Abstract
In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft repeatedly quotes from Alexander Pope’s “Of the Characters of Women,” agreeing with the poet that women’s love of pleasure and sexual power determines the course of their lives: forbidden by men to direct their energies toward an important social purpose, women of the middle and upper classes immerse themselves in gallantry, ornamentation, and other pursuits that extensive leisure makes possible. Wollstonecraft goes on to declare that “people of rank and fortune” resemble leisured women not only in being preoccupied with self-display and amusements, but also in being exempt from the need to exert themselves in productive, character-building employments. A third category of effeminate, useless citizens, however, includes male writers like Pope himself: “A king is always a king, and a woman always a woman. His authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse… And a wit [is] always a wit, might be added, for the vain fooleries of wits and beauties to obtain attention, and make conquests, are much upon a par”1 To Wollstonecraft, wits have much in common with women: lacking any better function, they exist to amuse the idle hours of an audience whose judgment determines their worth.
Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
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Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ( New York: Knopf, 1992 ), 60.
Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary 2 vols. (London, 1782), 2:186.
Richard Savage, Article I, A Collection of Pieces in Verse and Prose, which have been publish’d on Occasion of the Dunciad (London, 1732), 4.
Anonymous, The Poet finish’d in Prose. Being a Dialogue Concerning Mr. Pope and his Writings (London, 1735), 17–18.
Colley Cibber,A Letter from Mr. Cibber, to Mr. Pope (London, 1742), 49.
Giles Jacob, The Mirrour: or, Letters Satyrical, Panegyrical, Serious and Humorous, on the Present Times (London, 1733), 7.
Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1970), 2:481.
William Cowper, Table Talk, The Complete Poetical Works of William Couper, ed. H. S. Milford ( London: Henry Frowde, 1905 ), 652–55.
David B. Morris, “Pope and the Arts of Pleasure,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 ), 104–05.
Alexander Pope, preface to the Works of Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), xxv. All references to Pope’s poems are to Butt’s edition.
Alexander Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:109–10.
Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993 ), 130.
Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 ), 70.
Robert Halsband, offers an account of the escalating tensions between Pope and Hervey ,in Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 141–44.
John, Lord Hervey, An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity (London, 1733), 7. References to this poem are cited by page number.
John, Lord Hervey, to Stephen Fox (1731), as quoted in Lord Hervey and His Friends, 1726–38, ed. Giles Stephen Holland Fox-Strangways, earl of Ilchester (London: John Murray, 1950), 83–84.
John, Lord Hervey, A Letter to Mr. Cibber (London, 1742), 20.
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981 ), 32.
Anonymous, Tit for Tat. To which is annex’d, An Epistle from a Nobleman To A Doctor of Divinity (London, 1734), 6.
W. H. Dilworth, The Life of Alexander Pope (London, 1759 ), 122.
Ian Donaldson, “Concealing and Revealing: Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot,”’ Yearbook of English Studies 18 (1988): 189.
G. Douglas Atkins, Quests of Difference: Reading Pope’s Poems (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986 ), 136: 137.
Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 ), 124.
Dustin Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978 ), 173.
Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England ( Buffalo: William S. Hein, 1986 ), 59.
Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland, enlarged and continued to the present time by Thomas Park 5 vols. (London, 1806), 4:251.
Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660–1750 ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 ), 39.
Ripley Hotch, “The Dilemma of an Obedient Son: Pope’s ‘Epistle to Arbuthnot,”’ in Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn ( Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980 ), 428–43.
Owen Ruffhead, Life of Alexander Pope, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1769), 2:132.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets 3 vols. (1905; reprint, New York: Octagon, 1967), 3:199.
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© 2001 Linda Zionkowski
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Zionkowski, L. (2001). “A good Poet is no Small Thing”: Pope and the Problem of Pleasure for Sale. In: Men’s Work. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299743_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299743_4
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