Featured White Papers
- Hosted CRM buyer's guide (Inside CRM)
- Enterprise PBX buyer's guide (VoIP-News)
- Hosted CRM comparison guide (Inside CRM)
Content provided in partnership with
Defining self and others: Pope and Eighteenth-century gender ideology
Criticism, Fall, 1997 by Carole Fabricant
These passages exemplify what James Grantham Turner terms "Pope's transgressive play with the boundaries of decorum."(26) More to the point, these epistolary forays into the interrelated realms of verbal and erotic play simultaneously mocked and upheld the sexual myths which were becoming increasingly powerful as instruments for regulating women's conduct in society. Pope's rakish role shared important characteristics with the more formalized and legally sanctioned roles of suitor and husband: in relation to all three, woman was made to serve a function, to act out a particular part, in a drama or institution not of her own making, created to fulfill the desires and interests of another. Viewed in this light, the lines that Pope addresses to Teresa Blount in his Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture--"Ah quit not the free Innocence of Life! / For the dull Glory of a virtuous Wife!" (45-46)--are less an instance of Pope's championing women's rights than of his trying to "protect" Blount from subsumption into one male scenario so that she would be free to play a role in another: his own. The "freedom" Pope envisages here is the freedom to be addressed and played with--in words if not in physical deeds--by Pope himself.
Both Teresa Blount and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu pose particularly interesting examples of the demands made upon others by his masculine role-playing proclivities and the kinds of resistance these demands occasionally encountered--a resistance more easily subdued in art than in life. Pope was clearly drawn to each woman by her special brand of energy and assertiveness, even as he felt impelled to encompass each within his own imaginative constructs. With Blount these took the form of projected adventures such as the fantasized cross-dressing exploit cited earlier, and schemes to bestow an annuity upon her on the condition that she remain unmarried for at least six years.(27) Pope was subsequently quick to respond with moral outrage to news of her affair with a married man: that is, when her rakishness was no longer available to fulfill a role in his own self-titillating scenarios (see C 3:40, 41-42). Of course, by this time Pope had transformed the sisters into antithetical but interdependent stereotypes of womanhood, one bad, the other good beyond measure: an analogue to the division between the ridiculed and the idealized portraits of women we find in his satiric verse.
In the case of Montagu the initial attraction was more powerful; the subsequent rejection, considerably more obsessive and virulent. The basic tenor of Pope's letters to her in 1716 and 1717, while she was travelling on the Continent with her husband, may be gleaned from the opening to one of them: "After having dream'd of you severall nights, besides a hundred Reveries by day, I find it necessary to relieve myself by writing. . ." (C 1:363). The remainder of this letter and those that follow bear out their erotic and masturbatory function as suggested here, but what is perhaps even more revealing about them is the singlemindedness with which they strive to pull Montagu into the vortex of Pope's imagination and assign her a role in the elaborate fiction he weaves throughout them. Portraying himself as a devoted, lovesick worshipper at the shrine of Montagu's exalted femininity, Pope fantasizes about meeting her in Lombardy to share both pleasure and danger with her (365); assures her, "I lye dreaming of you in Moonshiny Nights exactly in the posture of Endymion gaping for Cynthia in a Picture" (439); and dramatizes himself as the unrequited lover of courtly love tradition, reduced to "imitating in my ravings the dreams of Spleenatic [sic] Enthusiasts and Solitaires, who fall in love with Saints, and fancy themselves in the favour of Angels, and Spirits, whom they can never see, or touch" (389-90). Direct contact between mere mortals and goddesses being forbidden, Pope petitions Montagu to send him an intermediary--in effect, a surrogate sex object, described as a "fair Circassian Slave . . . whom my Imagination had drawn more amiable than Angels, as beautiful as the Lady who was to chuse her by a resemblance to so divine a face" (364).
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur