15 - Pope and gender

Summary

Pope's work was both energized and constrained by gender; but evaluating its effects is far from straightforward, since gender in Pope's time was neither a monolithic system nor an entirely stable one, and major shifts were under way that would have far-reaching effects on understandings of what it meant to live as a man or a woman. For instance, the progress of normative heterosexual masculinity in stigmatizing its homosexual other was gradually ruling out the possibility both that boys might be counted among the objects of a manly passion, and that excessive infatuation with women might itself be counted as effeminacy. Meanwhile, the older model of elite femininity associated with intellectual culture, public sociability and household authority was being eclipsed by an emphasis on female domesticity that emanated from the middle ranks of society. These are just two instances, but sufficient to indicate the scale and importance of some of the changes at work. For Pope, marked as different by his disability, his Catholic religion, and his Tory loyalties, gender would entail a particularly difficult interface between challenge and conventionality, one that stimulated some kinds of imaginative work while it closed down others.