[In the following essay, Stephanson considers Pope's identification with the female voices of Eloisa to Abelard, “On the statue of Cleopatra,” and Sapho to Phaon as an artistic strategy designed to represent his insecurities about women and his own sexuality.]

The figure of the silenced woman occurs often in Pope's early works. Particularly complex is Pope's impersonation of a woman whose ‘speaking’ or whose speech is paradoxically about female silence. Three of his early female impersonations—Sapho to Phaon (1707),‘On the statue of Cleopatra, made into a fountain by Leo the Tenth’ (1710), Eloisa to Abelard (1716)—have received relatively limited attention. I want to suggest that Pope's imagining himself as female is a strategy or a symbolic drama—perhaps not always fully concscious—by which he can both represent and to a certain extent cope with the insecure nature of his own sexuality, his vacillating atitudes towards women, and the complex relationship between his unfulfilled sexual desires and the poetical character.

In Eloisa to Abelard Pope's identification with Eloisa has often been noted, as has the other obvious identification of the crippled, sexually inactive Pope with the castrated Abelard. What does it mean, then, for Pope to imagine his own sexual desires through a nun's sexual longing for a castrated man? On the one hand, impersonating Eloisa allows Pope to participate in a fiction of intense desire which lets him appropriate the female sexuality he is imagining. On the other hand, Eloisa's unmet sexual desires allow expression of his fears of denial by Lady Mary and the Blount sisters. A more intriguing problem is the psychological circuitry in Eloisa's desire for a castrated man. The fact that Pope's fantasy of female sexual desire is directed to an impotent male is perhaps a covert drama through which the poet imagines not how he will satisfy his own patriarchal projection of female sexuality, but rather how he will fail to do so. This feature of the poem represents a troubling encounter with phallic failure, and it is revealing that Pope should have deleted from the 1736 edition the couplet (after line 258 in the 1717 edition) that most poignantly records the poet's anxiety about his virility:

Cut from the root my perish'd joys I see,
And love's warm tyde for ever stopt in thee.

The deletion was Pope's response to charges of immodesty, but one might also think of the self-censorship as a kind of male silencing or figurative castration. I return to this idea in a moment.

Pope realises that in the absence of the lover's body or of sexuality itself there remains only language as a substitute (see ll. 51-54). If one cannot use one's natural voice to beckon and call forth the willing object of desire, then one must become a silent voice and write; but if that writing in turn is unanswered or unheard, then the idea of impotence is double. Part of what Eloisa's situation represents to Pope is not just the failure of the body but the failure of language, of poetry, as a surrogate for physical passion.

These male projections are partly about a patriarchal re-affirmation of the subordination of women, but Pope also seems to feel that the paradoxically silent voice of woman is ultimately linked to a failure of patriarchy itself. That is, the male voice and the phallus which authorises its power have become impotent—casualties of patriarchal violence, as the story of Abelard's castration makes clear—and left behind is a completely unsatisfactory space in which male, but especially female, voices cannot openly communicate their desires for a shared sexuality. Pope's impresonation of Eloisa's voice of course allows male power silently to re-enter the lonely world of the poem, but only to confront itself as a kind of lack or absence: the phallic ‘root’ is gone. Pope's imagining himself as both the female voice which will not be heard and the phallus that cannot respond is an intricate conjunction with implications for his attitudes towards femaleness and patriarchy.

In ‘On the statue of Cleopatra’ Pope sympathetically presents the attempt by woman to give expression to selfhood. The curious puzzle here is that the poem's primary and secondary titles (the latter being ‘Cleopatra speaks’) suggest that the change in the statue's function has already taken place, and yet the dramatic moment of the statue's ‘speaking’ presupposes a time antecedent to this change—a time, in other words, before she can ‘speak’. Where, then, does the voice come from? And why does Pope engineer the anachronistic space between title and dramatic moment? The answer to the first question is that the voice comes from within, another instance of silent speech sequestered in ‘This breathing stone’ (l. 26) or in ‘a glorious ghost’ (l. 17). The answer to the second question is that Pope wants to call attention to the transaction between female selfhood and dominant male culture in which being allowed to speak as a woman is already to have been consigned to a limbo of calcified or insubstantial self-expression. The three male figures in the poem make this condition absolutely clear. Octavius as figure of the artist-tyrant, Antony the lover-husband, and Leo X as father-God-Christ serve as a kind of shorthand for the patriarchal agents that confront the female who would give voice to the self within: either ‘Cleopatra speaks’ and no one hears, or she speaks a silent pseudo-language of the body defined by its serviceability to male needs.

What is striking in Sapho to Phaon is Pope's suggestion that poetical utterance and capacity depend directly on erotic, physical fulfilment. The poet Sapho's burning sexual passion for Phaon has been rejected, and the result is a poetic silence (see ll. 228-29, 240). As a figure of self, both sexually and as poet, the black, diminutive, less-than-charming Sapho represents the marginalised status that Pope's physical condition condemned him to all his life (see ll. 37-41). What Sapho and Pope both possess to offset their physical limits, however, is their wit as poets, and at its best wit can be an aphrodisiac, triggering off sexual desire in the beholder (see ll. 54-62). The poem dramatises the fear that this powerful transformation of verbal, poetic energy into sexual fulfilment will be rendered ineffectual. What remains is language, of course, but it is paradoxically silent and unheeded speaking, transferred to the body where words are internalised as ‘silent Tears’ (l. 200) and sexual frustration. The only place left for Sapho to give voice to a language of physical desire is in the erotic dream released by her nocturnal fantasy-world (see ll. 145-54). What draws Pope to Sapho's plight is similar to what he finds compelling in Eloisa's condition: poetry and ‘Fancy’ can supply a version of the sexuality that ‘Absence’ (l. 146) has denied, but the potency and efficacy of that poetic desire are likened to the fate of female speech. This idea is focused in Sapho's pointed reference to Philomela (see ll. 177-78). The equation is a telling one: to imagine himself as Sapho and then as Philomela—the woman raped, violently silenced by Tereus, and metamorphosed into the singing nightingale—is to align his poetic and sexual selves with a female figure whose poetic birdsong (itself a sign of both voice and silence) is the result of sexual victimisation and dismemberment. Philomela can ‘sing’, but it is a female voice singing the record of its own sexual silencing.

As Pope seems to realise in these early poems, within the dominant modes of patriarchy the female voice exists only as a retreat into the body, where it is locked up, unheard, and unmet. Pope identifies himself strongly with this condition, finding in the silenced woman a version of his own anxious position on the periphery of male sexual mastery where a successful assertion of the desiring self is unavailable to the dwarfed, crippled male except in a poetic language that is about unfulfilled physical passion. But there are moments of compensation that reveal the other side of Pope and the silenced woman. David Clay Jenkins published in The Scriblerian (8 (1976), p. 77-78) an epigram written in Pope's own hand on the verso of the autograph manuscript of Sapho to Phaon:

Poor Gellius keeps or rather starves two Maids,
Seldome he feeds, but often f—s ye Jades.
He stops one Mouth that tother may not mutter
So what they want in Bread, they have in Butter.

Pope may have identified his anxieties about sexuality and poetry with a Philomels or Sapho or Eloisa, but he also needs to reassure himself of his ability to exercise the phallic aggression that will put him closer to the centre of a patriarchal norm from which he most often felt excluded. The ‘mouth’ of woman and her speaking in this epigram are figured as genital realities only, about physical and sexual need which, if satisfied or filled by the male member, will generate the silence that is demanded by male prerogative. But it is a prerogative which, as in the case of Octavius, is only ‘impotently great’ (l. 20).

Pope's imagining himself as both Sapho and the potent phallus—just as he imagined himself as both Eloisa and the castrated Abelard—reflects his complex awareness that the performance of gender and the cultural roles imposed by patriarchy on women and men issue in a metaphorical silence—of bodies, of selfhood, of desire.