Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers by Claudia N. Thomas (review)

Book Reviews99 in the context of her "times." In this chapter as elsewhere, Stout occasionally indulges in a register of dismissive jargon which may strike some readers as needlessly combative. Then again, a person who could at times be as acerbic as Porter might require an occasional posture of self-defense from her biographer. In her concluding, well-reasoned defense of Joan Givner's earlier landmark biography, maligned though it is by many of Porter's friends, Stout places herself in a tradition of honest scholarship and refuses to be blindsided by false piety. One concludes her book with a great sense of satisfaction . Professor Stout has delivered on her promise to measure "the quality of Porter's mind" and has broken ground in a new form ofbiographical writing . THOMAS AUSTENFELD Drury College CLAUDIA N. THOMAS. Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. 309 p. Olaudia Thomas' book, Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, is a continuation of contemporary inquiries into Pope's attitude toward women. She follows such writers as Laura Brown, Ellen Pollak, Ruth Salvaggio, and Valerie Rumbold; Brown and Pollak deride Pope's attitude from their vantage point in the late twentieth century while Salvaggio applies contemporary French Feminist theory to Pope who emerges as a pitiable figure in his inability to understand women's absence, and Rumbold concentrates primarily on the biographical aspect of Pope's relationships with women. In contrast to these critics, Thomas attempts to analyze Pope from the vantage point of his own culture, looking directly at women's comments about Pope in letters and journals, their poems directed to him, and their poems which reflect Pope's own poetry in form, style, attitude, or technique . In so doing, Thomas provides an important corrective to our understanding of Pope and his women readers. Her book is clear, readable, carefully researched, and immensely thought-provoking. Thomas begins with a discussion of Pope's grotto and ofhis association of romantic feelings with creativity and with nature. She contends that Pope literally constructs his grotto as a retreat in which he can create poems which express emotions. She then looks at women's responses to Pope's garden . These responses range from Lady Mary Montagu's mocking of his selection of a cave as the site for creativity to Elizabeth Carter's enchantment by the garden. Hannah More was disappointed by the garden, finding it smaller and less impressive than she had expected, and Anna Seward accepts the garden as the inspiration for a poet who is her worthy predecessor. Thus, the range of response is a varied as the women poets who read and react to Pope's poetry. 100Rocky Mountain Review Thomas then proceeds to a discussion of Pope's translation of the Iliad and its notes directed to female readers. Samuel Johnson was appalled by the chatty nature ofthe notes, and many twentieth-century readers find the notes condescending, but Thomas contends that we must look at Pope's readers and the culture in which he was writing. She suggests that Pope's translation is full of sentiment, is more refined and less brutal than earlier translations, and that his treatment of Hector and Andromache heightens the importance of love and marriage—an attempt to edify women writers. Thus Pope's translation and the accompanying notes must be read as part of the idealized, sentimentalized framework of male/female roles promoted by Addison and Steele. This construction of gender saw women as defenseless and in need ofthe protection of men. Thomas thus reads Pope's translation as part of the ongoing creation of eighteenth-century bourgeois culture which narrowly defined women's roles. She concludes that Pope's attitude is neither misogynist nor feminist but reflective of the dominant thought of the time which defined women's nature as primarily domestic. In letters, journals, and poems Lady Mary Montagu and other less prominent women responded enthusiastically to Pope's translation, indicating that Pope drew women into an inclusive experience of the epic. Indeed, given the communal nature of life for eighteenth-century women, they often read the translation aloud together, thus expanding the boundaries...