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

There, my Retreat the best Companions grace, Chiefs, out

of War, and Statesmen, out of Place. There St. John

mingles with my friendly Bowl, The Feast of Reason and

the Flow of Soul: And He, whose Lightning pierc'd th'

Iberian Lines, Now, forms my Quincunx, and now ranks my

Vines, Or tames the Genius of the stubborn Plain, Almost

as quickly, as he conquer'd Spain.

(Imit. Hor., Sat. Il.i, 125-32)

Here, the homosociality of Pope's world blends into a politically reactionary vision rooted in elitism, militarism, imperialism, and a general elision not only of women but of all values traditionally coded as feminine. That the great war hero exalted in the final four lines of the passage is the same Lord Peterborough whom Pope addresses (in the letter cited earlier) as his sorely missed "Husband" only serves to underscore the compatibility between Pope's seemingly transgressive gender play and his embrace of a conservative patriarchal ideology. Not that I mean to simply collapse the two into a single perspective or to suggest that this kind of gender play is always and automatically recuperable by hegemonic forces. Undoubtedly there are instances and contexts in which such play can meaningfully be said to challenge established structures of authority. In Pope's case, however, it seems to me more appropriate to acknowledge the gender ambiguities and accord them their due--as occasionally unconventional expressions that intriguingly hint at certain ideological slippages--but without exaggerating their influence or imbuing them with a misleading political (i.e., fashionably "subversive") significance.

2

A different form of gender play is evident in Pope's letters to women, where we find a sexual role-playing calculated to create a masculine identity, clearly distinguished from the feminine identity he constructs for his female correspondents. In place of the roles of husband and family patriarch, Pope acts out other roles that function to define his relationships with women: rake, courtly lover, protector, heroic rescuer. His early libertine pose, for example--what James A. Winn terms Pope's "playing the rake"(25)--allowed Pope to carry on epistolary flirtations, occasionally marked by erotic fantasies and slightly lewd innuendoes, with young women such as the Blount sisters. In these letters he tells them, "I love no meat but Ortolans and no women but you.... For to love you, is as if one should wish to Eat Angels, or drink Cherubim-Broath" (C 1:428) and teases, "Do, keep your own secrets, that such fellows as I may laugh at ye in the valley of Jehosaphat, where Cunning will be the foolishest thing in nature, & those white Bums which I dye to see, will be shown to all the world" (515). He playfully suggests the analogy between his epistolary correspondence with the opposite sex and illicit intercourse with them: a sexual interaction, it is intimated, they secretly desire even if they don't openly admit it. Thus he warns Teresa Blount that her reputation cannot remain unblemished, nor her hands kept pure, "while [her] heart consents to encourage [a male correspondent] in this lewd liberty of writing" (350), insinuating a guilty connection between them cemented by what he describes as the "stain" of ink, of the pen's--and, implicitly, the body's--secretions.