Comment on Susan Gubar's "The Female Monster in Augustan Satire" (Vol. 3, No. 2)

Author(s): Ellen Pollak

Source: Signs , Spring, 1978, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1978), pp. 728-732

Published by: The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173197

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728 Letters/Comments

Comment on Susan Gubar's "The Female Monster in

Augustan Satire" (vol. 3, no. 2)

Ellen Pollak

Although it is in many ways a fascinating discussion of women in Au- gustan satire, Susan Gubar's treatment of the image of the female mon- ster in the works of the Scriblerians seems to me marred by the author's tendency to work backward from an externally defined archetype to specific literary texts. Starting with the premise that male-created literary images of female grotesques constitute projections of male anxiety and ambivalence about female sexuality and control, Gubar explicates a series of texts which make recurrent use of images of female monsters as if the texts themselves were just such projections-as if, in effect, the works of Swift and his contemporaries equaled the images they exploit.

Now early eighteenth-century English literature does reflect an un- usual, even anxious, preoccupation with women and their place in soci- ety, and this preoccupation does commonly express itself in concepts of female deviancy. Indeed, an analysis of the literature of the age-from popular fiction to feminine conduct manuals and periodical literature- reveals the existence by the 1680s of a pervasive social mythology of passive womanhood that upheld a rigorously defined ideal of woman as married, conjugally faithful, modest, good natured, cheerfully tolerant of idleness, and preeminently intent on pleasing her husband, while it placed a negative value on all women who strayed from these often impossible and contradictory expectations, generating as its most popu- lar stock deviants the figures of coquette, prude, pedant, and superan- nuated virgin or old maid. But as Elizabeth Janeway has shown, it is of paramount importance for analysts of culture to distinguish between the realms of myth, art, and neurosis. While the distortions of neurosis are private, those of myth have public meaning and are bound up with social and economic realities. Art, in turn, uses but is not the same as myth.' When Gubar treats Swift's literary use of female grotesques and the crazed projections of the Gulliver he created as equivalent examples of male "inability to accept .. . the human condition" (p. 381), these cate- gories become dangerously confused.

A more historical approach to the same body of works, in fact, reveals that the pervasiveness of themes of female promiscuity had roots in certain important social and economic developments that took place in the seventeenth century. A change in property law, such as the strict settlement, for example, helped to shift the burden of civil responsibility for conjugal infidelity almost exclusively onto women. Designed to pre- vent heirs from breaking up estates, this legal device enabled landowners

1. Elizabeth Janeway, Man's World, Woman's Place: A Study in Social Mythology (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1971), pp. 30-33.

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Signs Spring 1978 729

not only to project plans for their estates onto future generations but also to entail all their property in each generation on a single heir, thus exacerbating the damaging effects of bastardy on the lineal descent of family wealth.2 In an economy where commercial prosperity and in- creased social mobility were posing an uncommon threat to an already diluted aristocracy, and where women-who played a crucial if indirect role in the enlargement of estates-were experiencing an unprec- edented degree of leisure, social anxiety over the chastity of wives was, not surprisingly, intensified.

Attention to the social and economic realities being mediated by the popular myths of the age is essential to an appreciation of what were really striking differences among the Scriblerians in their treatment of women-differences which Gubar's archetypal approach inevitably obscures. As Charles Kerby-Miller makes clear in the preface to his edition of the Scriblerus satires, the group was not a "typical gathering of like-minded men," but rather "a merger of two literary groups, one led by Swift and the other by Pope … and the motives of their leaders were by no means similar."3 In fact, it is likely that one of Swift's hopes in joining the scheme was to win Pope and Gay away from the influence of Addison and Steele, whom the Dean repudiated not only for their Whig principles but for an exploitative and patronizing attitude toward the "fair sex,"4 evidenced in their urbane tolerance of women's "little Van-

ities and Follies" as negative yet somehow irresistibly appealing.5 Comic deflation of the threat of female deviancy is common in the works of Pope and Gay, as it is in those of Addison and Steele, and, in my opinion, has precisely the opposite effect of the female grotesques that appear in the poems of Jonathan Swift.6

Twenty years Swift'sjunior, Pope was much more comfortably iden- tified than the Dean with the bourgeois culture that generated the myth of passive womanhood and its stereotypic negative exempla. When he wrote the Rape of the Lock, he exploited this mythology for all its paradoxes and poetic possibilities, pitting the twin freaks of coquette and prude against one another in perfect dialectical symmetry.7 Belinda may be the Circe at the center of this poem, but she is tamed. As a "Vessel" (2.47) carrying all the "glitt'ring Spoil" (1.132) of the world, she herself is

2. See H. J. Habakkuk, "Marriage Settlements in the Eighteenth Century," Transac- tions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser. 31 (1950): 15-30.

3. Memoirs of… Martinus Scriblerus (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 1. 4. "I will not meddle with the Spectator, let him fair-sex it to the world's end" (Journal

to Stella, ed. Harold Williams [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948], p. 482). 5. The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), no. 92. 6. Katharine M. Rogers also observes this distinction between Swift and Pope in The

Troublesome Helpmate (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), pp. 174-76. 7. For Clarissa as prude, see John Trimble, "Clarissa's Role in The Rape of the Lock,"

Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1974): 673-91; see also Tatler, no. 126, for Steele on coquette and prude as opposite sides of the same coin.

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730 Letters/Comments

identified with that world and, like nature, is to be conquered, ran- sacked, and possessed by commercial man. As compulsive consumer, she is not only the bearer of but a testimony to British national wealth. Her narcissism, though satirized according to propriety as unfeminine and subversive, is also glorified as keeping commerce in motion. In short, as coquette and lady of quality, Belinda occupies as necessary a place in the providential order assumed by mercantile rationalism as ever Martha Blount did in her role as domestic ideal.8 In Pope's vision, the self- centered tease is ultimately justified and, in the process, robbed of her independent force by being brought into line with male economic needs. Her display of her beauty is identified with his display of his booty, her enslavement of and ultimate triumph over man through her powers of attraction with his blissful "living Death" (5.61, 78).

As Gubar notes, Swift's poems never achieve the degree of integra- tion evidenced in Pope's. But instead of attributing their dissonance to the Dean's more virulent contempt for women, I see it as a reflection of his failure ever to come to terms with the conventions "modern" culture

made available to him for writing about the female sex. With one foot in the Restoration and the other in the eighteenth century, he could tear away at the sentimentalizations of women that became fashionable in the reign of Queen Anne, but he lacked an appropriately comprehensive language or epistemology for embodying an alternative ideal in any but negative satiric terms. Such negatively conceived satire was a mode of liberation for Swift. Lacking faith in the commonplaces of ancient liter- ary tradition, but despising the available modern alternatives, he established a rhetorical art through which he could free himself from the limits of both. By donning the literary vestures of the virtuoso modern writer and appropriating them for his own satiric uses through irony, he managed, in A Tale of a Tub, to mourn the passing of a culture in the very act of becoming a modern writer. And in Gulliver he exposed the in- sanity of naive, utopian rationalism in its comic as well as tragic di- mensions; for Gulliver's disgust with his fellow mortals at the end of his travels is clearly more a mad than a model solution to the problem of being human. Similarly, if Swift creates mad or obsessive visions of women in his verse, he does so quite self-consciously and, finally, only to expose the inadequacy of such perspectives. Indeed, I would agree with Gubar that it is precisely because Swift was aware of the impact of "the gross and filthy"-of their power to embarrass a world concerned to keep appearances-that he exploits them so archly in his verse; but he does so in a way that ultimately challenges his readers to reevaluate their

8. For the lady of quality in terms of economic attitudes of the age, see Louis A. Landa, "Of Silkworms and Farthingales and the Will of God," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 2:259-77, and "Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm," South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (Spring 1971): 215-35.

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Spring 1978 731

responses to the excremental facts of life. If you're shocked by the fact that Caelia shits, "Cassinus and Peter" warns, you're a fool too! And it is precisely because the solution proffered at the end of "Strephon and Chloe" seems inadequate to the realities which the characters confront that we are invited to readjust our notions of what is possible. The last lines of this poem turn on the pivotal or "key" word "Decency." In line 252, the word "decent" clearly is used ironically to satirize the superficial, vulgar, and hypocritical values of a society that prescribes deception as the proper way for women to sustain an illusion of divinity. But in the final stanza, "Decency" takes on a more inclusive meaning, suggesting a notion of mutual human tolerance as a stable adhesive of life-long love, esteem, and friendship. This mode of shifting perspective through the multiple possibilities of a single word is typical in Swift, occurring in "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" with a play on the word "bash- ful" (line 71) and in a number of interesting ways in "Corinna."

In "Cadenus and Vanessa," the appeal to divine powers for the creation of miraculous Vanessa was a function of Swift's need to extri-

cate Esther Vanhomrigh from the stifling categories and "common Forms" (line 612) of a world in which a woman of her ilk was, by defini- tion, an eccentric. Vanessa's origins at the hands of Venus and Pallas mark her as a thoroughly "unconventional" female human being em- bodying both erotic and intellectual dimensions-a creature for whom the English language offered no positive or adequate term. Swift could name her only by negation as "A Nymph so hard to be subdu'd / Who neither was Coquette nor Prude" (lines 496-97). Both Venus and Cadenus in a sense create a monster in Vanessa; but though scheming, projecting Venus is self-defeated in her attempt to restore her reign, it is not at all clear that Cadenus, despite age and initial embarrassment, is not equal to the alternative possibility that Vanessa represents (lines 818-27). As an aging scholar he is, after all, as ill suited for love in society's eyes as she is for learning. Surely the complex process by which Swift imagines Hessy as a positive synthesis of the qualities his society took for granted as mutually exclusive in women is very different-indeed, precisely the reverse-of that by which Pope idealizes single, childless Martha Blount at the end of "To a Lady" by transforming her into the perfect wife and mother!

So, if Swift's women often overwhelm and repel, it is at least in part because he lacked what Pope possessed-the security of faith in a myth of idleness and domestication on the basis of which he could shape his literary representations of them. This hardly disassociates the Dean from the patriarchalism that has pervaded Western culture for centuries and is still deeply embedded in our language and traditions, but it does disassociate him in important ways from an essentially middle-class sex- ual ideology that crystallized during his lifetime and from which he expressed explicit alienation. Feminist criticism has as much to learn

Signs

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732 Letters/Comments 732 Letters/Comments

from the ways in which men could or could not and did or did not come to terms with the sexual norms of their societies as it does from the

devastating problems such norms have created for women. It would be a shame if feminist inquiry closed doors to an understanding of the rhetorical and emotional struggles confronted by either men or women engaged in literary activity within the context of cultural and linguistic institutions which have often tyrannically defined the limits of expres- sion. In its stance of resistance to what Ian Watt has called the "de-

carnalisation of the public feminine role,"9 Swift's work can provide us with an unusual and instructive, prenovelistic perspective on a body of attitudes that unfortunately happen to be part of our heritage.

Department of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University

Reply to Pollak

Susan Gubar

As I pointed out, critics of Greene's persuasion have traditionally in- sisted on justifying Swift's portraits of filthy females by claiming his ironic attack is leveled against male mystifications of women. But, in the process of deflating the romantic stereotype of angelic purity, Swift im- plies that for women to be human means to be monstrous. While I remain unconvinced that Swift praises the fuming goddess Cloacine for purely pedagogic purposes, I am indebted to Pollak for pointing out the quite divergent uses to which the female monster could be put by Swift and Pope. Actually, though, I would argue further that the differences between their personal and social attitudes toward women are quite small in scale compared with the wide-ranging positions distinguishing writers like Spenser, Milton, Coleridge, Keats, and Thackeray, all of whom are also obsessed with the female monster. What this implies, then, is that, regardless of the lesson she purportedly teaches, the female monster is a crucial symbol for radically different writers, all of whom exploit her fall into immanence to make it symbolize any number of contradictory attitudes, each of which would of course benefit from his- torical study of its legal, social, and political implications.

While it is true that I have tried to define a neurotic strain that runs

throughout western European literary culture, I fail to see why this approach is necessarily "archetypal" since I am hardly arguing that the female monster is an eternal verity. Instead, I would only claim that her persistent presence points to the deep misogyny of what Gertrude Stein

9. The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 163.

from the ways in which men could or could not and did or did not come to terms with the sexual norms of their societies as it does from the

devastating problems such norms have created for women. It would be a shame if feminist inquiry closed doors to an understanding of the rhetorical and emotional struggles confronted by either men or women engaged in literary activity within the context of cultural and linguistic institutions which have often tyrannically defined the limits of expres- sion. In its stance of resistance to what Ian Watt has called the "de-

carnalisation of the public feminine role,"9 Swift's work can provide us with an unusual and instructive, prenovelistic perspective on a body of attitudes that unfortunately happen to be part of our heritage.

Department of English and Comparative Literature Columbia University

Reply to Pollak

Susan Gubar

As I pointed out, critics of Greene's persuasion have traditionally in- sisted on justifying Swift's portraits of filthy females by claiming his ironic attack is leveled against male mystifications of women. But, in the process of deflating the romantic stereotype of angelic purity, Swift im- plies that for women to be human means to be monstrous. While I remain unconvinced that Swift praises the fuming goddess Cloacine for purely pedagogic purposes, I am indebted to Pollak for pointing out the quite divergent uses to which the female monster could be put by Swift and Pope. Actually, though, I would argue further that the differences between their personal and social attitudes toward women are quite small in scale compared with the wide-ranging positions distinguishing writers like Spenser, Milton, Coleridge, Keats, and Thackeray, all of whom are also obsessed with the female monster. What this implies, then, is that, regardless of the lesson she purportedly teaches, the female monster is a crucial symbol for radically different writers, all of whom exploit her fall into immanence to make it symbolize any number of contradictory attitudes, each of which would of course benefit from his- torical study of its legal, social, and political implications.

While it is true that I have tried to define a neurotic strain that runs

throughout western European literary culture, I fail to see why this approach is necessarily "archetypal" since I am hardly arguing that the female monster is an eternal verity. Instead, I would only claim that her persistent presence points to the deep misogyny of what Gertrude Stein

9. The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), p. 163.

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