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

4

The foregoing discussion suggests both the contradictions of Pope's identity and the various ways that he attempted to "resolve" them. It was an identity that continually strained the narrow limits of a selfhood defined by Christian and neoclassical essentialist assumptions --assumptions that were themselves coming under increasing challenge during this period, most notably from Lockean influences.(36) The variety of literary roles and voices that Pope adopted has given rise to Bakhtinian analyses of his work--not without some justification.(37) But in the end, concepts like "heteroglossia" and "dialogism" can only give a misleading picture of Pope's poetic world, the multiplicity of which Pope continually strove to contain and hierarchize in his attempts to construct a "purer," more unified identity for himself. Often this was accomplished by suppressing or disavowing, while at the same time projecting onto others, disturbing elements incapable of being integrated into his idealized self-image.(38) A telling example occurs in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in his attack on Sporus--i.e., the bisexual Lord Hervey--who in effect becomes the picture for Pope's Dorian Gray, acting out (and being condemned for) the sexual doubleness that Pope himself expressed elsewhere: "His Wit all see-saw between that and this, / Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, / . . . Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board, / Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord" (323-24; 328-29).

This process of projection and denial can be seen as closely bound up with broader cultural movements of the period, as described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White:

[Augustan poetry] nourished and replenished its refined formalisms

from the symbolic repertoire of the grotesque body in the very name

of exclusion. It took the grotesque within itself so as to reject it, but

this meant only that the grotesque was now an unpalatable and

interiorized phobic set of representations associated with avoidance

and with others. It could never be owned. It was always someone

else who was possessed by the grotesque, never the self. In this way

the bourgeois public sphere, that "idealist" realm of judgment,

refinement, wit and rationalism was dependent upon disavowal,

denial, and projection.(39)

Pope's persistent (if ultimately doomed) struggle to "clean up" the realms of both personal identity and art, to purge both of all heterogeneous matter that would prevent the creation of a "pure," clearly defined self as well as an exalted sphere of "high" culture, highlights both the triumphs and the failures of what has come to be known as English Augustanism. It was a struggle that revealed Pope's complicity in the very things--e.g., the "gross" materiality of his satiric projections, as well as their "debased" world of commercialism--that his poems attack most forcefully.