SOURCE: “Violence and Representation in Windsor-Forest,” in A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 67-85.

[In the following essay, Knellwolf investigates the myth of artistic origins in Windsor-Forest in relation to contemporary conventional thought on femininity and aesthetics, highlighting the fundamental value of violent themes in art.]

Although it appears to be a simple youthful exercise in the pastoral genre, and a panegyric of patriotic sentiments at that, Windsor-Forest is a challenging attempt to show the embeddedness of theories of power and violence in the eighteenth-century imagination. Since Pope was still at an early stage of his career and unflinchingly bent on questioning the foundations of the culture and society of his time, self-consciousness is, not surprisingly, a central feature of the poem. The symbolic origin of art coincides with a moment of self-consciousness which is simultaneously the consequence of an act of rape. The poem describes the pastoral fable of how Pan violates the forest nymph Lodona, in which art and violence are tied together.¹ It is here that the descriptive and suasive aspects of the text merge, and this is the moment at which the text raises the question of how aesthetic experience is constructed.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LEGITIMATION OF ART

Windsor-Forest has not attracted much notice in critical studies. If it is read at all, interpretations tend to be restricted to explaining its place in the tradition of the pastoral, sylvan, country-house or retirement poem.² It is assumed that its interest lies in the question of how it plays on allusions to earlier poems.³ This traditional framework makes the poem appear to be an unrewarding object for a twentieth-century approach. If we, however, study the poem's self-questioning stance in relation to a critical analysis of the function of violence, it becomes an extremely interesting text. In this chapter I will look at how the poem validates violence and defends its aesthetic status. As the violence is done to a woman, the passages in which the subject of art is dealt with show how Pope connected femininity with art. I am primarily focusing on the discourse in which the possibility of producing art is embedded, which leads to questions of how art is thematised in Pope's work and what kind of knowledge he deems requisite for the production of art. Since the myth of artistic origin is related to rape, the central question to be asked is to what extent violence, and especially sexual violence, is intrinsic to art.⁴

There is a gaping discrepancy between the overt and the latent meaning of Windsor-Forest, between the publicly asserted claim that it was written in support of the ruling monarch and the suggestion that it is an indictment of the contemporary political situation. As regards Pope's relation to his art, his legitimation to speak as a poet will be relevant, especially in those moments when he points to the wrongs of his time and culture. The validation of his style of writing will ultimately turn into a defence of his access to knowledge. In practical terms this means that we have to analyse his choice of a mythological narrative for both the origin and the meaning of art. In the second place we will have to analyse his attitude towards knowledge, both as a judgement of art and as a concept in its own right. All works of art, at some level, reflect back on themselves as being art and, in a more or less explicit way, ask what constitutes their own special status. If they do not do so themselves, it is our way of perceiving them which integrates them into the discourse on art. If this reflexive stance is taken as an implicit theory, there is no art which is not embedded in a theoretical account of its own possibility.

Apart from comments in letters to his friends, Pope seldom formulated his ideas concerning art outside his poetry.⁵ On the other hand most of his artistic productions deal in some way with aesthetic questions. The first successful poem, An Essay on Criticism, which I will look at in the next chapter, is exclusively concerned with the judgement of writing. It primarily condemns bad writing, but ends up with only a pathetically small number of exceptions as exemplary models. The poem with which he was so obsessed in the last period of his life, The Dunciad, centres around definitions of art and its appropriate judgement. An apology, an artist's excuse for importuning the reader with a seemingly trivial product, or rather a defence of his/her particular choices in matters of form and subject, is a mannerist stance. Aesthetic questions lead into an investigation of the relation between art and ideology. It has become a commonplace to assume that art questions the foundations of society. Theories of art undoubtedly analyse ways of seeing and understanding; but if we study the relations between art and ideology, the central question is whether the defence of a work of art implicitly includes a legitimation of the ideology which made it possible. It can go as far as to ask whether the stance of criticising culture is not already allowed for in a particular ideology, or indeed whether it foregrounds or even prescribes certain modes of criticism.⁶ But, as I will argue, the poem's manner of questioning its own point of view is where a theory of aesthetics and a critique of ideology come together.

Pope's poetry is permeated by a sense of artificiality. Stylised descriptions are, of course, no obstacle to seducing us to a particular point of view. If the verdict of artificiality does not function as an act of dismissing the poem—in the wake of the Romantic call that representation be close to nature—it simply confirms the commonplace that all representation is artificial. Talking about art and describing scenes of the poems as if they were works of art (portraits and statues) is not only a way to talk about the world in terms of its artificiality but also possesses some scope for expressing an attitude towards it. What looks like a formalised representation of a formalised society, therefore, should be viewed as an artistic form that may permit far-reaching critiques of that society's beliefs, and what looks like a self-referential exercise in the mode of art-for-art's-sake may be a clue to a critical assessment of the poetry's political arguments.

We need to think about the conditions for a metacritical position. Derrida's study of the feature of self-resemblance in representation is, first and foremost, motivated by an analysis of what interests are involved in the production of art. His essay entitled ‘The parergon’ focuses on the significance of frames. When he deals with the question of interest, especially as related to an act of judgement, he asks what motivates us to pass one judgement rather than another. As such it is an attempt to establish an interrelation between the motivating structures behind the text and those behind our interpretation. Derrida tries to tie an ‘ethically correct’ judgement to a notion of original unmediated pleasure.⁷ The all-pervasive desire for an objective correspondence between signifier and signified is motivated with regard to the sexual analogy and that overturns Kant's famous claim that art is self-sufficient and free of interest.⁸ These considerations are all the more important because sexuality is a field of contest, subjection and violence, and an analysis of the relationship between culture and sexuality (or gender) must be careful not to reiterate the violence which it studies.

THE SPACE OF LODONA

In Windsor-Forest's mythological account of how art first came into existence the precondition for art is violence—not any kind of violence, but specifically sexual violence. Pope's Ovidianised myth contains the story of the (attempted?) rape of a ‘nymph’, and this figures as the prototypical subject of art. Not only is rape typical of art but it also produces art. Since art is society's most highly valued achievement, sexual aggression and violence seem to be presented as a necessary evil. Of all the types of violence, sexual violence is most easily excused, especially if it is claimed to serve a higher (political or cultural) purpose, and I will now ask how the poem itself deals with this issue.

Making ideas visually palpable is the major suasive strategy in Pope, and the emphasis on vision goes along with a voyeuristic perspective on the subjects of his poetry. For this reason it is by no means accidental that a study of the scenery described in The Rape of the Lock, in which the innumerable objects in the poem are matched to graphic representations of the world of the eighteenth century, should be entitled The Rape Observed.⁹ The visual aspect of the scene is more than a straightforward and simple illustration of what is said; and the mode of presentation may easily differ so strongly from the poem's dominant argument that the discrepancy undermines its hostile politics. In any case, the fact that the sensory representation is as important as the plain account of it ensures that the poem's subject receives a certain immediacy.

At the surface level Windsor-Forest presents itself as a celebration of the government of Queen Anne, written to mark the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, which is illustrated by couplets such as: ‘Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains, / And Peace and Plenty tell, a stuart reigns’ (41-42); and ‘Hail Sacred Peace! hail long-expected Days, / That Thames's Glory to the Stars shall raise!’ (355-356).¹⁰ It is a highly stylised work, full of allegorical figures and stereotypes, and it is far removed from what will become popular as landscape poetry in the later eighteenth century and in the Romantic period. The passages describing aspects of ‘nature’ are highly artificial and belong to a literally human point of view. The connection to painting is so strongly noticeable that Pope criticism refers to it by the standard phrase ut pictura poesis, and there are a lot of studies which only point out the similarities between poetry and painting. Jean Hagstrum is probably the most famous representative of this school, and he argues that Pope's mode of description (for example of the pheasant, 111-118) is borrowed from contemporary still-life painting without analysing what the implications of such a similarity are.¹¹ The familiarity with hunting scenes depicting dead birds, rabbits and other game is taken for granted. But what are the implications of the connection between different forms of artistic representation? Does the reference to these genre pieces elicit the awareness that pheasants, from the human point of view, simply serve as targets for the hunt? These kinds of genre pieces are famous decorations of interior spaces, which may remind us that the hunt was one of the chief entertainments of the age and furnished the walls, as well as the minds, of private gentlemen. The pheasant was one of the most popular subjects of still-life paintings. But of course it was not hunted because its beauty is a value in itself; beauty only receives a place in this kind of art if it has been brought into human possession. There is no question of the thing (here the bird) being beautiful by itself and for itself. Beauty depends on an act of recognition and it is only granted by the human mind, and this, moreover, only if the thing bearing the mark of beauty has become a sign of human achievement and ownership. Genre pieces are, of course, not what is called high art but they belong to what we might call the ‘culture industry’ of the eighteenth century, and as such may reveal much more about the age's attitudes and fantasies than the recognised masterpieces.

Windsor-Forest contains a British version of a metamorphosis by analogy with the famous Ovidian tales. Pan, the lecher of conventional classical legend, pursues Lodona, the local inhabitant of Windsor-Forest. At the moment of the rape she is transformed by her patroness Cynthia into a river whose surface will later offer a mirroring surface, standing for artistic representation. Before going on to that passage, I want to analyse the description of Pan's pursuit of Lodona and of her rape:

It chanc'd, as eager of the Chace the Maid
Beyond the Forest's verdant Limits stray'd,
Pan saw and lov'd, and burning
with Desire
Pursu'd her Flight; her Flight increas'd his Fire.
Not half so swift the trembling Doves can fly,
When the fierce Eagle cleaves the liquid Sky;
Not half so swiftly the fierce Eagle moves,
When thro' the Clouds he drives the trembling Doves;
As from the God she flew with furious Pace,
Or as the God, more furious, urg'd the Chace.

(181-190)

Within the context of the poem this passage looks like just one more hunt scene. A beautiful young huntress is hunted. As in the case of the pheasant her beauty attracts the hunter's desire for possession and in no way protects her against male aggression. The phrase ‘her Flight increas'd his Fire’ demonstrates that resistance is impossible since it only reinforces the zeal of the aggressor. Right from the moment at which Pan is introduced, the text gives us hints that Lodona has no chance of escape. First, Pan is a stereotype who tends to win sexual fights; and, second, he is a god while she is only a nymph and hence of inferior status in the mythological hierarchy. Consequently, we are prepared for the narrative pattern in which a woman loses a struggle and is forced to conform to the role of victim.

Apart from the above, we get another textual hint as to the outcome of the narrative: the text says that she strayed ‘Beyond the Forest's verdant Limits’ (182). This implies that it was her fault to leave certain precincts which signify security, although there is no logical reason whatever why Pan should not have been able to enter the forest. However, this is a point that is irrelevant in the poem's context: we are not supposed to come up with conjectures, such as the statistical likelihood of him coming across her in the darkness of the forest being negligibly small. The important cue in this line is ‘Beyond’, which suggests that she did something improper and therefore is partly responsible for the outcome. The idea of ‘Beyond’ decidedly does not make sense topologically; it makes sense only in terms of ideological space. A footnote to the one-volume Twickenham edition explains that ‘the “forest” [is] thus a legal and not a geographical term’.¹² ‘Beyond’ implies a breach of decorum: by being a huntress, and performing an active role, she goes beyond her role of woman. By doing what it is wrong for a woman to do, she (as the text implies) ‘asks’ to be reduced to the passive female role. The logic of the text says that because she violates the definition of her gender, sexual violence is used to put her back in her place. Being a huntress makes it seem logical that she cannot escape becoming the target of the hunt in her turn. She is, however, not pursued in the same way as she pursues her game—she is pursued and destroyed as a woman.

Rape means that the woman in question is reduced to an object, and it is the reduction to an object which art mimes and which has to be resisted if the purpose of art is not simply that of consumption.¹³ For the poem, it does not suffice to recount that Pan rapes Lodona. The reader receives a description of the flight, whose narrative time is prolonged in order to prolong the tension but also in order to protract the (male) pleasure of reading/watching. To this end a tortuously detailed comparison of the flight to that of an eagle hunting doves is inserted. These six lines (185-190) not only emphasise that for Lodona it is a hunt for life or death, but they also demonstrate that this is a race between near-equals. They are only near-equals, though, and her strength is a means of making it more interesting to watch him win.

In the following lines Pan gets hold of Lodona and they describe the moment when he pulls her to the ground:

Now fainting, sinking, pale, the Nymph appears;
Now close behind his sounding Steps she hears;
And now his Shadow reach'd her as she run,
(His Shadow lengthen'd by the setting Sun)
And now his shorter Breath with sultry Air
Pants on her Neck, and fans her parting Hair.
In vain on Father Thames she calls
for Aid,
Nor could Diana help her injur'd
Maid.
Faint, breathless, thus she pray'd, nor pray'd in vain;
‘Ah Cynthia! ah—tho'
banish'd from thy Train,
‘Let me, O let me, to the Shades repair,
‘My native Shades—there weep, and murmur there.’
She said, and melting as in Tears she lay,
In a soft, silver Stream dissolv'd away.

(191-204)

The moment at which he tries to penetrate her, or presumably succeeds in doing so, is rendered obscure and once again protracted. The time which passes while she vainly appeals to the authorities of her father and of Diana suffices for Pan to carry out his intention. When she realises that her appeals have been ignored, she addresses Diana, the goddess of chastity, by her Greek name and receives some help from her, albeit not what she had prayed for originally. Lodona's own formulation that she is banished from the goddess's train (200) implies that Pan managed to penetrate her. A consequence of this is that she accuses herself and thinks herself unworthy of Cynthia's female company, which shows that rape figures as an act in which both the body and the image (or reputation) of the woman is presumed to be impaired. A comparison to Ovid's Metamorphoses shows that the female figures in most of these stories are transformed in order to escape from the pursuer. Pope seems to want more than a partial rape because the effect of the subsequent allegory of the origin of art (211-218) depends on the contrast to this act of violence. If Pan's triumph is withheld and the moment of sexual climax is obscured, or marked by absence, Lodona's existence is in any case damaged beyond repair. Even if she manages to escape, it is an escape into art, which means existing as a muted object that is looked at or read about; and in the artistic image the rape is being reiterated in the act of representation. Nevertheless, art's avowed dependence on violence makes any stance towards it uncomfortable.

The river Loddon, which is not only the transformed but also the renamed site of Lodona, then becomes the mirror on which art makes itself visible. The passage describing this effect seems to be the first uncontroversially peaceful moment in the poem. In terms of narrative development it started out with a history of brutal government (as demonstrated in a line like ‘The Fields are ravish'd from th'industrious Swains’, 65; note the term ‘ravish'd’). Then it argues that the hunt (supposedly) absorbs the aggression which had previously gone into the exploitation of the subjects. The world of Windsor-Forest is still full of aggression. Violence is not extinguished but only conducted into different channels. Thus the seasons are not defined according to the flowers which are in bloom but according to which animal can be hunted. In this context the peaceful landscape is all the more surprising:

Oft in her Glass the musing Shepherd spies
The headlong Mountains and the downward Skies,
The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods,
And absent Trees that tremble in the Floods;
In the clear azure Gleam the Flocks are seen,
And floating Forests paint the Waves with Green.
Thro' the fair Scene rowl slow the lingring Streams,
Then foaming pour along, and rush into the Thames.

(211-218)

Here we have an idyllic landscape painting which is specifically a pastoral one. The musing shepherd emerges all of a sudden out of the context of violence and destruction. The shepherd himself (or herself?) belongs to an artistic genre and is a stereotype. Still, an idyllic scene is ‘painted’ here.¹⁴ It is so fleeting, fragile and unreal that it is attractive while it also expresses its own unreality. The ‘absent Trees that tremble in the Floods’ (214) reproduce the ambiguity of presence and absence which is typical of art. These lines, moreover, refer back to the description of how the reflection of the landscape originated as a story of sexual pursuit, since the ‘absent Trees’ have a distinctly phallic overtone. In any case, the context of the preceding passage suggests that the landscape was formed through violence and disruption. The result of the rape is a peaceful scene, but the poem makes us aware that the idyll originates at the cost of a wilful blindness to the violent elements. This kind of ambiguity makes the work of art more attractive, but its illusionism pivots on the possibilities that rape and violence serve the purpose of gratifying us. The seemingly harmless scenery, in fact, has submerged layers which contrast and challenge the Kantian notion that aesthetic responses to the beautiful can be disinterested.¹⁵ On the other hand, the challenge could not be made if the idea that this is a moment of true art and beauty were not posited alongside its own disruption, and if it did not let us see its mode of representation alongside that which is represented.

The space in which the scene of beauty can be seen is referred to as ‘her Glass’. Within the literal logic of the Ovidianised metamorphosis it is the surface of the river. The term used here is ‘Glass’, which suggests that an artificial instrument is involved. A natural element is used for artificial, or rather, artistic purposes, which corresponds to the classical attitude that nature and art are mirror-images of each other.¹⁶ The concluding lines of the first epistle of An Essay on Man say: ‘All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee’. The art in Windsor-Forest is of a special kind: it is a gallery of visual images depicting different scenes of violence. The individual images are themselves of a special kind. As I argue, the surface complicity with the discourse of political propaganda is undermined by the fact that the expressiveness of these ‘portraits’ is pushed to an extreme. If sufficient attention is paid to the implications of its individual passages, it should be impossible to argue along the lines that ‘[v]iolence is deflected, consummation suspended, action transmuted to art; and Lodona becomes the typical pastoral image of art, the reflecting water in which the world is framed’.¹⁷ Observing the expressive violence of these images is an enabling feature for a feminist reading, and a close analysis of the sexual politics of propaganda should make a mistakenly simplistic understanding of the poem's female figure impossible.¹⁸

To come back to the idyllic picture that is mirrored on the river Loddon, for all its visual appeal it offers only an instant of ‘happiness’ and the description makes it clear that its desirability is achieved by illusion. The river serves as a mirroring surface, and it is itself the object of perception. On the other hand, the river holds up the mirror to nature, so to speak, while it is itself nature. The ‘absent trees tremble in the Floods’ because the water flows and the surface is not altogether smooth. Then ‘the azure Gleam’, which is caused by the sky being mirrored, serves as a background for the pastoral picture, complete with sheep and shepherd mirrored in the water. No painter is visible; every bit of this work of art is carried out by natural agents, which suggests that its artistic quality consists of the special way in which it is looked at. Or, indeed, the fact that the shepherd looks into the water and recognises himself as a shepherd transforms a mere landscape into a pastoral painting. In the temporal development of the poem the picture is erased as easily as it was made. The forests are already floating away. As the flow of the water accelerates, the mirroring effect, the picture, vanishes. Being reminded of the fact that a smooth surface mirrors, while a troubled one does not, suggests that an observer must be present whose eye can imagine an escapist calm. Such considerations project the reader into a detached vantage point which is one more frame to ‘the landscape painting’. From this point of view he or she watches the chase of Lodona, her rape, and her subsequent transformations into a river, into a self-conscious work of art and into the (real) landscape that is implied by the stylised landscape of the poem.

Towards the end of the poem ‘old Father Thames’ is depicted as a typical allegorical figure with the conventional attribute of the urn. Engraved on his urn is the whole stretch of landscape of Windsor-Forest, which figures as the centre of the world. In this passage the poem concentrates on describing the different streams of the area. Here the ‘Loddon slow, with verdant Alders crown'd’ (342) once more occurs as artistic representation but it is just one of many. The last of the rivers is described as the ‘silent Darent, stain'd with Danish Blood’ (348). While the Loddon is just mentioned and does not receive special attention, the Darent is stained with blood. As part of the depiction on Father Thames's urn, the red colour of the blood makes the scene more picturesque and more colourful. In the necessary reduction in size it will look like a tiny bit of red colour functioning as a decorative detail. If we translate it back to its implied size, we have to ask how much blood it takes to change the colour of a full-size river. If it is looked upon as a metaphor for a moral blemish in the soil of Windsor-Forest, the question to be asked is, can this disfiguring wound, which continues to bleed (if only in metaphor), be looked upon as a triumph in Britain's imperial history?¹⁹ And a further question concerns whether we can treat a disfiguration as a sign of triumph, and interpret instances of bloodshed and violence as self-sufficient aesthetic features.²⁰

THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION

There may be some fleeting moments of beauty in Pope's descriptions of the landscape, but, as Lodona's story shows, they are bought at the expense of a violation. Furthermore, if we do not deliberately close our eyes to violence, the text shows this dependence openly and indeed insists on it. In doing so it subverts its own complicity with the dominant ideology of colonising the female body and the whole world. It undermines the glorious myths which transform the location of power into an allegorical landscape, and it uses artistic means to point towards the moments of disfiguration and disruption. The critical strategy of going into the details of the narration to an extreme and expressive degree disturbs the unity of the text and exposes its ideological contradictions. Of course, if the poem is read as an expression of harmony, it is propaganda. It is only a close look at the language of Windsor-Forest that shows how the narrative details work to erode the overall surface message of celebrating the British empire.

Pope is not an openly political poet. He criticises by presenting contradictions simultaneously and somehow assumes that a sound judgement will discern what is incompatible. When we read a poem such as Windsor-Forest, which for a long time belonged to the patriotic canon, we feel that its ‘subversive logic’ is not explicit enough.²¹ While the poem's preoccupation with its own status as art may seem the limit of its interest, Pope also uses his descriptive technique as a mode of critique. Pope relies for his art on the power of describing details expressively. These details represent self-contained microcosms, which render a distorted mirror-image of the world at large. His descriptions go far beyond a gratification of voyeuristic desire since the details themselves remain strangely incompatible. Their only common denominator is that of disrupting the poem's seemingly public and guaranteed statements. For this reason, I conclude that while his art sets up the illusion of unity and undisturbed beauty (as for example through the use of the heroic couplet), it also points to its own illusionary nature and, in so doing, undercuts the possibility of textual closure.

Towards the end of the poem Father Thames delivers his prophetic vision of the future of the British empire. He begins with his eulogy on the promising future of Britain by celebrating it as a harbinger of peace:

          Hail, Sacred Peace! hail long-expected Days,
That Thames's Glory to the Stars
shall raise!

(355-356)

The passage continues with comparisons between Britain and other famous empires, such as Rome, Egypt, Russia and India (357-368). Father Thames's emphasis is on the fact that the other empires are governed by ruthless and inhuman principles while Britain aspires to a peaceful reign:

Let Volga's Banks with
Iron Squadrons shine,
And Groves of Lances glitter on the Rhine,
Let barb'rous Ganges arm a servile
Train;
Be mine the Blessings of a peaceful Rein.

(363-366)

In spite of his insistence that peace is the motivating goal for British foreign policy, he spouts expansionist propaganda and he celebrates the glorious future moment when the British empire will have swallowed all other nations. In his words, it is Peace that ‘Thames's glory to the stars shall raise’, but what will earn Britain its unique fame, of course, is that it has vanquished all other competing empires.

The following lines present the argument that the hunt will serve as a domesticated outlet for the ineradicably human sentiments of aggression so that bloody battles will no longer be necessary:

Safe on my Shore each unmolested Swain
Shall tend the Flocks, or reap the bearded Grain;
The shady Empire shall retain no Trace
Of War or Blood, but in the Sylvan Chace,
The Trumpets sleep, while cheerful Horns are blown,
And Arms employ'd on Birds and Beasts alone.

(369-374)

This passage admits that violence is an essential element of human nature. It does not argue that it is a weakness of the human character, and violence is quite openly accepted as one of the passions which are vital for existence. As Pope puts the argument in detail in the Essay on Man, none of the passions is either good or bad but it is the task of civilisation to make sure that they are used in the interest of society. That the hunt is necessary, as an opportunity to abreact aggression, is cogent; what is questionable is whether the project of subjugating the rest of the world is acceptable, even if the purpose of doing so is to guard over unanimous peace. It also has to be noted that the successful conquest of the world produces the same pastoral idyll as that which preceded the ambitious plans of establishing an unbounded British empire. Ironically enough, the aggressive passion leads to the same kind of peaceful relationship to nature which had been abandoned for the sake of fighting for the establishment of peace. This leads us to conclude that the peaceful future is the outcome of severe and cruel foreign battles which cannot but endanger the peace at home. When we read Father Thames's propaganda it is up to us to question the perspective from which he is speaking and to investigate the implications of his statements.

Father Thames appears to be more than pleased with his vision of Britain's exclusive dominion over the world:

There [in London] mighty Nations shall enquire their
          Doom,
The World's great Oracle in Times to come;
There Kings shall sue, and suppliant States be seen
Once more to bend before a British queen.

(381-384)

The purpose of these lines is to glorify Queen Anne and to set her up as an epitome of justice and mercy. In this context, the term ‘oracle’ by no means implies that her judgements will be oracular (that is, incomprehensible), but it equates her with the figure of a classical priestess whose task it is to speak the direct will of the gods. What the text intends, above all, is to describe the role of Britain (or of Britain's queen) as that of a wise arbiter to settle the quarrels between the rulers of the less civilised parts of the world. Even though we admit this to be the intended meaning, these lines describe a condition of unlimited power which is deeply worrying and whose potential danger should not completely have escaped Pope. There may be no conscious, or overt, attempt to challenge the plans of the British government at the early stage of his career when he wrote Windsor-Forest but, I argue, certain doubts about the legitimacy of its expansionist plans are still present in this propagandist exercise.

An alternative argument to consider is that the expansionist plans need not necessarily be envisaged as a military project and that Pope was primarily praising the achievements of trade. On the face of it, this interpretation fits in better with the passage's emphasis on the peaceful character of the expansionist plans. But then, it is hopelessly naive to imagine that a widespread trading network could be established without enormous naval and military power to protect the routes, the ships and the trading posts in foreign countries.²² Therefore, Father Thames's vision of a peaceful world-wide trade implies that it should be controlled by Britain. Since such a project can only be held in place if the foreign countries agree to accept the laws dictated by the British government, the trading empire is tantamount to the political empire.

Now I will examine the language of Father Thames's speech in detail and ask how this passage renders the arguments in favour of establishing the British empire, so as to discover the subversive undercurrents contained in his propagandist arguments:

          Thy Trees, fair Windsor! now shall leave their Woods,
And half thy Forests rush into my Floods,
Bear Britain's Thunder, and
her Cross display,
To the bright Regions of the rising Day;
Tempt Icy Seas, where scarce the Waters roll,
Where clearer Flames glow round the frozen Pole;
Or under Southern Skies exalt their Sails,
Led by new Stars, and born by spicy Gales!
For me the Balm shall bleed, and Amber flow,
The Coral redden, and the Ruby glow,
The Pearly Shell its lucid Globe infold,
And Phoebus warm the ripening Ore
to Gold.

(385-396)

The idea that the trees leave the forest transformed into ships was first introduced in the beginning of the poem: ‘Let India boast her Plants … / While by our Oaks the precious Loads are born’ (29-31). The argument is that a paradisaical forest is uprooted and transformed into a (military and / or commercial) fleet. Of course, if all the trees are used to build ships, what is left behind is no more than a desert.²³ This is to say that the groves of Eden will vanish not for reasons of lust, however, (as in the Bible) but because of a continuing desire for expansion. The destruction of the native countryside is only one instance of violence: the ships sail to places which are peaceful and self-contained in order to acquire their special products; being able to obtain these exotic treasures, of course, requires that these far-off spaces agree (or are coerced to agree) to the conditions imposed by the British traders. Couplet 387-388 is a striking example of how a superficial approval of the policy of expansion clashes with the perception that it could only be achieved in the guise of violence and destruction. The expression ‘For me the Balm shall bleed’ (393) is a further example of the rapacious character of the coloniser (in whose stead the figure Thames speaks). It does not suffice to get the balm; the balm has to bleed; more specifically it has to bleed for him, so that he can feel gratified in its possession. The expression ‘bleeding balm’ is a commonplace metaphor. (At the beginning of the poem there is a similar anthropomorphising metaphor when amber is described as ‘weeping’ (30).) But in line 393 the idea of bleeding is focused upon in such a way that the force of the conventional, or dead, metaphor comes back to life, the effect being that nature is presented as being in a state of mourning over the loss of its treasures.

In the next stage Father Thames describes his own status in his vision of colonial expansion:

The Time shall come, when free as Seas or Wind
Unbounded Thames shall flow for all
Mankind,
Whole Nations enter with each swelling Tyde,
And Seas but join the Regions they divide …

(397-400)

The Thames stands metonymically for all water, and this couplet implies that Britain is the source of the life-giving element, water being an image for life in general. As much as the narrative of Lodona's rape produced the mythologised landscape of Windsor-Forest, the water of the small (blood-stained) rivulets feeds the Thames which in its turn feeds the whole world. The literal description says that the water becomes ‘unbounded’ and the dynamic of couplet 399-400, which celebrates the flow of commerce, also suggests that the noise and bustle of trade will almost certainly destroy the Edenic beauty of Windsor-Forest. Once the water has become unbounded, the stability of the creation, the firmament which, according to Genesis, holds water and land in their respective places, becomes unsettled and the light would only have to go out to produce original chaos.²⁴

Even though Father Thames continues to foretell peace and harmony, he loses himself in the rhetoric of shallow propaganda:

Oh stretch thy Reign, fair Peace!
from Shore to Shore,
Till Conquest cease, and Slav'ry be no more …

(407-408)

There is a transition from the voice of Father Thames to that of the poetic persona which is hardly noticeable because the eulogy carries on after the actual speech has finished: Father Thames presumably finishes his speech at the end of line 422 when the poetic voice says, ‘Here cease thy Flight’ (423). The poem concludes with the following lines: ‘Enough for me, that to the listning Swains / First in these Fields I sung the Sylvan Strains’ (433-434). These lines not only end the poem with a reference to a pastoral audience of its own, but they also insist for one last time that we are listening to a poetic convention whose objective it is to establish illusions. The poem contains noticeably different perspectives and renders different (propagandist as well as critical) discourses. While it makes no overtly critical statements, it is in such clashes of perspective that the poem broaches the question of what is political and asks us to think about the representational strategies of political propaganda.

Closure requires that the cogency of conventional assumptions is confirmed. In such a spirit Lodona might be interpreted as a figure representing a certain locality; she might be equated with nature itself, and it might be argued that the violation of woman and nature (or of woman as nature) is a necessary stage on the road to culture and progress.²⁵ In her study of Rembrandt's pictures of Lucretia, Mieke Bal reads the visual representations of the ravished Lucretia from the point of view that the tool of rape is rhetoric, or the conventional patterns of discourse. Bal specifies her argument as follows: ‘I do not mean that rhetoric is exactly identical with “literal” language, but that rhetoric is important because of the very difficulty it presents in deciding which reading is literal and which is figural.’²⁶ Here Bal draws attention to the difficulty of deciding how to unpack the representationality of central cultural myths. This is because it is convention (or a particular historical period's sense of propriety) which demands that a raped woman commit suicide in order to fend off suspicions of her complicity.

The main difference between Rembrandt's representation of Lucretia and Pope's landscape is that the former depicts the female body of Lucretia while the latter does not directly describe the body of the raped woman (although, metaphorically, it is the raped woman's body which is the centre of Windsor-Forest).²⁷ For Lodona this means that she has become invisible; and since woman tends to be equated with nature, nature in woman has, so to speak, simply been reduced to its essence. Once she is literally an object, she nevertheless possesses the power to disrupt the fantasies which the musing shepherd-artist projects on to her. As soon as she is transformed from a woman who is roving through nature into an allegorical figure representing a particular place, she acquires an ambivalent status. Her passivity, or inefficient activity, was taken for granted during the narrative of her rape and she is excluded as a creative agent in the production of art. The fact that she stays in the place where she was raped, that she hovers over and haunts the production of art like a revengeful genius loci, however, suggests that it takes very little indeed to disrupt the cultural fantasies of beauty and harmony and to expose the violence with which they were constructed in the first place.

For us readers this means that we need to refuse to accept Lodona's transformation into an object of art with a clearly defined meaning. Above all, we have to resist textual closure because that tends to posit the conclusion that violence is inevitable. By means of structuring the imperial vision around instances of violence, Pope insists that we recognise its central position. This is undoubtedly a depressing message; but I suggest that one possibility of responding to a poem, such as Windsor-Forest, is to ask ourselves whether the recognition of the centrality of violence in art might challenge us to search for ways of coping with violence that reduce its force. Windsor-Forest itself posits the hunt as a less violent option than war, but I have argued that the poem also shows awareness that this is an unsatisfactory solution. When it deals with the topic of representation and exposes the violence contained in representation, its interest in illusion is a warning against premature conclusions about the nature of reality. Because readings which adopt interpretative closure force the illusory elements of the poem into firm definitions, it asks us to be prepared to experiment with different readings so as to discover the different perspectives and implications contained in political rhetoric.

Notes

1. For a study which relates the poem's pastoral mode to its imperialist project, see Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1985).

2. Windsor-Forest stands in the tradition of the garden-landscape poem which functions as an encomium of the owner of a particular palace or country house (this tradition chiefly includes Ben Jonson's ‘To Penshurst’, Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House and John Denham's ‘Cooper's Hill’); see, for example, Robert Cummings, ‘“Windsor-Forest” as a silvan poem’, English Literary History 54:1 (1987) 63-79; or Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (London, Oxford University Press, 1969).

3. Cf. Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959).

4. See Stephanie H. Jed's analysis of rape as a central topos in any culture's process of self-definition: Chaste Thinking: the rape of Lucretia and the birth of humanism (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1989).

5. He wrote a satirical treatise on literary merits entitled Peri bathous and expressed his ideas mainly in letters to his poet friends; see Bertrand A. Goldgar (ed.), Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

6. For a feminist discussion of eighteenth-century ideology see Penelope Wilson, ‘Feminism and the Augustans: some readings and problems’, Critical Quarterly 28:1-2 (1986); and also Penelope Wilson, ‘Engendering the reader: “wit and poetry and Pope” once more’, in G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (eds), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope: tercentenary essays, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

7. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 42.

8. In The Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant argues that art should be conceived of as being freed from the necessity of directly promoting interests: see Kant Selections, ed. Theodore M. Greene (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), pp. 392-407.

9. Clarence Tracy, The Rape Observed: an edition of Alexander Pope's poem ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1974).

10. See for example Charles H. Hinnant, ‘“Windsor-Forest” in historical context’, in Wallace Jackson (ed.), Critical Essays on Alexander Pope (New York, G. K. Hall, 1993).

11. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (London, University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 214-218.

12. The Poems of Alexander Pope: a one-volume edition of the Twickenham text with selected annotations, ed. John Butt (London, Methuen, 1963), p. 197.

13. Cf. Teresa de Lauretis's claim that the violence of rhetoric consists in the equation between the female and the object: Technologies of Gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction (Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1987), p. 45.

14. Jeffry B. Spencer, Heroic Nature: ideal landscape in English poetry from Marvell to Thomson (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 214-215.

15. Cf. Mary Poovey, ‘Aesthetics and political economy in the eighteenth century: the place of gender in the social constitution of knowledge’, in George Levine (ed.), Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, Rutgers, 1994). She shows that in the eighteenth century, aesthetic experience was modelled on Shaftesbury's view of ‘disinterestedness’, which was contrasted to a political economy ‘which dealt with the individual's acquisitive relation to the world, and by extension, to the use or end that objects, once possessed, were made to serve’ (p. 84).

16. For a discussion of neoclassical standards of imitation (viewed in relation to the contest between classical and modern views) see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: history and literature in the Augustan age (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991).

17. Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: studies in order and energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, NY, Doubleday and Co., 1964), p. 149.

18. Historicity is an important term in Windsor-Forest. When the poem presents its core story in the form of a myth it masks its message as a timelessly true narrative. Part of the project of establishing imperial power consists in arguing for its timeless duration. Or, as Jed claims, a humanistic discourse which reinstates power structures in a republican (or just) form of government eradicates the specific historicity of an event so as to justify the necessity of certain acts of violence for the preservation of a stable rule: see Chaste Thinking, p. 8.

19. For a study which describes how historiography figured in Pope's imagination, see Stephen Szilagyi, ‘Pope's “shaggy Tap'stry”: a discourse on history’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1990) 192.

20. It makes sense to remember that aesthetics and violence were thought to be closely related. Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan poetry reconsidered (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), therefore, emphasises that Dryden coined the phrase: ‘the imagination is a hungry hunter’ (p. 8).

21. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: an approach to the poetry of John Clare (London, Cambridge University Press, 1972), refers to Windsor-Forest as the precursor of eighteenth-century poems in praise of ruling magnates living on country seats.

22. I owe this point to Carolyn D. Williams.

23. The Twickenham editors emphasise that the whole passage (lines 381-422) is a rewriting of Isaiah 60; cf. TE I, p. 188. See for example Isaiah 60.13: ‘The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary.’

24. Cf. Genesis: ‘And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters’ (1.6: second day); ‘And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear’ (1.9: third day).

25. The critique of the conventional equation between woman and nature has by now become one of the centrepieces of feminist enquiries; see for example the very stringent analyses by Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Making gender visible in the pursuit of nature’, in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (London, Macmillan, 1986).

26. Mieke Bal, ‘Visual rhetoric: the semiotics of rape’, in Reading ‘Rembrandt’: beyond the word-image opposition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 69.

27. In An Essay on Man Pope points to the fact that rape is a central element in any country's history: ‘Boast the pure blood of an illustrious race, / In quiet flow from Lucrece to Lucrece’ (IV. 207-208). I am grateful to Carolyn D. Williams for pointing out to me that the gist of this passage concerns the certainty of people's ancestry; the issue of chastity is discussed by means of differentiating between whores and chaste wives. However, not only does rape figure prominently in the story of Lucrece but the way in which it deals with rape makes us aware that the politics of chastity is dictated by an unequal power balance and as such it is a telling instance of women's sexuality being treated as an object. Moreover, Shakespeare's narrative of Lucrece, to cite one influential version, metaphorically relates the raped female body to the act of ravishing the country. As such, the sexual politics of rape is entangled in a feminisation of the patriarchal sense of home (both in terms of a man's own place of residence and of the country in which he lives).

A Note on the Text

Unless otherwise indicated references to Pope's poetry are to The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 11 vols, London, Methuen, 1939-69, using the abbreviation TE throughout. I have followed the editors' practice with regard to emphasis, capitalisation and punctuation.