Defining self and others: Pope and Eighteenth-century gender ideology

Pope's satires abound in examples of such appropriation, of enclosure of the female voice within his own structures of thought and expression: the Goddess Dulness in The Dunciad, who ostensibly has her say but whose words are satirically framed and subverted by the epic machinery and (especially) the voice of the epic poet, representing the authority of tradition and high culture; Clarissa in The Rape of the Lock, who is first recruited into the service of the Baron, to supply the "weapon" that enables him to perpetrate the "rape," and later promoted to the higher service of Pope, given the exalted task of "open[ing] more clearly the moral of the Poem" (see note to Canto V, 7f.) by in effect counseling Belinda to act in conformance to male interests (i.e., to take the rape "like a woman" by accepting both her violation and her wifely destiny with grace); and Martha Blount in To a Lady, whose supposed words opening the verse are voiced, in effect mediated and authorized, by Pope himself ("Nothing so true as what you once let fall, / `Most Women have no Characters at all'") and whose attempt to insert her own viewpoint into the poem ("`Yet Cloe sure was form'd without a spot--'" [157]) is immediately interrupted by the poet, who converts her diffident objection into a springboard for his own peremptory thoughts on the matter ("Nature in her then err'd not, but forgot"). Blount is thus transformed into a kind of "straight woman" for Pope, supplying him with lines--or one and one-half lines, to be exact, since she is silent for the remainder of the poem--that help set up his witty repartee and tendentious observations on women.

It is telling that in To Cobham and To Bathurst, Epistles I and III of the Epistles to Several Persons, the male addressees are allowed far more of an independent voice and perspective than is Martha Blount in To a Lady, even though there is no presence of a dialogue taking place in the former poems. The first eight lines of To Cobham, for example, present Richard Temple's views concerning the relative merits of empirical study versus book learning. The poet's subsequent observations acknowledge the validity of Temple's argument even as they proceed to qualify, dispute, and/or build upon it. In To Bathurst, the first fourteen lines are devoted to setting out the ostensibly divergent views of Bathurst and Pope himself concerning the role of riches in human affairs. Although the views are finally revealed to be harmonious--"Like Doctors thus, when much dispute has past, / We find our tenets just the same at last" (15-16)--the effect is to affirm a reconciliation of separately held views rather than to create a specious unity or a homogenized outlook achieved through the absorption of all potentially different perspectives into one (i.e., the poet's).

By contrast, any independent views Martha Blount might have are absent from To a Lady. Apparently incapable of answering her own question or completing her own thought, not to mention of filling out her own heroic couplet, without the intervention of a male authority, Blount is shown to be fundamentally dependent on Pope throughout the entire course of the poem, no less than she is at the very end for the poetic immortality he wittily, magnanimously confers on her. Thus, although To a Lady purports to be a dialogue, and has traditionally been discussed as such by critics, what we in fact hear is a monologue: a strictly one-way conversation which depends on the illusion of a female voice and presence to support its own authority and self-sufficiency. That a poem so insistently univocal could be interpreted by so many as dialogic underscores the validity of Judith Butler's observation that "The very notion of `dialogue' is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not. The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated."(30) In other words, like the question of who is speaking for whom, the question of whether or not a dialogue is taking place cannot be answered without considering precisely those issues of domination and control that poems such as To a Lady serve variously to mystify or translate into other (e.g., "aesthetic") terms.