Alexander Pope by Laura Brown (review)

242Rocky Mountain Review LAURA BROWN. Alexander Pope. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. 177 p. Laura Brown's new study of Alexander Pope is the latest volume in a series called Rereading Literature, edited by Terry Eagleton, whose healthy polemical work, Literary Theory, has seen wide use in the classroom since its appearance three years ago. Eagleton attacked what he saw as the stifling elitism of traditional English studies, and his chief weapons were the principles of Marxism, feminism, and deconstructionism . Brown uses these same instruments to demolish, rather convincingly, the received standard views of Pope which most of us learned in graduate school, and to replace the old views with a new sense of the magnitude with which Pope was affected by the strong currents of capitalism and imperialism in the early eighteenth century. Her final thesis is that his stance toward these new forces was one of seaching ambivalence: although he sang on a number of occasions the praises of imperialism, he also felt threatened by what he interpreted as defective by-products of the new mercantilism — e.g., cultural crassness and a general cheapening of the profession of letters. According to Brown, Pope's ambivalence is enriched (and at times a bit muddled) by his imagery, which has a tendency to "commodify" experience — that is, to transform literary and philosophical feelings into a species of shelf-goods brightly packaged for the wrong kind of popular consumption. In the face of new challenges by mercantilism and expansionism, the poet looked toward the future of England with a sleepless blend of fear and hope, and it is this poetic anxiety that makes his art all the more compelling to modern readers. To grasp the significance of Brown's findings, we need to backtrack for a moment and recall that until now there have been three well established traditional manners of studying Alexander Pope in the twentieth century. The earliest is the biographical manner, typified by Edith Sitwell's eccentric but illuminating Alexander Pope (1930) and George Sherburn's meticulous The Early Career ofAlexander Pope (1934). This tradition was replaced in the fifties by studies informed by pressures of the New Criticism. Three typical close readings are Rebecca Parkin's 77?e Poetical Workmanship of Alexander Pope, G. Wilson Knight's 77ie Laureate of Peace, and Robert Rogers' The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, all appearing in 1955. At the end of the 1950s, the new critical approach began to give way to more comprehensive modes of studying the poet, in which the critic combined Brooksian scrutinies with a sensible immersion in the deep array of the poet's Renaissance and ancient Greek and Roman sources. Some of the better efforts in this third tradition are Reuben Brower's Alexander Pope: The Poetry ofAllusion (1959), Thomas R. Edwards' 77¡¿s Dark Estate (1963), and John Paul Russo's Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (1972). The comprehensive tradition continues into the present decade, as can be seen in David B. Morris' well researched Alexander Pope: The Genius ofSense (1984). What Laura Brown does that is new is to question the assumptions on which all three of these respectable traditions are based. Whereas all of them, with the possible exception of Morris, tend to isolate Pope too severely from the pulsing and rapidly changing economic ethos of his century. Brown places him squarely within the actual traditions of buying, selling, capitalizing, and the like. When she gets through with him, he begins to look like a submerged kind of Defoe, completely in tune with the shopkeeper's environment. But unlike Defoe, Pope is wracked with misgiving and suspicions toward the very mercantilism and imperialism that he so often seems to support on the rhetorical surfaces of his major poems. Using the deconstructionist technique of showing that to strenuously define and uphold a particular attitude or thesis is at the same time to undercut it and nearly to transform it into its opposite, Brown comes close to convincing us that we need to undertake an extensive Book Reviews243 rereading of this major poet and that all of the earlier critics, although they are worth looking at, have in fact missed the point — the point...