SOURCE: Introduction to The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 1-21.

[In the following essay, Pollak outlines differences between Pope and Swift in their formal responses to eighteenth-century sexual ideology, highlighting the emergence of modern cultural attitudes about gender.]

… the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism. To parody a well-known saying, I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, but that a lot brings one back to it.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies

I

This book investigates the differing relationships of Swift and Pope to a shared set of cultural myths about gender. It seeks to illuminate not only the dynamics of eighteenth-century sexual ideology, but also the formal manifestations of that ideology in the poems of two men writing during the period of English cultural history when modern conceptions of sexual difference came into currency.

Neither the political reality of masculine privilege nor the predominant cultural inscription of woman as inferior to man disappeared with the social and epistemological revolutions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that produced the conditions under which the novel flourished and that, in many respects, can be thought of as marking the transition from the ancient to the modern world. For although, in England, the age of Locke was also an age of incipient feminism and of unaccustomed interest in female education, dominant eighteenth-century myths of woman sustained the same Judeo-Christian dualism that prevailed in earlier centuries. The exclusive and rigid categories of angel and whore remained intellectual institutions in this age as they had been in others and, as standard terms for conceiving of the female sex, they made the integration of spiritual and erotic attributes in a single woman logically impossible. Indeed, as Ian Watt observes, the classic female paragon of the age displays an immunity to passion, the “decarnalisation” of female virtue being as integral in its way to the largely secular bourgeois moralism of the early eighteenth century as it had been to the Catholic orthodoxy of the Middle Ages.¹ For both the scribbling Clarissa Harlowe and the voluble Wife of Bath, the very existence of desire is a transgression of the laws of gender and is represented as the invasion of a male prerogative.²

Nonetheless, despite the historical continuities of patriarchy, there is little question that the systems of thought by which its realities have been explained and justified have at various points in time undergone important transformations. As paradigms of social, political, and cosmic order have changed, as epistemological assumptions have evolved, so too have the discursive structures that have legitimized and sustained the historical fact of male hegemony.

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries mark a critical point in the codification of modern strategies for conceptualizing women. As patriarchal notions of divine-right monarchy were rejected by political theorists, as benevolist attitudes began to infiltrate religious thought, as empiricist philosophy increasingly designated the human subject as the locus both of psychic and of referential truth, new terms in keeping with these individualist traditions gradually evolved to accommodate the ongoing subordination of women to men in social, political, economic, intellectual, and domestic life. Fuller and more complex strategies began to emerge for resolving the inconsistency between the increasing autonomy of the masculine subject, in a culture which increasingly affirmed the prerogatives of individual desire, and the systematic denial of either desire or autonomy in women.³

Analysis of popular literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—from prose fiction to the feminine conduct book and periodical essay—reveals the existence by the 1680s of a bourgeois sexual mythos whose values differed from those implicit within earlier sexual codes. Despite adherence to a belief in the fundamental supremacy of man over woman, Tudor and Stuart books of domestic conduct had concerned themselves seriously with women's competent performance of a wide range of agricultural, industrial, and managerial tasks.⁴ By contrast, the feminine conduct books which became widely popular in the last decades of the seventeenth century were distinguished by an advocacy of purely passive female virtues. In them a woman's “duties” were identified exclusively with such qualities, or passive states, of soul as meekness, modesty, affability, compassion, and piety, her “calling” with the dependency of marriage.⁵ Education, when advocated at all, was to serve a woman not as a means of acquiring worldly competence, but rather—through the development of her spiritual capacities for Christian resignation—as a way of cultivating techniques for bearing domestic solitude, idleness, economic dependence, and subservient social and conjugal status happily, without ennui, expense, or recourse to pedantry.

The passive female virtues of obedience, modesty, and compassion were, of course, valued in aristocratic circles earlier—whether or not they were accompanied by practical domestic skills. But a nobility where social status depended on the secure prerogatives of birth rather than on the contingencies of property per se could afford to be more casual about the inculcation and fulfillment of those virtues than a “rising” middle class influenced by Puritan religious and economic imperatives. Certainly aristocratic tolerance for, nay even attraction to, the sexual exuberance and gamesmanship of women appears in Restoration drama in a way unmatched by virtually any form of imaginative literature in the eighteenth-century proper. Indeed, by the turn of the century, the comic deviance of those stock female types that had frequented the Restoration stage was functioning more and more commonly in prose fiction to sanction a norm of radical self-denial in women rather than to puncture that norm by means of spunky female libertinage. Representing departures from its twin ideals of cheerfully obedient daughter and sexually faithful and supremely solicitous wife, the most popular stock deviants of the emerging middle-class myth (the coquette, prude, pedant, scold, and superannuated virgin or old maid) served to ratify the naturalness of feminine passivity by demonstrating the futile narcissism of women seeking the prerogatives of masculinity.

I call this configuration of ideas and attitudes which prevailed in England by the last decade of the seventeenth century the myth of passive womanhood, after the projected ideal of woman against or in relation to which all its other features are formulated. To a considerable extent, its fictions did mirror a social reality shaped by complex economic, religious, and psychological influences; but where they diverged from historical truth, they nonetheless sustained a powerful existence as a superstructure ordering society's ways of interpreting that truth and making it intelligible. For a long time to come, the values of this myth informed the conventional structures of language and thought available to writers for conceiving of and representing women.

For the most part, the myth of passive womanhood was prevalent among those classes most directly affected by the commercial and financial revolutions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These primarily included the upper and lower orders of the gentry and the merchant and professional classes; for it is probably fair to assume that in the squirearchy and aristocracy, where the effect of economic prosperity on the lives of women was somewhat less pronounced than in the middle class itself, the transitional impact of a cultural mythology that sought to justify and reinforce the idleness of women would be accordingly less profound. Nonetheless, to the extent that middle-class culture sought to emulate aristocratic manners, and to the extent that the society in which the myth of passive womanhood emerged as a dominant cultural code was one which had already witnessed generations of mobility between its highest and intermediate orders—and in which economic occupations were being distinguished less and less neatly on the basis of social class—the scope and boundaries of the influence of this myth become difficult to determine absolutely. I thus characterize its spirit as “bourgeois” not because its influence was confined exlusively to the middle classes, but because, pervading the literate classes generally, it emerged in and became the dominant sexual ideology of a culture where social consensus and representational codes originated in the middle class—indeed, where the mobile structure of society was itself a middle-class phenomenon.⁶

I use the term “myth” advisedly in order to maintain what I believe to be a significant theoretical distinction between ideology proper and the social fictions that evolve at once to cover and to enable its effects. For, as my analysis of Pope's verse especially seeks to show, ideology and its forms of representation do not always manifestly agree. By its function within a larger ideological system, for example, an affectively “positive” rendering of a woman (such as that embodied in Pope's portrait of Martha Blount) may be the vehicle for an essentially negative conception of the female. Women may be imaged favorably in a system of representation that operates on the ideological premise of their exclusion from the domains both of value and of meaning.

Thus, when I use the term “myth,” I mean to refer specifically to the representational forms that ideology takes—to the literary and epistemological structures by which certain propositions about the phenomenal world (in this case, women) are made to seem the outgrowths of a strict necessity, consistent with the laws of natural order.⁷ For the propositions that myths embody are typically conveyed in some narrative or dramatic, some mythological as opposed to logical, form—by means of a story. The peculiar advantage of this mimetic feature of myths is that it enables certain logical contradictions to be presented plausibly. The contradictions are obscured by being brought within a discursive order that constitutes the world according to culturally sanctioned axioms and laws. In this way, ideological consistency can be passed off as logical consistency, and systems of knowledge (which are inevitably systems of value too) can operate as narratives of fact.⁸

Only representational modes can give a powerful sense of inevitability to casual assumptions that conflict either with one another or with what, in fact, happens to be true. An excellent example of the way myths make propositions seem “natural,” even when they are not borne out by social realities, is suggested by Elizabeth Janeway in her influential study of social mythology, Man's World, Woman's Place. The proposition so familiar in the West that woman's place is in the home frequently runs up against the simple social fact that women constitute and always have constituted a significant proportion of the Western work force. The “mythic thinker,” according to Janeway's definition, obscures this discrepancy between proposition and fact by concluding that if women are not at home, they should be, and then promptly reassures him or herself of the inevitability of this conclusion by invoking myths (stories) about unhappy or irresponsible working mothers from anecdotal, legendary, or other largely impressionistic sources.⁹

The other type of contradiction common to myth is more internal to the structure of myth itself and is exemplified by the dual proposition familiar in Western patriarchal thought that women are, by nature, at once insatiably oversexed and indefectibly spiritual. As I have suggested above, these two statements are opposing aspects of a single ideological matrix which expresses a negative conception of women in the form of ambivalence; it at once idealizes and disparages female nature. The most familiar way in which this contradiction is obscured by representational modes is by the mythic division of women into two types, good and bad, a division which tacitly defines its “positive” pole as somehow “not woman.” (The common euphemism for a “good woman” is, of course, a “lady.”) Thus an underlying negative valorization of female sexuality is masked by the assertion of a positive ideal; the ideal is presented as an alternative to a negative assessment when, in fact, it is but a variant, or reinscription, of it.

Myths normally operate as parts of mythological systems; they tend to imply, complement, and signal one another. The attitudes and assumptions they embody generally constitute complexly articulated networks with specific, tacitly understood internal organizations and dynamics. For this reason, myths or parts of myths are apt to function as shorthand indicators of whole systems of belief. Pope's Belinda is, on one level, the antithesis of the Martha Blount that Pope portrays in “To a Lady”; but as I shall seek to show, the ideological content of the two figures is the same. Both are alibis for a single ideology supporting an elaborate system of social and economic relations and behavior.

The literary creations of an individual writer may be distinguished from myth up to a point. All fictions are mythic to the extent that they are defined by the semiological structures made available by the culture in which they exist; a writer has no choice within the limits of intelligibility but to speak or write this social language. But though the structure of this common discourse will inevitably determine the parameters of meaning, a given writer does retain a certain element of choice in the relationship he or she assumes to that structure. Thus, though myth is inevitably the material of artistic creation, the latter differs from the former by making a degree of singularity and subversion possible within limits. Art, in short, includes the potential for self-consciousness, while naive myths—as Barthes observes—usually imply a genuine confusion between nature and history.¹⁰

Recent critical work by Nancy Miller, Janet Todd, and Rachel Brownstein has effectively shown how the contradictions of bourgeois sexual ideology condition the plots of eighteenth-century novels.¹¹ Even as such texts as Moll Flanders and Clarissa make their eponymous heroines the very representatives of integral selfhood—symbols of absolute identity—they reinscribe woman's status as an object within the syntax of a masculine desire and ratify her value as a commodity according to the realities of economic law. The fictional dominance of heroines in what Miller calls the “feminocentric” novel belies the operation of androcentric values which underwrite, indeed co-opt, the “subjectivity” of women. The Clarissa who passionately wills her own bodily and spiritual integrity by vowing that her hand and heart will never be separated is the same Clarissa who finally can sustain her experience of that integrity only by self-willed dismemberment, by the brutal banishment of self from self and, at last, that ultimate dissociation of body and soul in death.¹² Such a heroine might take up the pen in a gesture of rebellion against the patriarchal norms that threaten her, but the Richardsonian plot is nonetheless determined by a conception of sexual difference which categorically defines the female as a sign of the lack, or absence, of what is present and appropriate in the male. Thus, when (as Leo Braudy puts it) the “woman with the pen confronts the man with the penis,”¹³ the woman with the pen must pay a price; for by its possession she both literally and figuratively threatens to undermine a system of signification that defines her both as vulnerable and as victim. By the “defense” of writing, she may defer her fate but never quite avoid it; her text is always recuperated by the necessity of her silence, her submission, or her death.

The artifice of narrative authenticity by which women in the novel became writing and speaking “subjects” did help readers to lose consciousness of the ideological impositions of plot. Indeed, in this sense, the epistemological and the ideological premises of the genre seem from the very outset to have been at odds. For even while this new tradition was, in principle, a tradition of the new—a tradition in which singularity, difference, new beginnings had a shaping and an authorizing role—it was also a tradition which denied the force of difference to women by authorizing a system of representation which hierarchically contained the sign of woman within man, indeed which figured female selves not as self-constitutive entities but as extensions, or constitutive parts, of the male self. The very centrality and intensity of the early novel's preoccupation with the inscription of female selves seem to have been born of a rhetorical need to resolve and thus obscure this paradox.

II

It is true that Swift and Pope did not write novels. Indeed, when we think of these two writers, we are more inclined to think of their loyalty to a threatened classical tradition than of their debt to “modern” cultural ideals. To both writers, “modern” learning was intellectually unregenerate, a menace to cultural stability. Whether one's dominant association is to The Dunciad's finale—that cataclysmic death of art before the uncreating word—or to Swift's yet more desperate vision of literary chaos in A Tale of a Tub, there is no escaping the perception that both Swift and Pope experienced themselves, with varying degrees of distress, as living at the brink of cultural collapse.

It is clearly an error, however, to read the works of these two writers solely as monuments of resistance to “modern” values. For both were as fully engaged as Defoe or Richardson in finding literary solutions to the formal and epistemological dilemmas of their age. The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, A Tale of a Tub, Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa—each in its own way addresses itself to the question of where to find meaning once the authority of the past has lost its sway. And though Swift and Pope finally commit themselves less wholeheartedly than the novelists to the values of interiority, personal psychology, and individual voice, they are nonetheless both seriously engaged by the possibilities and limits of situating value in the self. In their poems about women, they were inescapably confronted with the necessity of establishing some relation to what were becoming, to what to some extent already had become, the representational codes of modern sexual ideology.

Because Swift's fictive mode involved the impersonation of writing/speaking subjects, because he wrote largely in prose, and because that prose is sometimes digressive and open-ended, it is easier to recognize continuities with the novel tradition in his case than in Pope's. In a sense, Swift became a modern writer through his propensity for parodying modern modes. Still, in an effort to correct the distortions of traditional formalist and allusion-tracing analyses, recent Pope criticism has concerned itself with Pope's endeavors at self-representation, with his attempts at shedding autocratic speech, with his experiments in poetic autobiography.¹⁴ Despite his sustained optimism about the power of traditional literary forms to continue to move readers, he was embarked on a lifelong quest for personal voice; indeed, as Frederick Keener strikingly observes, he “came to incorporate more personal experience in his poems than had any English poet preceding him.”¹⁵

It is perhaps to be expected that a study of the impact of sexual ideology on a certain body of literature might call into question critical commonplaces that are not directly concerned with sexual difference but are vulnerable nonetheless to the pressures of feminist analysis by virtue of their relation to a critical tradition which excluded gender as a field of inquiry. The conventional identification of Swift and Pope—in literary, historical, and political terms—as “Tory satirists” is one such commonplace whose limits I seek to challenge in this book. In its emphasis on what the two writers have in common as cohorts in the war against the “moderns,” this critical concept has obscured not only the important continuities each had with modern discourse, but also the significant literary and philosophical differences that existed between them.¹⁶

For our sense of Swift's and Pope's connection with the novel is inevitably complicated by that division within the genre itself between the infinitely eccentric possibilities of a formal method that authorized, indeed privileged, the singularity of selves and the ideological structures that delimited and legitimized those selves. Even as the novel exalted private experience as the source of authenticity and truth, its pursuit of the particular and of the new was firmly circumscribed within static and recurrent cultural codes.

Swift and Pope stand in complexly varied relations to this split. Notwithstanding Pope's fidelity to traditional verse forms, he—like the novelists—sought to stabilize, and thus obscure, the contradictions inherent in the literary representation of private selves. Thus in the political poems of the 1730s, he undertook the Crusoe-like task of cutting himself off from the mainstream of society in order to establish himself, in private life, as an “individual”—in order to become his own master or, to use Maynard Mack's phrase, “master of a poet's ‘kingdom.’”¹⁷ Incorporating into himself classical values once presumably inherent in the universe but no longer easily found there, he would become the representative of virtue and good sense and his estate a microcosm of positive values beyond whose bounds only anarchy and corruption could prevail. He truly believed his satiric wit, though “now Apocrypha, … In time to come, [might] pass for Holy Writ” (Fourth Satire of Donne, 286-87). Private and public values could ultimately bear each other out.

Conversely, while Swift's work assumes more of the formal features of novelistic discourse, it is precisely the balance of the relation between singularity and its limits that his writing always seeks to undermine, the instability of the very idea of singularity that his satire always struggles to expose. Hence the madness of his narrators and the chaos of their views. To Swift, the idea of private meaning never held the positive possibilities it did, say, for Defoe, whose Crusoe would set himself adrift from a community of values in order to define and thereby validate a self. Difference, discontinuity, new beginnings boded epistemic madness in Swift's view; they signified the total disintegration not just of meaning, but of the discourse that could make that meaning known.

Indeed, as Edward Said has observed, Swift had a deep suspicion of beginnings. Writing at that pivotal point in English literary history when what Barthes calls the “erotics of the New” began, at the beginning of what Said calls Western literary culture's “obsession with beginnings,” Swift feared the imminence of a culture in which devotion to innovation was to become a value in itself, a culture whose investment in beginnings would ensure a loss of continuity with what had gone before.¹⁸ Thus in Gulliver's Travels he established a quartet of new beginnings (Said calls the text “a set of experiments in changing directions”)¹⁹ which on the one hand mocks Gulliver's compulsion to be continuously starting out and on the other offers a series of perspectives by incongruity through the juxtaposition and mutual criticism of different (really discontinuous) continuities of travel; and in A Tale of a Tub he ridiculed the individualist project of beginning a text fresh, presumably without “one single Hint from any Writer in the World” but “in a manner, that should be altogether new, the World having been already too long nauseated with endless Repetitions upon every Subject.”²⁰

Perhaps it was because Swift sensed so keenly that absolute originality and authenticity in fiction were illusions, because he saw so clearly the utter instability of consciousness implicit in affirming “difference” as a value (both from the point of view of subverting the foundations of any affirmation of value and from the point of view of the insularity and megalomania of any purely private view) that he felt such fierce nostalgia for a settled, stable language.²¹ He seemed to know the paradox at the heart of a tradition of the new, that beginnings would always exist in a dialectical relationship both to repetitions and to what had gone before. Despite its disclaimers of repetition and its pretensions to the “novel,” modern discourse would carry with it the imprint of its origins and casual assumptions.

The great irony is that, in his desperation over the relentless mutability of meaning, Swift should have exploited difference as a formal principle as fully and as joyfully as he did. Indeed, by pushing that principle to its very farthest verge in A Tale of a Tub, he laid bare its dual nature as the condition at once the most enabling and most threatening to selves. As the parable of Crusoe would attest, while the modern ego might derive identity by its difference from the world outside the self (in Crusoe's case, by sailing away from society and its external impositions of identity on him), it could ensure its stability as a coherent, whole, integral entity only by the reduction or conversion of all otherness to sameness with the self (for Crusoe, by the taming and colonization of the black, pagan cannibal). It is precisely by failing to respect the limits of difference necessary to this project of defining the modern self that the quintessentially arrogant modern writer who narrates Swift's Tale is catapulted into incoherence. Swift, to be sure, is satirizing the literal-mindedness and ineptitude of the modern who, in effect, obliterates himself by misunderstanding the necessary compromise at the heart of modern meaning; but he is also refusing to accommodate the enabling contradiction on which the notion of the modern ego rests.

In the most general sense, it is the refusal of this accommodation that lies at the heart of my analysis of Swift. Most particularly, I am interested in examining the Dean's relation to the way gender conditions the modern configuration of textual relations that organize notions of selfhood and difference. For if modern notions of masculine selfhood are radically problematized in Swift's writing, so too it seems to me are corollary notions of the female as the fetishized appurtenance of a male totality.²² Indeed, intersecting with Swift's complex resistance to the values of the novel (a resistance which, as both the Tale and Travels would attest, was conditioned at one and the same time by a nostalgia for classical forms and a conviction of their utter obsolescence) is an equally complex system of resistance to eighteenth-century strategies of fictionalizing women.

Swift could never wholly avoid the terms of gender made available to him by the age in which he wrote, but neither could he ever embrace them comfortably. Thus, as we shall see, when he trapped his narrators—or his own narrative voice—in ambivalences embedded in the very structure of the available sexual myths and then produced within that voice the awful rage of impotence, he was exploiting the only means available to him for not complying with the logic of those myths. Such a refusal to comply is inevitably an equivocal pursuit, for it is in the very nature of language that a subversive text will exist in a parasitic relation to the constitutive text it would subvert. As Barthes has written of the ambiguous relation between what he calls the “text of pleasure” and the “text of bliss,” “there will always be a margin of indecision; … the paradigm will falter”; pleasure “sometimes extends to bliss, sometimes is opposed to it.”²³ When Swift lets the terms of gender fail him, when he shows that he is not at home within the sexual mythos that he finds, or even within the language on which that myth erects itself, when he fails to make his women or his world cohere, but rather dashes them to pieces or skews them out of symmetry, he is calling attention to the rhetorical and conceptual problems he faced in representing women in much the same way he called attention to the problem of beginnings.

This tendency of Swift's writing to call its own organizing structures into question, insistently making them the grounds of their own critique, frequently manifests itself through the dramatizing of conflict between empirical and mythic “truths.” In Cadenus and Vanessa, for example, where Cadenus's subjective experience of Vanessa defies the logic of “experience” as shaped by literary, social, and sexual codes, Swift's textual strategy has the dual effect of underscoring the essentially fictive and historical nature of systems of knowledge about women and of disabling their aesthetic reconstitution.

Pope's work offers a striking contrast to Swift's in this respect. Instead of poetically exploiting the dissonance between reality and myth, Pope seemed to go out of his way to resolve that dissonance, to rhetorically accommodate the contradictions inherent in his culture's dominant sexual codes and—despite their delimiting character—to make them seem sufficient to experience, fulfilled. His poetry fed on the stock paradoxes that conventional myth allowed, not on those it found unthinkable. Thus in The Rape of the Lock Pope ratifies the premise that women are objects even as he satirizes the irrational materialism of bourgeois values that objectify human beings by giving primacy to forms over substance. And in “To a Lady” he portrays Martha Blount in the image of the feminine ideal even as he establishes the essential negativity of women. Indeed, in order to render a literary compliment that is consistent by the terms of the sexual ideology he sanctions in his text, he must take liberties with the facts of Martha's life, must literally reconstitute the history of the woman he so gallantly celebrates.

III

To argue as I do that Swift was committed in his poems to exploding certain bourgeois sexual myths that Pope's verse insistently worked to justify is, in a sense, to question a still largely accepted critical consensus. Broadly speaking, Pope has been considered not only the better poet of the two but also kinder to women. The New Criticism, with its emphasis on the aesthetic “integrity” of poetry—i.e., on the degree to which a poem manages, by resolving internal tensions, to achieve formal coherence, wholeness, or stability—saw in Pope's perfectly balanced and self-contained heroic couplet, with its masterful use of zeugma, punning, rhyme, syllepsis and a host of other devices for binding together manifold incongruities of sense, a richness of linguistic possibility that only the finest poetry could achieve. Sensitive to the subtler aspects of Pope's art, William K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, and Maynard Mack went far in restoring Pope to a literary preeminence that nineteenth-century criticism largely denied him.²⁴ To Wimsatt's illuminations of the potentialities of couplet rhetoric, Mack and Brooks added eloquent elucidations of the larger metaphorical properties of the mock-epic itself. Through it, they sought to show, Pope managed to combine—often in the very same breath—dazzling literary compliment with gentle satiric wit. The mock-heroic's “supreme advantage for Pope,” wrote Mack, was that “it was a metaphor that could be made to look two ways. If the heroic genre and the heroic episodes lurking behind The Rape of the Lock diminish many of the values of this society, they also partially throw their weight behind some others.”²⁵ And Brooks, in “The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor,” further developed this concept of the Rape's duality of vision. Through the use of paradox, Brooks maintained, Pope was able to censor the follies of Hampton Court while allowing Belinda all the myriad charms attendant upon her naive sense of self-importance. Moving through the world of maids and children with something approaching a sense of what Keats later called “negative capability,” the poet of the Rape managed, in Brooks's view, to capture the special loveliness and power of that world, even as he ridiculed its values as irrational.

No one can deny the formidable contribution of the New Critics in retrieving Pope for modern readers; and truly they have achieved as much in the elucidation of Swift's prose. With its stress on the rhetorical character of literary art in general and its interest in satire as a special kind of fiction, the New Criticism actually lent itself quite effectively to analyses of the rhetorical strategies of Swift's satiric art.²⁶ Yet from this same school of criticism, the verse of Swift has suffered sore neglect, having until very recently attracted greater biographical than literary interest. By New Critical standards, surely, it would seem to be a species of coarse, doggerel rhyme, radically “unintegrated,” aesthetically inadequate, and, in any case, not serious or mature poetry. As early as 1937, this view was expressed by Harold Williams in the introduction to his three-volume edition of the poems. Though Williams made a gold mine of poetic material available to modern criticism, his own perception of Swift's verse is as of something imperfect, the product of a “natural genius” thwarted and confined. Swift, he held, “had something to give to English poetry that he never wholly gave,” and Williams faulted the indifference of editors to the verse far more than that of readers or of critics:

Swift's verse has been shabbily treated by his editors. Perhaps readers and critics may plead this neglect in excuse for theirs. Much of his verse is not readily, or completely, intelligible until ordered chronologically and annotated. If this be an admission that the chief interest of Swift's verse lies elsewhere than in poetic content, it is unnecessary to plead the contrary. Poetry is there, and the instinct to poetry, though trammelled and impeded. Further, the events of Swift's life, his character, his standing with his fellows, and his place in history can only be adequately interpreted if his verse is closely read and understood.²⁷

There seems a fitting logic to the fact that the very critics who sought, through their formalism, to free literary interpretation from the psychological fallacies of intentionality and affect, were also those who, by turning their backs on Swift's verse, abetted its subjection to the most historicist and psychological of interpretations. The poems on women in particular have attracted the attention of biographers and psychoanalysts, serving as evidence for a mixed bag of speculation not only about Swift's personal feelings for particular women but also about the nature of his psychosexual conflicts. While John Middleton Murry argued from a conviction of Swift's repulsion toward mankind in general to a “peculiar physical loathing of women” evident in the excremental poems, Ricardo Quintana appealed to such works as the poems to Stella and “A Letter to a Very Young Lady on her Marriage” as proof that “Swift was not a hater of women” and not “an anti-feminist.”²⁸ Yet whether or not biographers have found misogyny in Swift, their discussions of his poems almost invariably have left readers with more associations to the Dean's personal relationships with women than to his literary representations of them. It seems fair to say that quite the contrary is true for Pope, whose portraits of Atossa, Belinda, and Sappho—despite well-annotated texts—generally overshadow information about the historical figures who inspired them. The difference in the kinds and degree of critical attention the two poets have received is, I believe, largely responsible for this difference in popular image. Having been approached almost universally as no more than a series of occasional verses expressing his random personal attitudes and opinions, Swift's poems on women have received very little sustained critical scrutiny as self-conscious rhetorical statements with a representative place in their author's broader literary vision.

In the context of the larger body of sexual conventions that helped to shape Swift and Pope's poems about women, another critical view is possible, one that invites a reestimation not only of the relative value of the two poets in the history of English literature, but also of the criteria by which we have been accustomed in recent decades to judge the “integrity”—whether aesthetic, social, or moral—of our literary artifacts. As Judith Fetterley asserted in her witty exploration of the relationship between the New Criticism and feminist criticism in a paper delivered at the 1976 convention of the Modern Language Association, the New Criticism's “insistence on the objectivity of the determination and application of aesthetic criteria” had a tendency to enshrine and protect certain unacknowledged subjective values that run directly counter to the imperatives of a feminist hermeneutic. “The New Critics saw the world in pieces,” writes Fetterley,

and they wanted it put back together again. Hence the significance of their critical vocabulary: Tale's fusion of extension and intention into the concept of tension; Ransom's interweaving of structure and texture; Brooks's passion for paradox in which two contradictory concepts are catapulted into coherence; Warren's impure poetry which earns its vision by incorporating its opposite; and their joint dedication to the superfusion of form and content. This is not to say that these criteria are not useful or valid ones for reading poetry; it is to say that the exclusive concentration on them, the identification of the aesthetic with the degree of their presence in the poem, is the result of personal and political needs on the part of the critic. For the feminist critic, poetry which splits the world open and the critical vocabulary which accompanies such a rendering may be more useful and more valid.²⁹

Fetterley makes effective use of John Crowe Ransom's comments on Edna St. Vincent Millay to demonstrate how drastic a failure of critical insight can be engendered by the standards of taste legislated by the New Criticism; finding that Millay's poetry makes him feel foolish when he commits himself to it, Ransom dismisses it as bad verse.³⁰ And, indeed, is it not precisely such a failure of insight—part refusal and part inability of certain kinds of critics to respond to certain kinds of poems—that accounts for the unevenness of attention modern criticism has bestowed upon the verse of Swift and Pope? For more perhaps than for any other poet of his age, it was Swift's habit in his poetry to “split the world open” irrevocably rather than to make it cohere; and this is especially true in his poems about women, poems neither conventionally pretty nor orderly in subject matter or form.³¹

Twenty-one years the senior of his Twickenham friend, Swift was much less comfortably identified than Pope with the bourgeois culture that generated the myth of passive womanhood and its stereotypic negative exampla. In his verse he consistently failed to come to terms with the conventions which that culture made available to him for writing about or even conceiving of the female sex. With one foot in the Restoration and the other in the eighteenth century, he could tear away at the sentimentalizations of women that became fashionable in the reign of Queen Anne, but he lacked an appropriately comprehensive language or epistemology for embodying an alternative ideal in any but negative satiric terms. Such negatively conceived satire was, in some ways, a mode of liberation for Swift—a way of placing himself beyond (by, paradoxically, insisting on) the limits of both traditional and middle-class systems of value and the literary structures they engendered. Pope sought to revitalize classical ideals and literary forms by finding a way to make them accommodate and at the same time satirize the realities of eighteenth-century life. But in Swift's writing, classical and bourgeois values meet head-on in a form of mutually crippling confrontation.

Meaning, in Swift's texts, is generated not—as it is in Pope's—at the point of poised reconciliation between the contrary terms of a single epistemological or mythic structure (such as between the contradictory nature of Belinda as goddess and tease, or of man as glory and jest); it is produced, rather, at the point where two or more heterogeneous systems of signification meet, engage, and in interacting become the mutual critics of the logic of one another's terms. Conceiving culture as a relative phenomenon, Swift did not presume, with Pope, that anarchy would reign in the absence of social myths and conventions he considered valid or valuable, but rather recognized the potential efficacy of other kinds of orders. As a satirist, he sought less to defend any consistent personal position—any single “angle of vision,” to borrow another phrase from Maynard Mack—than to explore and thereby expose the limits of individual perspectives by juxtaposing them to alternative points of view.³² He hoped to remind us that at any given moment a normal-sized eagle seen at a distance might be far more prodigious a bird than we have ever seen, flying at a distance far greater than we know. In a Swiftian universe, there could be no “middle state,” for there could be no absolute or stable center.

The decentered character of Swift's vision—his studied refusal in his texts to establish reliable centers of authority or voice—was the source of a literary radicalism and irreverence in his writing that has much in common with the “exceptional freedom and pitiless gaiety” that Mikhail Bakhtin discovered in the writing of Rabelais.³³ Like Rabelais, Swift lived and wrote at the historic intersection of two cultures, “on the confines” of two competing languages, and it is precisely on those borders that he situates his texts.³⁴ Orwell once characterized Swift's radicalism as a reactionary form of iconoclasm, a passion inspired by devotion to a political interest that had already been effectually overthrown and that therefore could express itself only in “the irresponsible violence of the powerless.”³⁵ But even as Swift despaired of the efficacy of the traditional literary language for which he yearned, he won a certain equivocal, spiteful victory in his writing over both the defeated culture that had failed him and the nascent culture he despised but had to face; turning his back on classical discourse with the vengeance of a disappointed son, he embraced the modern vision with something of a vicious stranglehold, pushed it to the point of self-unraveling excess.

To Ian Watt, the appearance of Richardson's Pamela in the 1740s marked a “very notable epiphany in the history of our culture: the emergence of a new, fully developed and immensely influential stereotype of the feminine role.”³⁶ Standing at the threshold of the development of the novel, Swift and Pope were inescapably a part of the culture and intellectual climate from which this stereotype emerged. But—cognizant though Swift was of the waning efficacy of traditional literary and social conventions in an age of encroaching “modernism”—his writing remains, in the best tradition of literary anatomy, consistently analytic, resistant at every turn to the middle-class sexual ideology he saw crystallizing around him. By contrast, Pope managed the last great synthesis of bourgeois sexual values and ancient ideals before literary neoclassicism was exhausted. Confronting essentially the same tensions that plagued Swift, between ancient and modern values and between aristocratic and commercial attitudes, his most notable works on women, The Rape of the Lock and the “Epistle to a Lady,” serve rather to resolve and justify those tensions than to reproduce them angrily. Where Swift's position vis à vis the “modernism” of his day is radically uncompromising, Pope's work—virtually Miltonic in its capacity for synthesis—tends to naturalize the contradictions inherent in eighteenth-century economic individualism in a way that makes them seem utterly inevitable—indeed, commensurate with the order of the universe. This, in large part, is his great poetic achievement.

I do not wish to turn the conventional assessment of Swift and Pope upon its head. Although I applaud the recent rehabilitation of Swift's verse as a serious subject of critical inquiry, I am less interested in morally vindicating Swift at Pope's expense than I am in rethinking the terms of the analysis that has organized our perceptions of their writing about women. The concept of misogyny as it has been traditionally understood is itself constructed within the contextual limits of phallocentric norms and thus requires circumspect analysis.

I thus seek to shift the focus of critical inquiry away from the largely psychological question of whether, and to what extent, Swift's and Pope's poems show that they liked or disliked actual women; my interest, rather, is in analyzing the relationship of their writing to their culture's ideological imperatives regarding gender. A more strictly psychological emphasis persists even in the wealth of critical work published in the last ten years that has sought to rescue Swift's verse from the neglect of a New Critical establishment by whose formal standards it did not measure up. For whether recent readings implicitly confirm or deny Swift's misogyny, they are typically arrived at in the absence of any broad or systematic critique of the forms of culture that circumscribed his limits of expression. While the importance of women in the verse continues to be acknowledged, current discussions of it demonstrate little interest in socio-critical questions, in what Fredric Jameson has called the “ideology of form.”³⁷

The formalism of Pope studies has similarly bypassed questions of sexual ideology. The reason for this in Pope's case seems to have been the apparent absence in his poems of what our culture would consider evidence of sexual pathology. Aesthetic integrity and the expression of psychosocially “healthy” attitudes have been read as ideological innocence. Moreover, when Pope's poetry has been contextualized, the context insisted on has been (as in Swift's case) personal rather than cultural, as if there were still some residual need to answer the Romantic charge of Pope's impersonalism on its own terms. Indeed, as Phillip Harth has seen, the recent impulse of Pope criticism to correct the distortions of New Critical “objectivism” has, in some ways, been no more than a swing back to the biographical methods that the New Criticism had endeavored to displace.³⁸ Critical trends have been oscillating between rhetorical and personalist modes of inquiry without directly engaging the question of how the “personal” is itself shaped by conventional ideological imperatives.

Thus, by its interest in examining the ideological structures available to Swift and Pope for representing women, my approach seeks to depersonalize the charge of phallocentrism even as it refuses either to absolve writers from responsibility for the conventions they exploit or to allow those conventions to remain unanalyzed. The tacit and often inadvertent sanctioning of values already sanctioned by a period or a text is frequently supported by the claim that conventionality is itself an argument against its own critique. Such a “conventional fallacy,” what Wayne Booth calls the “apology by historical placement,” pervades a great deal of contemporary critical practice and is still summoned as an argument against feminist scholarship by those who allow criticism to be genuinely historical only when it demonstrates sympathy for texts and authors within the context of the values of their times.³⁹

But such arguments for “sympathetic” historicism totter on the brink of justifying what is more familiarly a formalist imperative, namely, that literary texts ought to be taken “on their own terms.” Like Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn, they support a mode of interpretation in which the critic's highest aim is to merge effectively with a writer's work—to place him or herself as fully as possible inside the conventions and values a writer takes for granted in an effort to experience adequately the texture of that writer's art. Up to a point, surely, this process is central to any perspicacious critical endeavor; but in the absence of a rectifying process of self-differentiation of critic from poet, it finally reduces analysis to an act of exegesis or naive appreciation.

Brooks, for example, finds “a large element of amused patronage” toward Belinda in The Rape of the Lock, but “no contempt.”⁴⁰ Pope's satire, he maintains, is supple and relaxed enough to accommodate multiple perspectives on its subject without ever undercutting the poem's status as dazzling literary compliment. As I shall argue in my discussion of the Rape, this reading begs the question of the underlying attitudes and assumptions—the broader structures of value and meaning—that made Pope's Belinda and Clarissa possible as literary archetypes at all. To Brooks, paradox is one way a skillful poet frees his language from the narrow biases of ideology. But paradox can also be a rhetorical strategy that, by creating the illusion of complexity, masks an ideological simplicity. Belinda's status as both goddess and tease depends as much on establishing a relation of sameness as of difference between those terms. It is true that despite the prevalence of irony in Pope, we never find Belinda disgusting, sinister, or terrifying; but this seems to me to be as much a function of the complacency with which Pope assumed her ultimate impotence as it is a reflection of his basically benign and delighted view of her. Indeed, the very strategies that enable Pope to maintain a tone of chivalry in the Rape at once depend upon and perpetuate a set of conventions in which the divine-though-all-too-human Belinda is at bottom negatively defined. The poem's graciousness itself belies contempt.

Thus, distinguishing my approach from the acontextual New Critical formalism that has dominated Pope studies on the one hand and from the excessively historicist orientation of Swift studies on the other, I seek to offer a series of rereadings of the verse of Swift and Pope that is at once textual and ideological in character. My readings are formalist insofar as they treat literary texts essentially as verbal structures. It should be clear from the analysis of literary and social history that I offer in Chapter 2, however, that I do not reject out-of-hand a reliance on historical material in the analysis of literary texts but rather proceed on the assumption articulated most persuasively in this country some years ago by Kenneth Burke, and reiterated in my epigraph from Barthes (which leads, neatly enough, straight back to Pope) that questions of the intrinsic and extrinsic in literature ultimately verge on one another.⁴¹ The effort to forge a point of contact between formal and sociopolitical concerns has a peculiar urgency for feminist criticism, which now finds itself potentially endangered on one side by the historical indifference of poststructuralist formalism and on the other by the prevalence of a naive faith in the power, and neutrality, of empiricist inquiry.⁴²

Notes

1. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 163-64.

2. For an analysis of the laws of gender operating in Chaucer's portrait of the Wife of Bath, see Robert W. Hanning, “From Eva and Ave to Eglentyne and Alisoun: Chaucer's Insight into the Roles Women Play,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (1977): 580-99. For readings of Richardson's Clarissa that focus on the sexual politics of the text, see Leo Braudy, “Penetration and Impenetrability in Clarissa,” in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Phillip Harth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 177-206; Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), chap. 6; Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's “Clarissa” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

3. On, among other things, women, individualism, and desire in the eighteenth century, see Mary Poovey's illuminating essay “Persuasion and the Promises of Love” in The Representation of Women in Fiction: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1981, n.s., no. 7, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 152-79.

4. This subject is treated in Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (Houston: The Elsevier Press, 1952; rev. ed. Mamaroneck, N.Y.: Paul P. Appel, 1975), pp. 132-49; Christina Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953); Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1919; rpt., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968); and Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women, 1475-1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), esp. pp. 31-70.

5. See, for example, [Richard Allestree?] The Ladies Calling (London, 1673), pt. I, which calls each of its five chapters after one of these qualities. While more than half of all books for women published between 1475 and 1640 were practical guidebooks (Hull, p. 31), it is probably safe to assume that that proportion diminished as middle-class women became increasingly leisured and as the market for women's books diversified. Thus when the Spectator lists the books in Leonora's library, one is not surprised by his failure to mention even a single book of cookery. Aside from Culpepper's Midwifery, a spelling book, and a dictionary, the closest thing on Leonora's shelves to a manual of practical advice is La Ferte's Instructions for Country Dances (The Spectator, 5 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], vol. 1, no. 37). Although no statistical analysis of books for or about women after 1640 has yet been undertaken, an annotated bibliography of published materials by or about seventeenth-century women is forthcoming: see Hilda L. Smith and Susan Cardinale, eds., Women and Literature of the Seventeenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography Based on Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, forthcoming).

6. Charles Wilson discusses what he terms the “mobile confusion” of the distinction between country and city occupations in England's Apprenticeship, 1603-1763 (London: Longmans, 1965), esp. pp. 8, 18, and 204-5. For other general discussions of the mobile structure of English society of the period, see Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), pp. 273-74, and Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1965), chap. 2. Lawrence Stone provides a more detailed analysis in “Social Mobility in England, 1500-1700,” Past and Present 33 (April 1966): 40-52.

7. I would define ideology as any set of ideas or propositions whose implicit structure of values reflects and supports the interests of a particular society, class of people, or power structure. By following Roland Barthes in distinguishing ideology from myth on the one hand and art on the other, I seek to leave space for an investigation of ideology in its specifically aesthetic or poetic manifestations. I would reemphasize, nonetheless, that I consider the distinction to be ultimately a theoretical one. For not only do I conceive myth as a form of ideology, but I would say, too, that ideology, like art, is always mythic in some sense. Indeed, as Barthes defines it, mythology occupies the cultural space between art and history, the study of mythology being “a part both of semiology inasmuch as it is a formal science, and of ideology inasmuch as it is an historical science: it studies ideas-in-form” (Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1972], p. 112).

8. See Barthes's Mythologies, esp. pp. 121-31.

9. Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study in Social Mythology (New York: William Morrow, 1971), chap. 1.

10. Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 129-31.

11. Nancy Miller, The Heroine's Text; Janet Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Viking Press, 1982), pt. I, chap. 2. For a more recent analysis of how such ideological contradictions condition the plots of women's fiction in particular, see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

12. For Clarissa's vow of integrity, see Samuel Richardson, Clarissa or, the History of a Young Lady, 8 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1930), 6:45. For her banishment of herself from herself, see the same volume, p. 116.

13. Braudy, “Penetration,” p. 202.

14. See Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), esp. pp. vii, 8, and 100-13; Frederick M. Keener, An Essay on Pope (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 1-17 and 183-89; and Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. pp. xi-xvii.

15. Keener, p. 185.

16. Although the concept of Swift and Pope as “Tory satirists” is becoming dated, it still significantly affects the way the work of these two writers is being taught. Historically, the concept grows out of a critical tradition that identified individual writers as belonging, categorically, to one or the other of what James L. Clifford, in his introduction to an anthology of modern critical essays on the period, called “two great streams of thought” dividing the eighteenth century and representing “basic and irreconcilable” differences in religion, philosophy, and aesthetics (Eighteenth-Century English Literature: Modern Essays in Criticism [London: Oxford University Press, 1959], pp. viii-ix). Louis I. Bredvold's landmark essay “The Gloom of the Tory Satirists,” which is the lead essay in Clifford's volume, perhaps reflects this dichotomized view of the age most emphatically. For some efforts other than my own to elaborate the differences between Swift and Pope, see C. J. Rawson, Gulliver and the Gentle Reader: Studies in Swift and Our Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. viii and 52-54; and Carole Fabricant, Swift's Landscape (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). In her introduction, Fabricant usefully reflects on the way the articulation of differences between Swift and Pope cuts across the bias of traditional interpretations of the Augustan age (pp. 3-5).

17. The Garden and the City, p. 232.

18. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 76; Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 40.

19. Said, p. 30.

20. A Tale of a Tub … The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), pp. 13 and 4.

21. See “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue,” in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 14 vols., ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 4:5-21.

22. Eagleton's Rape of Clarissa provides an illuminating analysis of the fetishized female in the fiction of the period. See also, my chap. 6.

23. Pleasure of the Text, pp. 3 and 19.

24. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason” and “Rhetoric and Poems: Alexander Pope,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 153-85; Cleanth Brooks, “The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor,” in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), pp. 80-104; and Maynard Mack, “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’: Some Observations on His Imagery,” in Pope and His Contemporaries, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 20-40.

25. Mack, “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope,’” p. 37.

26. The device of the satiric persona, discussed in Mack's famous essay, “The Muse of Satire,” Yale Review 41. no. 1 (1951): 80-92, was a central concept in the Swift criticism of the late forties and early fifties, emerging most notably in Ricardo Quintana's essay “Situational Satire: A Commentary on the Method of Swift,” University of Toronto Quarterly 17. no. 2 (January 1948): 130-36. Martin Price's Swift's Rhetorical Art: A Study in Structure and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953) and William B. Ewald's The Masks of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954) figure among the most prominent rhetorical studies of Swift from this period.

27. The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 1:xiii and xvi-xvii.

28. John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1954), p. 439; Ricardo Quintana, The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 171, 277-85, 356.

29. Manuscript. I am grateful to the author for sharing her text with me.

30. John Crowe Ransom, “The Poet as Woman,” in The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), pp. 76-110.

31. The source of Fetterley's phrase, which has also been used as the title of an anthology of poems by women called The World Split Open, ed. Louise Bernikow (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), is Muriel Rukeyser's poem “Käthe Kollwitz” from The Speed of Darkness (New York: Random House, 1960): “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” To the extent that Swift's voice is identified with a defeated political interest that, in its powerlessness, can assert itself only by exploding the discursive structures that prevail, it has an affinity with a radical female voice that can make itself heard only by failing to cooperate with the linguistic terms of its powerlessness. While Swift clearly does not give a voice to women, however militantly his writing disrupts the terms of the dominant discourse (see for this argument Susan Gubar, “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire,” Signs 3, no. 2 [Winter 1977]: 380-94), his habit of disruption does—as I argue in the final chapters of this book—deliver us before the unspoken, indeed “unspeakable,” possibility of a “significant” subversion of meaning more fully than Pope does when, for example, he appropriates the voice of Eloisa.

32. The Garden and the City, p. 232.

33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), p. 472. For Pope's famous allusion to Swift's affinity with Rabelais, see The Dunciad, I, 22. For an interesting recent study of the issue of authority in Swift's prose narratives, see Everett Zimmerman, Swift's Narrative Satires: Author and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).

34. Bakhtin, pp. 471 and 473.

35. “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels,” in In Front of Your Nose: 1945-50, vol. 4 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), p. 216n.

36. The Rise of the Novel, p. 161.

37. As David Vieth notes in his introduction to a special issue of Papers on Language and Literature 14, no. 2 (Spring 1978) containing presentations from an MLA special session on Women in Swift's Poems, the essays in the volume do not engage in feminist analysis, but rather pursue a line of inquiry more exclusively devoted to personal psychology: “Despite the transparent bid for topicality in the theme … [the] papers provide little fuel for feminist fires. Their emphasis, as each panelist independently worked out his or her interpretation, turned, not to the nature of women, but to the nature of Jonathan Swift as he responded in artistic form (or calculated formlessness) to a series of women. … Taken collectively, the five papers are rich in new insights into Swift's psychology” (pp. 115-16). One piece in this collection not included in the MLA panel, which focuses on matters of form and structure and meshes nicely with some of my readings, is Richard H. Rodino's “Blasphemy or Blessing? Swift's ‘Scatological’ Poems” (pp. 152-70). Several full-length studies of Swift's verse have offered interesting readings of specific poems about women, but none directly addresses itself to the issue of gender as a cultural construct in those texts: see, for example, John Irwin Fischer, On Swift's Poetry (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1978), pp. 110-51; Peter J. Schakel, The Poetry of Jonathan Swift: Allusion and the Development of a Poetic Style (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 97-120; Nora Crow Jaffe, The Poet Swift (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1977), pp. 85-120; and Anthony B. England, Energy and Order in the Poetry of Swift (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1980), pp. 106-221. One major recent exception to this trend of indifference to socio-critical questions in the analysis of Swift's verse is Carole Fabricant's Swift's Landscape. For Jameson's phrase, see “The Ideology of Form: Partial Systems in La Vielle Fille,” Sub-Stance 15 (1976): 29.

38. See “The New Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 3 (Spring 1981): 533.

39. “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (September 1982): 67n. Paradoxically enough, such an apology also in some ways characterizes Felicity A. Nussbaum's recent volume on the tradition of English satires against women, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984). Nussbaum's study uses splendid source material and offers a multitude of valuable insights into individual texts and their literary contexts in an effort to help us distinguish between what is conventional and what is new or original in the major satires against women of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century. But, situating itself within a critical tradition that assumes an irreducible gap between literary convention and idiosyncrasy—a gap in which an individual poet presumably can mitigate the misogyny of misogynous conventions by personal complications and elaborations of them—Nussbaum's book does not confront the rather volatile question that seems to me implicit in its subject and that I have tried to address in what ensues: the question of the relation of rhetorical conventions and personal aesthetics to cultural ideology. By contrast to Nussbaum, I proceed on the premise that both the aesthetic and the mythic or conventional are functions of ideology and that, in order to be read responsibly, they must be contextualized in more than a purely literary way. Thus, although Nussbaum and I analyze some of the same texts by Swift and Pope (in Nussbaum, chaps. 6 and 8), our very different critical interests and the very different critical premises from which we begin lead us, predictably, to quite dissimilar conclusions.

40. Brooks, p. 87.

41. Kenneth Burke, “The Problem of the Intrinsic (as reflected in the Neo-Aristotelian School),” in A Grammar of Motives (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 465-84.

42. For a theoretical analysis of the structures of power implicit in the practice of accumulating knowledge about women, see Peggy Kamuf, “Replacing Feminist Criticism,” Diacritics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 42-47 and, on the dangers of poststructuralist historical indifference, see Nancy K. Miller's response, “The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions,” in the same issue, pp. 48-53.