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

It is important to keep in mind that for Pope, letters were as much a public as a private mode of expression, designed to disseminate a carefully crafted image of himself for posterity. Hence we can assume that, in the epistolary examples just cited, Pope is remaining safely within the bounds of accepted conventions governing male relationships and their expression in the eighteenth century. And indeed, in (for example) the letter to Bathurst cited above, Pope is careful to situate his address within the context of a pure and exalted friendship by assuring his correspondent, "I know you to be so much a better friend to me than myself," and by quoting a couplet adapted from Dryden's Epistle to Congreve ("Let not th' insulting foe my fame pursue, / But shade those Laurels that were raisd by You"). Yet the overall picture is more complicated than this. For in likening himself not only to the "old Woman that loves the man that had her Maidenhead" but also to "a Child that comes to complain to its best friend who has humoured it always," Pope seems to be using his epistolary communications to act out an entire range of relations based on differences of age and worldly position as well as gender.(15) The metaphorical acknowledgments of his "lesser" status (as an old woman, a young deflowered girl, and a child in need of humoring), while on one level affirming Pope's social inferiority to Bathurst, on another level seem to allow him a greater latitude to test--even to give a playful hint of flouting--the boundaries separating them in society.

Pope's representation of his "connubial" relationship with Jervas in terms of an equality of status, while obviously contrasting with his self-portrayal vis-a-vis Bathurst, similarly stretches the limits of the conventional without actually transgressing them. It is interesting (and not a little ironic) to note that the picture he draws of his friendship with Jervas seems to approximate more closely the ideal of "companionate marriage" claimed for the eighteenth century by Lawrence Stone than do the officially recognized, legally constituted marriages invoked to support Stone's thesis.(16) Several rather different conclusions can be drawn from this observation. One might be that the problems surrounding Pope's highly self-conscious romanticizations of himself and his friendships in his letters, which concealed the darker realities of his life and his relationships with others, find a telling counterpart in Stone's idealizations of eighteenth-century family life, which have the effect of eliding the continuing hardships and inequalities characterizing women's position in society.(17) A somewhat different (though not necessarily incompatible) conclusion might be that the flaws in Stone's argument can be redressed, not only through the more sustained and careful investigation of contemporary women's lives that various feminist critics have called for, but also via a broader consideration of the range of ways in which people in the eighteenth century organized (and expressed) their affections, their desire for connection and community, outside of as well as within the dominant structures of society (as symbolized by Stone's triumvirate, "Family, Sex and Marriage"--institutional categories largely or wholly irrelevant to Pope's mode of existence). In this regard, Pope's letters to his male friends can offer an important perspective for understanding relationships that defy neat, either-or labels, seeming to skirt the borders of the conventional by at once functioning to shore up and to reveal slippages in the patriarchal order.(18)