“To One Thing Constant”: The Passion of Pope’s Eloisa

This essay considers the ways in which Pope re-works the materials in John Hughes’s Letters of Abelard and Heloise (1713) to construct a heroine who uses her passionate voice, often characterized as one articulating overwhelming emotional conflict, to strategic ends. Pope’s Eloisa, I argue, deploys (rather than succumbs to) passionate language in order to recuperate Abelard’s reputation, deliberately deflecting on to herself the sexual desire and transgressions that have damaged Abelard’s fame. Pope’s poem demonstrates the rhetorical tactics Eloisa animates in order to re-constitute Abelard as a noble figure, whose serene faith contrasts with the tumultuous passions of his lover.