1/29/09 Pope continued; set-up for "Debating Women"

So far:

• we've been looking at Pope's use of the heroic couplet, and in particular his use of what Hugh Kenner calls "normal" rhymes, i.e. rhymes that seem to fit together because of long traditional use, and comic rhymes, i.e. rhymes in which there is some kind of ironic or deflating effect in the pairing of the rhymed words.
• in Ariel's speech to the Sylphs, there is a loose progression in the way the rhymes are used.
  • In the first verse paragraph, which spells out the duties of the "aerial kind" in general, there are a lot of normal rhymes such as high/sky, light/night, main/rain. The paragraph as a whole is not especially ironic: the aerial beings are fictional--as opposed to, say, angels, which Pope would probably have believed in--but they have serious roles such as guiding the course of the stars, making the rain fall, and protecting the British throne. Thus the normal rhymes suggest and contribute to a sense of order, natural order primarily, but political order also. In the Great Chain of Being, imaginary supernatural creatures division, these members of the aerial kind are high enough to be taken seriously.
  • In the second verse paragraph, which details the duties of the Sylphs in particular, there is a subtle change. The Sylphs are lesser creatures on the Chain of Being, with more humble duties; they help keep "the fair" beautiful by doing things like preventing powder from blowing all over and keeping the essences of perfumes fresh in their bottles. Apart from the mildly comic rhyme bestow/furbelow, which is unusual rather than ironic, the rhymes in this verse paragraph tend to be normal rhymes. However, they are not used in normal ways: gale/exhale is a normal rhyme, but instead of suggested a natural order in which divine beings makes the winds blow, this rhyme is about face powder. Flowers/showers is as normal as it gets, but here too, rather than suggesting a natural order in which rain leads to flowers, these lines are about cosmetic lotions. There's nothing overtly ironic or especially deflating about these lines individually, but the subtle skewing of the normal usage contributes to a sense that the natural order has been corrupted to some degree.
  • In the third verse paragraph, where Ariel is warning the Sylphs of his premonition that something bad is going to happen, some of the rhymes become overtly comic: law is rhymed with flaw, ball with fall. What these rhymes and the passage as a whole do is suggest serious failures to order priorities: breaking Diana's law, i.e. losing one's virginity, is equated with a jar's being chipped; losing a losing one's heart is equated with losing a necklace; losing a necklace is equated with the death of a beloved pet.
• in the passage in which the lock ascends to the heavens, we see the same kind of disordered priorities, at least apparently: heroes wits are kept in ponderous vases, and compared with the wits of beaux, which are kept in tweezer cases. The passage is subtle, because at first it appears that the whole passage mixes things up that don't belong together: a "sick man's prayers" and the "tears of heirs" seem much more serious than "cages for gnats, and chains to yoke a flea." Upon reflection, however, we realize that what is implied is that the prayers and the tears were hypocritical and should not in fact be taken more seriously than the absurd things.

It's important to note that this tendency to suggest true order with normal rhymes and failing of priorities with comic rhymes is only a tendency, not a hard and fast structural principle. The majority of rhymes are neither normal, in the sense of being conventional, nor comic, so it's perhaps stretching things a bit to think that there is some precise progression in a series of rhymes. But at the very least one can say that Pope is adept at using the resources of the heroic couplet. Couplets implicitly pair things; a poet can therefore pair them in all seriousness, or parodically, linking things which really don't fit together. No one is better than Pope at moving back and forth effectively between these two modes.

Want to start where we left off, with the very closing speech. I'm not sure that we have a consensus on this section: clearly there is a lot of flattery in this section, and we don't think that is really sincere. But some us think that Pope is actually mocking Belinda--look at you, all you'll be known for is being the object of a satire--while others of us think that he is giving her more credit for being able to take the satire with a sense of good humor, and the flattery is primarily just 18th C courtesy.

• either way, what do we do with dust/must and fame/name, two of the most normal rhymes imaginable?

Both the sylphs and the ascension of the lock into the lunar sphere are examples of mock epic form. The sylphs are parody of the "machinery" of the epic, the gods and goddesses that populate classical Greek and Roman epics; the ascention of the lock is a parody of the ascension of the epic hero into the heavens (but not up to the stars, where heroes go, but only to the lunar sphere). Want to move now to other examples of the mock epic form. How specifically does the parody of the epic form work?

• high formal diction (good example: coffee service 3.105-116)
• [invocation of the muse, statement of argument (see PL, 1818, compare 1st 7 lines; in this case, the Muse is presumably Fermor herself, since she "inspires the lays")]
• description of arming of the hero (Belinda at the dressing table, 1.121-149; see esp. 139); begins as religious ritual
• [sacrifice to the Gods (Baron at the altar of Love, 2.35-46)]

What's the satire aimed at?

• the easy one: vanity
  • Clarissa's speech:5.9-34 (but notice who supplies the scissors, 3.127--what do we make of this?)
  • the male version: Sir Plume 4.121-130
• polite society generally: 3.1-8 Queen Anne, obey/tea;3.9-24, reputations die, wretches hang
• what's the effect of the whole?

Set-up for "Debating Women"

What we'll do: I'll give some background, then we'll hold a mock debate between 18th C men and women.

background

Title of section, "Debating Women," refers both to a debate ABOUT women and to a debate BY women. Understanding this debate, then requires knowing something about :

• 18th C attitudes towards and beliefs about women (by both women and men) and
• position of 18th C women writers;
• to do that, need to talk about social and economic conditions of women

The first, 18th C attitudes, are what we hope to figure out with this debate, so we'll leave this for the moment.

Social and economic conditions:

• the Queen aside, women had no direct political power: women could not vote or hold public office; they could not make, interpret or enforce laws
• could wield indirect power, but usually only by influence over men
• unsurprisingly, laws were highly inequitable:
  • double standards on adultery: e.g. the case of William and Mary Yonge. William a notorious libertine; caught Mary in act of adultery with Charles Norton; sued Norton for 1500 pounds, petitioned for divorce and was granted it, along with Yonge's dowry and most of her ancestral fortune.
  • Mary could not have petitioned for divorce under any circumstances: women had no right to divorce, and, if divorced by their husbands, no right to their children
  • "rule of thumb": refers to law which allows a husband to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Women could be imprisoned in their houses until 1891.
  • mothers of stillborn children could be tried for infanticide unless they could produce witnesses to testify that the child was born dead, until 1803
  • "scolding women" could be punished with the brank (iron cage around head) or the ducking stool until 1809
  • 1770, Parliament passed a law to the effect that any woman who were found to "betray into matrimony" men through the use of cosmetics, false teeth, iron stays, and the like could be tried for witchcraft and the marriage declared void.
• economic conditions were as bad:
  • unmarried women could own property, and widows could own part of their husband's estate, but married women could not own property or make a will; she was in effect treated as a part of the property of her husband.
  • there were very few respectable occupations for women. In some ways worse than in preceding centuries, because industrialization had reduced the number of "cottage industries" that were partially or wholly open to women, such as spinning, baking, sewing and brewing. Most middle class women had basically two options: marriage or domestic service.
• education, too was inequitable:
  • Women could not attend university, or the best schools. Of course, as a Catholic, Alexander Pope couldn't attend university either, but in general education for men was quite different from education for women:
    • men (of middle class or higher): Greek and Latin; classical authors.
    • women: domestic duties such as embroidery, with polite accomplishments such as musical accompaniment, modelling in wax, and painting on glass. They were taught French, if any foreign language; not classical languages or authors.
    • Such women as DID have some education--e.g. by private tutoring paid for by an unusual father--could expect to face public criticism.

Despite all this, 18th C was also a period of profound change for women, especially for women with literary aspirations.

• 18th C basically invented the modern system of publication for pay. Beforehand, with the exception of playwrights, authors were amateurs, who subsisted either by relying on their own incomes or on the patronage of wealthy benefactors.
• 18th C invented the newspaper, the magazine, and the journal;
• income from patronage declined, while income from subscriptions went up. Pope become self-supporting primarily because of the subscriptions to his editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
• 18th C was the century which developed a middle class readership--many of them women.
• For all of the above reasons, writing was an option for women, if a dangerous one. Making a public name for herself would have opened up a woman to all kinds of attacks on her character, but it was a least POSSIBLE for a woman to become a writer as it would not have been, for instance, for a woman to be a doctor or a lawyer.
• What PLACE a woman could have in literature depended on what kind of literature she was writing. Consider: this is the neoclassical age, after all, and one thing that that means is imitation of and allusions to classical authors. How do you imitate and allude to classical authors if you are not educated to read Greek and Latin?
  • not so much of a problem in the novel, which was considered a "lower" form of literature and generally had neither classical models nor classical pretensions.
  • a woman poet, however, was writing in a tradition with an immense classical tradition and immense pressure in the present to acknowledge that tradition

Debate on Tuesday:

Starting topic: what is the nature of women? May branch out from that starting question as the debate takes its course, but the subject should always be women and/or men's beliefs about women.

How do you want to split this up? Who gets men, who gets women?

Each side will points for accurately stating a position held by one of the writers we're reading. Specifically:

• 1 point for a clear statement of a position on your side. (in character, with reference to specific poem and lines)
• 3 points for a clear statement of a position on your side with a clear explanation of how it refutes or responds to a position advanced by the other side. (in character, with poem/lines)
• 3 points for a clear explanation of how the other side misread a passage. (out of character, with poem/lines)

To prepare:

• mark and be able to paraphrase as many arguments as you can in your chosen sex's poems. Note the exact lines, so you can refer to them in the debate.
• mark and be able to paraphrase the arguments in the other sex's poems to which your points seem to be responding, explicitly or implicitly.
• In general, you shouldn't get caught up too much in Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" or Montagu's reply; these poems are fair game in the debate, but the points these poems make are unsubtle, let us say. Better to focus on the more substantive poems--the two by Pope and the responses by Finch, Ingram and Leapor.