendship rather than romance between herself and her correspondent, in the process revealing their author's determination to avoid having her character and experiences appropriated to satisfy the dictates of someone else's story about her. Coolly and matter-of-factly she regales Pope with detailed accounts of the landscape she has traversed, the villas and monuments she has visited, and the exotic social customs and rituals that have especially captured her attention on her sojourns in Hungary and Turkey. Her letters are anecdotal, informative, highly descriptive; above all, they are focused outward, on external phenomena and happenings, in sharp contrast to the inward-directed, self-centered and self-obsessed epistolary effusions of Pope's.
One might be tempted to argue that their correspondence represents yet another example of gender reversal, with Pope performing a conventionally defined feminine role by writing primarily about his feelings and inner thoughts, while Montagu fixes her attention almost exclusively on the "masculine" domain of worldly realities and events. This is true up to a point--and seems reinforced by Pope's metaphorical identification with decidedly non-"macho" lovers like the beautiful, poetically sensitive Endymion and with explicitly female ones such as the "Spouse in the Song of Solomon" (C 1:365). But as I read Pope's letters there is also something traditionally and symbolically "masculine" about his emotional outpourings in the way they make demands upon their audience for immediate and total recognition, as well as in the way they assert their own priority over the thoughts and feelings of the one to whom they are being communicated. The expression of the writer's subjectivity is only one half of the story of Pope's letters to Montagu. The other half is the intrusiveness and imposition of this subjectivity on another, the negation or absorption of the other voice trying to express a subjectivity of its own: in short, a kind of imaginative and emotional imperialism whose opening up to others constitutes a form of taking them over. Pope's fantasies about slave girls and Turkish concubine add a special resonance to the colonialist implications of his epistolary stance.
Some recent critics have responded negatively to Montagu's letters, blaming (for example) her "habitual refusal to exhibit sympathy, here perfectly exemplified" for the later ugly rupture between her and Pope, and sternly declaring that "the detachment of her replies comes as a shock."(28) There is, however, another way of understanding Montagu's epistolary responses to Pope, as Patricia Meyer Spacks suggests when she observes, "Lady Mary reveals not callousness but only the kind of self-assertion she had gradually evolved--the assertion of her refusals.... [S]he claims her control of written language to insist on the value of an imagination different from Pope's."(29) The way in which the authority of literary tradition and convention supported Pope's epistolary project while it impeded Montagu's efforts at autonomous self-expression points beyond Pope's letters to the successful strategies of appropriation and control evident in his major poems dealing with women.
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