Pope, Swift, and women writers

About this book

The writings and satire of Pope and Swift have aroused intense hostilities in women readers and feminists, both in their own day and ours, for their allegedly unsympathetic treatment of women. They have been accused of indifference to the plight of eighteenth-century women in a patriarchal society and even of exhibiting sexist and misogynistic attitudes in the case of the eighteenth-century woman writer. Despite Pope's satirical depictions and often contemptuous treatment of a whole range of what he called the "variegations" of the female sensibility, he clearly enjoyed the company of women and placed high value on female friendships during his life. And regardless of Swift's habitual lashing out at "fair-sexing" and at the fulsome gallantries with which women are condescendingly depicted in such periodicals as the Spectator and in amatory verse, and in spite of his insistence that women be treated intellectually and socially on a par with men, feminists find evidence, in such works as Gulliver's Travels and the "scatological" poems, of fierce and deep antagonisms that seem to defy rationalization. Indeed, the very language and phrasing that the two men employed when expressing their praise of women seem only to make things worse. According to their detractors, such expressions are sexist and deny possibility of an independent female identity. It is a case of damning with the wrong kind of praise. The essays in this volume challenge such antifeminist stereotypes and employ a variety of interpretative strategies that combine recent modes for critical inquiry with traditional historical and formalist readings. Besides discovering similarities between Pope and Swift and the women writers, the essayists also discovered a certain shared status as alienated, displaced, excluded, victimized, and even self-divided outsider figures.