Re-Writing Rabelais's "Nonsense": The Feminine Grotesque in Alexander Pope's Dunciad The McNeese...

Re-Writing Rabelais’s “Nonsense”:

The Feminine Grotesque in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad The McNeese Review. 2006 (44): 53-69.

Lysbeth Em Benkert

Northern State University

Claudia N. Thomas argues that the Rabelaisian carnival, as presented in

Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, represents “the most distasteful metaphors available to his

culture.”1 Carefully distinguishing the marketplace from refined, genteel behavior, “Pope

immersed himself, his victims, and his readers in pungent carnival metaphors,”2

metaphors that erase the individuality of his rivals and conglomerate them into a massive,

undifferentiated, uncontrollable mob. Through this, Pope intends to provoke disgust and

anxiety for the “creeping vulgarity” he saw overwhelming polite society. In that respect,

however, Pope’s grotesque is radically different than that of Rabelais. Where Rabelais’s

carnival is life affirming, all embracing and joyous, Pope’s is a deeply disturbing vision

of nihilistic apocalypse.

Thomas points out that Pope’s transformation of the grotesque realism described

by Bakhtin emerges in part because Pope was “building on more than a century of

negative associations” with the marketplace and their annual festivals.3 However, where

the sixteenth century seems to have harbored few negative associations with them,

genteel society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attempted to differentiate

itself from the “low culture” of marketplace celebrations and sports by labeling them as

vulgar. In addition, it seems that when Pope read Rabelais he just didn’t get it – Pope

wanted “coherent satiric purpose” where Rabelais offered exuberant excess. When he

described Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pope argued that Rabelais was simply “writing

The Feminine Grotesque - 2

nonsense” so readers would finally start paying attention.4 Reading from within his

century’s distaste for disorder and carnivalesque celebrations, Pope failed to understand

the message of transformation and potential inherent in Rabelais’s narrative. These

differences certainly form a foundation for Pope’s construction of the grotesque in The

Dunciad, but something more must account for the level of revulsion and anxiety he

evokes for his victims. That something is Pope’s feminization of the grotesque. Pope

merges not just the animal and vegetal, but also grafts the female onto the male creating a

hermaphroditic monster paradoxically sterile and fecund.

The grotesque, at best, can be only vaguely described as an attempt to mesh

together into one image elements which cannot be reconciled. It includes nearly anything

unexpected, much that is shocking, and a great deal that is perverse. In early modern

western culture, the grotesque was reintroduced to popular tastes with the discovery and

excavation of Nero’s “Golden Palace” in Rome at the close of the fifteenth century.

These walls contained fantastical wall and ceiling frescoes.5 The presumed artist,

Fabullus, covered the walls with intricate designs which began as vegetation and ended in

animal shapes. They twined over the plaster, art for art’s sake. Their only purpose

appeared to be delicate and ostentatious decoration.6 Artists of the Renaissance

popularized the style, calling it grottesche, and the grotesque became associated with

darkness, caverns and the underground because the only access to these paintings was a

descent into buried rooms.7 The form became a natural vehicle for portrayals of Hell,

and is most familiar to us in the works of Heironymous Bosch.

Once the groteque form was popularized, however, it came to inhabit a nebulous

realm between meaning and meaninglessness; by extension, opinions about it were often


quite ambivalent. It occupies a “no man’s land” between semiotic system and chaos, and

because of this seems somewhat threatening.8 It offers compelling images that promise

equally compelling interpretations, a promise which it often, almost invariably, fails to

fulfill. This ambiguity invests the grotesque with an artistic power matched by little else.

Its “yoking violently together” of images is emotionally compelling because it pushes at

the boundaries of social intercourse in order to create new meaning, or at least, to

promise this creation.

Rabelais fuses this grotesque with familiar folk festivals to create what Bakhtin

describes as grotesque realism. Rabelais creates a carnival overflowing with vitality and

a celebration of its physicality, its potential and its spontaneity: “no dogma, no

authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images.”9

The imagery invests the grotesque with a deep appreciation for the duality of life – birth

and death, destruction and renewal. The laughter of carnival “is gay, triumphant, and at

the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.”10

In so

doing, it preserves the basic ambiguity of the grotesque, while affirming the joyousness

possible in worldly existence.

If grotesque realism in Rabelais is “deeply positive,”11

in Pope it becomes deeply

threatening. On the one hand, Pope’s grotesque is as Bakhtin describes: “grandiose,

exaggerated, immeasurable . . . [and the] leading themes of these images of bodily life are

fertility, growth, and a brimming over abundance.”12

Yet the fertility and abundance of

the dunces is a terrible engulphing of mental and moral enfeeblement – grown men acting

like irresponsible children and women uncontrollably breeding. The dunces are a

spreading plague of rats who multiply unchecked to the destruction of polite society. Its


excess, its hermaphroditic ability to self-replicate, adds to its menace. Yet, at the same

time, it remains an oddly sterile fecundity, an asexual reproduction that destroys itself

and its surroundings as it reproduces. For Rabelais, the virtue of the grotesque is

“degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract”13

in order to

reform and recreate it. Rabelais’s carnival renews society by breaking it down and

allowing its rebirth. For Pope, this breaking down of social distinctions is exactly what

makes the grotesque horrific. The destruction it engenders leads to the annihilation of

culture, not its rejuvenation.

If Rabelais celebrates the grotesque of carnival from the standpoint of the

oppressed, Pope fears and loathes it from the conservative standpoint of the established

order. Pope’s life was consumed with the desire for a social acceptance which he could

never achieve, both because of his presumed physical inadequacies, as well as because of

his Catholicism – weaknesses persistently exploited by his rivals. On the one hand, Pope

was excluded from the circle of aspiring writers of the successful middle class. Colley

Cibber’s attacks on Pope gleefully focused on Pope’s physical limitations when he

described how he once “rescued” Pope from a prostitute on whom he was “like a terrible

Tom Tit, perching on the Mount of Love!”14

On the other hand, Pope’s own associations

with the literary marketplace gave others reason to exclude him from complete

acceptance among the genteel. Lord Hervey openly disparaged Pope’s pretensions to the

aristocratic life and as a “companion to men of rank,” when he groups Pope with “those

wits by profession . . . [who] are a sort of mental post-masters.”15

In opposition to this,

and because of his desire to define himself as belonging to the intellectual and social

elite, Pope appoints himself defender of its masculine intellectual ideal. The foundation


of this ideal is a well-ordered society, each animal and person having its place and

staying in it: “Such is the World’s great harmony, that springs, / From Order, Union, full

Consent of things!” (Essay on Man, III.295-96) Such a society is entertained, but also

educated and chastised by a moral, creative, well-ordered intelligentsia. Even Pope’s

chosen verse form reflects his faith in a well-ordered society – his use of the heroic

couplet is precise, masterful and formal, just as well-ordered as society at large ought to

be. Opposed to that ideal is the grotesque carnival of popular culture and the feminine

intellect. These are irrational, wild for self-display, and whimsically driven by money.

When Pope fuses images of the carnival with feminine stereotypes he transforms the

grotesque into the overwhelmingly negative images of The Dunciad.

The foundation of Pope’s grotesque imagery derives on one level from the freak

shows and madhouses that were popular attractions during the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. Roger Lund details some of the shows that formed the staple of these sites.

Bartholomew Fair in particular included “conjurors, acrobats, rope dancers, gamesters,

religious fanatics, . . . curious beasts, . . . [as well as] deformed and monstrous animals

and a rich variety of embryos.”16

Such claims as would be suitable for the National

Enquirer were also common. Mary Tofts and her doctors gave out that she had given

birth to rabbits, a claim Pope ridicules in The Discovery; or The Squire Tur’n Ferret.17

Lund outlines Pope’s long fascination for the grotesque, which manifests itself in the

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus; Memoirs, Three Hours After Marriage, and in Peri

Bathous, as well as in The Dunciad. Drawing on images such as these was particularly

useful for Pope because much of his argument against the dunces was centered on class

and the marketplace. As several writers have argued, Pope wishes to construct an image


of himself as distanced from the economics of writing, while he disparages his rivals for

professionalizing literature. Eric V. Chandler argues that the heart of Pope’s

disagreement with Colly Cibber is essentially one of economics – Pope denies that he

writes for money and equates literary commercialism with prostitution, while Cibber not

only admits, but is proud of his ties to the marketplace.18

In this sense, a grotesque

created out of marketplace images is particularly effective, because it allows Pope to

impose distasteful images of low culture onto otherwise respectable middle-class

publishing ventures. Yet, while Pope draws on examples of popular culture readily

available to him, he never adopts them wholesale. One of the techniques he learns to use

to devastating effect is to graft onto these images the negative stereotypes that surround

women, an addition to the grotesque which intensifies its effects because it relies on

accepted cultural myths.

Eighteenth-century myths surrounding women were often contradictory and

mostly unflattering.19

Reflecting the essential ambiguity of the age toward women, these

myths portrayed women at once as the pillars of spirituality and as highly sexual beings.20

As she documents the decreasing economic power of women during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, Ellen Pollak sees an increasing stress on the woman as the spiritual

support of her husband, rather than as an integral part of the economic support of the

household. The ideal for women increasingly becomes a “cultivated passivity.”

Simultaneously, prominent Augustan opinion held that “women universally possess

unregenerate natures which irredeemably condemn them to lives of vanity and

ignorance.”21

Insecurities as to the position of women in society manifested themselves

in the common view of women as proud and fond of exhibitionism.22

Out of these


stereotypes came the stock characters of the prude, the coquette, the censorious woman

and the scold.23

Felicity Nussbaum’s work reveals that common opinion believed women

prone to inconstancy and the inability to reason. Women were often accused of striving

for advanced learning only for their own self-aggrandizement. According to cultural

myth, most women are more sensitive to spleen, more delicate, and more fragile than

men. Nussbaum argues that women provoked fear because their tenuous natures were

thought more easily to dissolve through moral decay. Inconsistent, self-centered, and

affectedly witty, the female sex often attempts to outshine men when it should only

reflect the light of the superior sex.24

Women, much more so than men, were believed

prone to the error of misplaced wit, resulting from their susceptibility to fancy and vanity.

Long before he writes The Dunciad, Pope repeatedly returns to these stereotypes

to magnify his themes. In his correspondence, Pope refers to his muse as an “old stale

wife,” and at another point complains of “that Jade whom everybody thinks I love, as a

mistress, but whom in reality I hate as my wife, my Muse” (Corr. 1:292-93). These are

excellent examples of how Pope attempts to insulate himself from barbs aimed at his

physical/sexual weaknesses. By denigrating women, he constructs a masculine self-

image, one that is active, intellectually superior, and potent.

His reliance on negative gender stereotypes surfaces again in The Rape of the

Lock and Epistle to a Lady. In “The Rape,” Belinda’s primping and autoerotic love

represent those failings to which women are most prone, manifesting women’s pride and

self-love. As a result, Belinda becomes, in Pollak’s words, “the embodiment of self-

enclosed narcissism.”25

Her primping has as its objective, not pleasing men, but gaining

power over them; her card-playing shows itself to be a strategy to achieve mastery rather


than as an innocent pastime; her flirtations surface as another maneuver for control, rather

than as a true bid for marriage. As such, her characterization capitalizes on the common

gender stereotype of women as sexual and self-serving individuals and reaffirms man’s

superiority over women. Belinda’s inability to successfully resist her assailant reveals

her pride as the pretentious self-delusion it is.26

Belinda’s protecting sylph, Ariel,

evolves from these same sexual myths. She is the false prude, whose interest in chastity

grows out of the power it gives her over her suitors, not from any true religious devotion.

Pope’s ability to manipulate the common stereotypes exaggerates the portrait in order to

trivialize Belinda’s pretensions.

In Epistle to a Lady, Pope manages to praise Martha Blount only at the expense of

the entire remainder of the female sex. She is the perfect woman, Nussbaum observes,

only because she “has rid herself of the ruling passions . . . which plague the whole

sex.”27

She is less an exemplary woman than a “softer man” (l. 72), a paragon

unreachable by average women, because, well, they are women. The women to whom

Pope compares her all fall victim to stereotypically feminine failings: “they are governed

by fancy and imagination.”28

What is worse, however, is that these women are not

content with realizing and living with their faults. They remain reprehensible because

they cannot overcome their natures, and become despicable because they choose to

display their faults through creative expression. This impulse to display their wit

inevitably leads to sexual promiscuity, a portrayal which reveals female sexuality as

“strongly negative” in the poem.29

Perhaps Pope’s most cited use of negative female imagery comes not in a portrait

of a woman, but in that of a man, and here is where Pope transforms those images into a


true grotesque. In his portrait of Lord Hervey in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope

proves that the most effective way to insult a man is to call him a woman. The

description draws on many elements of what we traditionally call the grotesque, a

confusing meld of the animal and human. Hervey is “this Bug with gilded wings, / This

painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; . . . [a] well-bred Spaniel,” a squeaking

puppet, and a “familiar Toad” (309-319). Our mind’s eye slides over a picture of a man

that merges into a butterfly which transforms into a non-descript bug and then into that of

a small lap dog combined with a puppet and a poisonous toad. Pope completes the

portrait by emphasizing Hervey’s effeminacy. He is not simply bestial, but

“Amphibious,” a “Fop at the Toilet, Flatt’rer at the Board, / Now trips a Lady, and now

struts a Lord” (326, 328-29). Pope describes a fop, a Cherub, a reptile all merged into

one Bosch-like portrait of a single being. The images are incongruous and confusing, and

much like Hervey himself, incapable of making sense on their own. Yet Pope makes this

great monstrosity even more repellant by gilding it with feminine associations. The

portrait, as Clive Probin points out, is one of “gutless androgyny.”30

Hervey possesses a

woman’s “silk” softness, her self-centered emotionlessness, her “gilding” and “painted”

looks, the “Buzz” of her uncontrolled talkativeness, her “Spaniel-like” defenselessness,

her “Amphibious” inconstancy, as well as the “Beauty that shocks you [and] the parts

that none will trust” (332). Although Pope builds the portrait with the elements of the

traditional grotesque, it depends heavily on its androgyny for its satiric effect. A fine dog

has the dignity that a lady’s lapdog lacks. Through this literary castration, Hervey

becomes less than bestial. He loses the power and agency inherent in masculinity – he

becomes dependent, derivative, expendable. What is worse, Hervey has chosen this


effeminate behavior. He has the capability of masculine reason, but chooses to affect a

feminine primped up pride and inconstant reason – her “misplaced wit.”

This grotesque grafting of the feminine onto the masculine contributes in large

part to the effectiveness of The Dunciad’s condemnation of marketplace ethics. By

describing the dunces as falling prey to feminine vices, Pope belittles them in a way not

possible had they been able to retain their masculine dignity and agency. Pope strips

them of a man’s ability to act independently in the public world – their castration

relegates them to a demeaning position equivalent to the domestic space, dependant on

others for praise, for money, and for permission to act in the world at large. Many of the

traits Pope capitalizes on in these portraits can be traced back to common negative

stereotypes about women. This also enlists the eighteenth-century reader more strongly

on the side of the author, because it evokes the readers’ own fear of castration. Readers

distance themselves from Pope’s victims because they do not wish to become guilty by

association, to be seen as associated with effeminacy.

Catherine Ingrassia gives a thorough treatment of Pope’s portrayal of women in

The Dunciad, and how this portrayal reflects “Pope’s escalating fear of a pervasive

'feminization’ that threatens to permeate nearly every aspect of English culture.”31

When

read in this context, Dulness comes to represent the “feminization” of the age in its

increasing dependence on financial speculation and the comodification of literature.

Pope’s portrayal of Eliza Haywood re-places a transgressive female author into her

properly passive, child-bearing, rather than text-producing, woman’s role. By extension,

Pope reveals the dunces as effeminately dependant on their mother Dulness for both their

sustenance (economic and otherwise) and their self-esteem. In light of this argument, one


can see how Pope builds on these underpinnings to create the grotesque of the poem as a

whole, a grotesque that suffocates and sterilizes rather than renews or offers re-birth.

The links between the dunces and female sexuality is established at the start of the

poem through Pope’s creation of the goddess Dulness. Mythographic source work

clearly demonstrates the connection between Pope’s Magna Mater and the ancient

practices of goddess worship in Greece, Rome and Egypt.32

Pope sets the dunces beneath

the rest of mankind by making them subject not to God, the Father, but to a goddess who

embodies all of the worst characteristics of the female myth. Her images gather to her

the orgies of ancient fertility rites along with the frenzied, violent celebrations of Cybele

and her eunuchs dressed as women.33

Pope blends negative eighteenth-century

stereotypes of women with the most infamous traits of these ancient goddesses in order to

transform their life-giving potentialities into Dulness’s darkness, triviality and abortion.

Dulness becomes so threatening, in part, because she is fertile in and of herself.

She brings forth multitudes, but not as part of a family or a community, or within the

subservient position of wife. Instead, she produces and celebrates that production as a

singular, self-productive entity. From her throne she

beholds the Chaos dark and deep,

Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,

‘Till genial Jacob, or a warm third day

Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play.

How Hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,

How new-born Nonsense first is taught to cry,

Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet,

And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. (Variorum, I.53-60)

This is not the sensuous, community-affirming fertility of Rabelais, but an isolated,

asexual reproduction that serves to choke the community surrounding it. Dulness does


not so much as give birth to her followers and to chaos as she enables their spontaneous

generation from the slime, just as maggots were supposed to generate from rotting meat

left in the sun. Dulness oversees their potential “in embryo” and teaches them to cry and

to crawl. In this way she is infinitively fertile, bringing forth her spawn without a male

consort. She, like the “watchful Bruin[,] forms with plastic care / Each growing lump,

and brings it to a bear” (Variorum, I.100-101), and by implication, she embodies the

same threat of destruction. She is a self-contained, self-sustaining being. She even

celebrates their births without help from others. Once she brings forth her children, she

views them “With self applause” (Variorum, I.80) – the vanity expected of a stereotypical

woman.

In seeming contradiction to this, however, Dulness is as sterile as she is fertile, in

that all she brings forth is both monstrous and fleeting, as all she oversees are

“momentary monsters [that] rise and fall” (Variorum, I.81). None of her progeny can

obtain the lasting fame of a Homer or Virgil, but disappear into obscurity almost as soon

as they are born. The poet she brings forth for Lintot and Curll in Book II, vanishes as

soon as he is caught, “ No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit, / That once so flutter’d,

and that once so writ” (Variorum, II.111-12). Her Dennis leaps into the Thames and is

neither seen or heard from anymore, a fact brought to our attention in the Variorum’s

footnotes: “The reader . . . may be surprized at [Dennis’s] sinking at once, in so few lines,

never to rise again” (Variorum, II, fn 271). However, his disappearance makes him an

excellent emblem for all of Dulness’s children, who are called forth, make a great deal of

noise and then disappear with the arrival of new mobs. All is novelty, nothing lasting or

permanent.


Not only will we not remember them, but their monstrous androgyny ensures they

cannot reproduce themselves. More than once, Pope refers to her “abortions,” just as in

Book III, when Settle asks his listeners to “prepare / For new Abortions, all ye pregnant

Fair!” (Variorum, 311-12), and declares that “Light dies before her uncreating word”

(Variorum, 340). What Dulness creates cannot itself reproduce or perpetuate itself. In

some cases, this sterility results from an explicit androgyny. In both the Variorum

(III.173) and in the 1743 edition (III.179), Pope describes Burnett and Duckett with a

wink and a nod as “in strict embraces join’d.” In the former, Pope mentions Ducket’s

“pious passion for the youth,” while in both editions, the footnotes disclaim any

insinuation other than plutonic friendship, but manage to imply something more: “The

verse is a literal translation of Virgil . . . and there, as in the original, applied to

Friendship: That between Nisus and Euryalus is allow’d to make one of the most amiable

Episodes in the world, and surely was never interpreted in the perverse sense” (Variorum,

III.fn 176; and referred to again 1743.III.fn 179). Surely not.

Appropriately, the king of the dunces also reflects this monstrous paradox of

sterile fertility. Dulness sees “her image full exprest. / In Tibbald’s monster-breeding

breast” (Variorum, I.105-106), just as in the later edition it is “chief in Bays monster-

breeding breast” (1743.I.108) she views her own image. Pope extends this image in the

later edition of the poem when he pictures Cibber surrounded by “much Embryo, [and]

much Abortion” (1743.I.121). The King of Dunces brings forth monstrous creations that

will themselves never live to reproduce.

This is one of several ways that Pope allies the laureate with his goddess, and

effectually strips him of his male agency. Even Cibber’s process of composition marks


him as effeminate, writing the same way a silly housewife keeps her home – reduce, re-

use, recycle. Cibber pieces his works together with “All that on Folly Frenzy could

beget,” (1743.I.125) using the “Sooterkins of Wit” (1743.I.126) and “The Frippery of

Crucify’d Moliere” (1743.I.132). Cibber writes by virtue of the frenzy of feminine fancy,

and the “Frippery” of “a good housewife [mending] old linnen” (1743.I.fn 132). While

Cibber defends the practice (a fact Pope shares with us in his footnotes to the 1743

edition), Pope sees his plagiarism as reprehensible, and makes his condemnation all the

more clear by feminizing the practice – it is a small, trivial, women’s art. Pope compares

it to the mean skill a woman employs when she re-uses old bed sheets, and compares the

writing it produces to the self-engendered little rodents born of little stoves up the skirts

of Dutch women (1743.I.fn 126).34

Cibber’s writings, Pope implies, are the product of

mental masterbation, because he is too lazy to write anything original. Ultimately,

Theobald, but even moreso Cibber, is the domesticated pet of Dulness – by definition a

goddess of inaction – and castrates himself of his naturally masculine agency. When

“Soft on her lap her Laureate son reclines” (1743.IV.20), he sacrifices his virility by

laying his head within her receptive, ample, enveloping and enfeebling skirts.

Her effects on her kingdom are much like those on her laureate, enfeeblement and

emasculation. As the games begin in Book II, Pope portrays the gamesters as inversions

of their classical models, not only in their association with country sports, as Claudia

Thomas points out,35

but also in their complete lack of dignity and masculinity. Pope

merges the bestial with the impotently child-like with the distastefully effeminate into a

devastatingly effective grotesque. Masculine athleticism is utterly foreign to the runners

in the opening race. The “huge Lintot” runs behind Edmund Curll:


. . . lab’ring on, with shoulders, hands, and head,

Winds as a wind-mill all his fingers spread,

With arms expanded Bernard rows his state,

And left-legg’d Jacob seems to emulate. (1743.II.65-69)

As Lintot struggles to heave his soft bulk down the street, Curll runs “as when as dab-

chick waddles thro’ the copse / On feet and wings, and flies, and wades, and hops”

(1743.II.64-3). Curll runs, well, like a little girl. In fact, he not only runs like one, but is

surrounded by girls. He is a devotee of Dulness, falls in the puddle of slime left by

“Curl’s Corinna” and is rescued from the slime not by Mercury or Ares or Jove, but by

the goddess of sewers, Cloacina, as:

Forth from the heap she pick’d her Vot’ry’s pray’r,

And plac’d it next him, a distinction rare!

Oft, as he fish’d her nether realms for wit,

The Goddess favour’d him, and favours yet. (1743, II.91-94)

Pope associates Curll with the worst of female failings, her sexuality and her uncontrolled

speech, both of which flow incontinently like diarrhea. Despite his effeminate running

style, however, Curll proves himself somewhat potent in the next event, pissing for a

poetess. His stream “smoking flourish’d o’er his head” (180), while his opponent in this

match is as unlucky as his last. Osbourne’s attempt to “send on high / The salient spout”

(1742.II.161-62) ends in a pitiful impotence as his spout “rose and labor’d to a curve at

most” (1742.II.172). Pope shows Osboune to be impotent indeed. Yet, even here, Pope

undermines Curll’s masculinity, because the prize for which he battles once again

embodies the era’s worst of female stereotypes: “See in the circle next, Eliza plac’d; /

Two babes of love close clinging to her waste.” Eliza Haywood is “yon Juno of majestic

size, / With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes” (Variorum, II.149-50, 155-56). Curll


gets the prize he richly deserves, a woman who is sexually loose, vain, physically soft,

and as dull as a bovine in the field.

Pope further feminizes the dunces by dramatizing their need to flaunt themselves.

Society often complained that women were inherently exhibitionist, performing and

primping in order to attract the gaze of admiring men. Pope repeatedly imposes this trait

on the dunces in Book II. He emblematizes them through Cibber’s “brazen, brainless

brothers,” and uses “shameless” over and over in his descriptions as the dunces enviously

compete for Dulness’s approving gaze. Theobald in 1729 and Cibber in 1743 are both

marked by the “jealous leer” in their faces (6). Curll and Osbourne shamelessly attempt

to display their sexual potency in the pissing contest. In the diving contest, Dulness’s

worshippers show off like a bunch of little children. Here, Dulness exhorts her

worshippers to “strip, my children! here at once leap in” (1743. II.275), and the political

hacks line up in their naked glory next to Fleet Ditch, a sluice appropriately located, as

Pope points out, next to the women’s prison Bridewell. Oldmixon steps up “In naked

Majesty,” along with “a feeble, but a desp’rate pack, / With each a sickly brother at his

back” (1743.II.305-6). There are so many, in fact, that they are both nameless and

numberless. They “number’d with the puppies in the mud. / Ask ye their names? I could

as soon disclose / The names of these blind puppies as of those” (1743.II.308-10). In a

single line, Pope transposes one image atop the other to de-humanize and emasculate the

entire group. Like a young, naïve woman, the poor, little puppy-writers are eager to

expose themselves, but because they are blind, are equally unable to act without proper

masculine, rational guidance. Appropriately, Smedley returns from the deep at the climax

of the episode with tales of the beautiful mud nymphs who fell in love with him, and


“suck’d him in” (1743.II.332). In the muddy deep, he is led not by masculine reason, but

by feminine sensuousness.

The images are amusing, but also carry with them an implied threat to the social

order. The second book closes with a picture of Norton Defoe’s “never blushing head.”

The dunces are clearly proud of themselves, and vie with one another for their mistress’

full attention – they are defined by her gaze. In so doing, Pope sets them on the same

level with women who are defined by the gaze/opinion of men. They primp themselves

for sexual displays much like Belinda at her dressing table. Yet, these are the men who

define popular tastes and polite discourse. Pope sees in these men a grotesque mingling

of power over discourse with a simpering effeminate desire for attention and patronage, a

woman’s weakness, irrationality and fickle exhibitionism coupled with a man’s

prerogative of public speech. They will say and do anything to be the center of attention,

especially if that attention has a purse attached to it, as does the lord at the center of the

tickling contest. If this is the case, Pope argues, wit and skill have nothing to do with

choosing the winner:

A youth unknown to Pheobus, in despair,

Puts his last refuge all in Heav’n and Pray’r.

What force have pious vows! the Queen of Love

His Sister sends, her vot’ress, from above.

As taught by Venus, Paris learnt the art

To touch Achilles’ only tender part;

Secure, thro’ her, the noble prize to carry,

He marches off, his Grace’s Secretary. (Variorum, II.205-212)

All of the writers are essentially prostitutes. They beg to be taken home as the kept

man, and sell their manhood in the bargain.


This bizarre mixture of pride, selfishness, exhibitionism and simpering self-

degradation all point directly to the dunces’ irrationality and narrow separation from

insanity. This association serves as a crucial foundation of Pope’s satire. Dulness herself

has already been linked with Bacchanalian frenzy, but in addition to these classical links,

Pope explicitly portrays the dunces as mad. Their actions are dominated by fancy and the

imagination, traits consistently identified by the eighteenth century as feminine and

opposed to the masculine quality of right reason. David Morris argues that The Dunciad

is constructed as a kind of literary Bedlam, and deliberately displays the insanity of

misplaced wit.36

Maintaining the dominance of reason over the imagination required a

constant vigil, since the imagination at any time might attempt to usurp the place of

reason in determining the actions of the will. This implies that madness became a

conscious moral choice. For this reason, Bedlam was constructed more to punish and

display its inmates as moral exempla than to cure: “the age believed that irrationality

implied moral failure,” and so the insane were put on display to warn others of the danger

in giving way to fantasy.37

In the 1743 edition of the poem, Pope takes care to remind the

readers of “Great Cibber’s brazen, brainless brothers,” those statues standing at the front

of Bedlam which Cibber’s father had carved for the institution.38

Pope repeatedly

reminds us of Cibber’s kinship with madness throughout the poem, both through

descriptions of Cibber’s actions and through the actions of his subjects.

The laureate’s dream vision in particular links him with this irrationality. The

dream state places the individual closest to the imagination and farthest from the control

of the reason proper. Although dreaming is a state experienced by all, Morris argues that

Cibber’s dreams indicate an affinity for the fanciful greater than that of sane men.


Cibber’s dreams affirm the visions of his waking self so that “the dream becomes a

component of madness.” Cibber’s dreams appear on the English stage and again

reappear in his dreams, and Settle’s cry that “I see my Cibber there” confirms “Cibber’s

appearance as an actor as well as a witness, in his own hallucination.”39

Waking and

sleeping are one and the same for the king of dunces. The same could be said of

Theobald in the earlier version of the poem. Book III opens with a picture of the sleeping

laureate as

Him close [Dulness] curtain’d round with vapours blue,

And soft besprinkled with Cimmerian dew.

Then raptures high the seat of sense o’erflow,

Hence, from the straw where Bedlam’s prophet nods,

He hears loud oracles, and talks with gods. (Variorum, III.3-8)

A dunce is unreasonable, irrational, and subject to that most female of failings, fancy.

Again, however, these are failings more reprehensible in men, because they are failings

the dunces could avoid, being men. Not only do the dunces fail to reject them, but they

consciously seek them out – Theobald’s hallucinations, after all, are actively aided by

clouds of opium, as he is “curtain’s round with vapours blue” – and they are proud of

these feminine weaknesses. Cibber may turn away his head as Settle praises the future

glory of his reign, but his is a false modesty. The face he turns away is a “ne’er blushing

head” just like that of his subject Defoe. Cibber’s pride is, as Morris argues, “the center

from which radiates the ultimately annihilating power of madness: just like Belinda at her

dressing table.”40

Morris’s comparison of Cibber to Belinda is particularly apt, because

Cibber’s failing is, ultimately, a woman’s defect. While essentially trivial in a woman,

however, Cibber’s vices threaten the end of polite society and learning. In Pope’s

construction, a man’s part should be one of agency and independent action, not the


passivity, dependence, and mental prostitution demanded by the marketplace. The

feminine grotesque constructed by Pope dramatizes how the literary marketplace itself

castrates those who depend on it, men who should be the arbiters of masculine reason and

good taste.

These issues are to a great extent complicated by what some critics have seen as

Pope’s ambivalence toward the dunces and their real-life models. They are at once

laughable and dangerous. Emrys Jones has shown that the dunces have a child-like

quality about them. As they take part in the games of Book II, no hint of malice appears

in their competitions. There is, in fact, an air of naïve simplicity about their play, no

awareness of embarrassment about their actions as they strip naked in full public view

before they plunge into Fleet Ditch, no awkward hesitation as Curll and Osbourne have a

pissing contest in the middle of the street.41

Conversely, even if they are children, they

pose a seemingly real threat to Pope’s conception of learning, knowledge and the

construction of polite society. Book IV predicts the destruction of all civilization, hardly

the logical product of harmless children:

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restore’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All. (1743.IV.653-56)

The Dunciad rests, as Dennis Todd argues, on the paradox that the power of the dunces

lies in their triviality, in their inability to move an audience to the sublime passions of

Homer.42

Unable to bring light through the power of true inspiration and rational

judgment, the world sinks into the mental darkness they create. This paradox seems to

arise out of the same ambiguity with which the eighteenth century regarded women, as


virgin and/or whore, as submissive wife or scold. Women were dangerous precisely

because of the traits for which men admired them – their passivity (or dullness), their

emotionality (or irrationality), their sensual beauty (or sexual weakness). Such self-

contradictions make them a natural vehicle for the grotesque. Pollak argues that Pope

tries to “resolve the dissonance [between reality and cultural myth] to rhetorically

accommodate the contradictions inherent in his culture’s dominant sexual codes.”43

I

would argue, however, that this dissonance is exactly the effect Pope seeks to create,

because dissonance is essential for the grotesque to produce its full emotional power.

Pope plays with and utilizes the contradictions inherent in these codes, just as he

struggles with his own dependence on and loathing for the literary marketplace; this

creates the complexity of The Dunciad. It is the grotesque grafting together of unlike

images, but also of social ideals and desires.

Pope’s employment of feminine stereotypes allows him to drain Rabelais’s

carnival of its remaining appeal for the eighteenth-century reader – it no longer renews, it

debases and trivializes. By emasculating the carnival, Pope emasculates his rivals while

attempting to push his readers toward disdainful rather than unifying laughter. Desiring

masculine authority themselves, his readers distance themselves from the feminine

monsters Pope creates. By grafting female stereotypes onto male characters, Pope is able

to draw on the strongly prejudicial, radically contradictory attitudes his era held about

women in order to further trivialize his satiric victims. On yet another level, Pope’s

feminine grotesque is crucial to his argument about the comodification of literature and

the willingness of men to participate in the castration of polite culture that results. Pope

dramatizes what he sees as a demeaning social practice by transforming his metaphors


into characters and images. When polite society and the literary elite allow themselves to

become domesticated and dependant on the gaze of the marketplace, they create the

“nonsense” of a feminine grotesque, a nonsense that does not renew society, but has the

potential to destroy its ideals.


End Notes

1 Claudia N. Thomas, “‘Writing Nonsense’: Pope, Rabelais, and the Fair,” in

“More Solid Learning”: New Perspectives on Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, eds Catherine

Ingrassia and Claudia N. Thomas. (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000), 207.

2 Thomas, 190.

3 Thomas, 190.

4 Thomas, 191.

5 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art

and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 23.

6 Harpham, 25.

7 Harpham, 27.

8 Harpham, 31.

9 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans., H l ne Iswolsky

(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 3.

10

Bakhtin, 11-12.

11

Bakhtin, 19.

12

Ibid.

13

Ibid.

14

Colley Cibber, A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope, Inquiring into the

Motives That Might Induce Him to His Satyrical Works, To Be So Frequently Fond of

Mr. Cibber’s Name (London: Lewis, 1742), 48.


15

Qtd in Linda Zionkowski, “Not ‘The Only Trifler in the Nation’: Pope and the

Man of Leisure in The Dunciad,” in “More Solid Learning”: New Perspectives on

Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, eds Catherine Ingrassia and Claudia N. Thomas (Lewisburg:

Bucknell U P, 2000), 136.

16

Roger D. Lund, “Pope’s Monsters: Satire and Grotesque in The Dunciad,” in

The Scope of the Fantastic—Culture Biography, Themes, Children’s Literature: Selected

Essays from the First International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film,

ed Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce, 61-78 (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1985),

62.

17

Lund, 63.

18

Eric V. Chandler, “Pope’s ‘Girl of the Game’: The Prostitution of the Author

and the Business of Culture,” in “More Solid Learning”: New Perspectives on Alexander

Pope’s Dunciad, eds Catherine Ingrassia and Claudia N. Thomas (Lewisburg: Bucknell

UP, 2000), 106-128.

19

Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985). By

“Myth” Pollack refers to “literary and epistemological structures by which certain

propositions about the phenomenal world . . . are made to seem outgrowths of the natural

order,” 4.

20

Pollak, 5.

21

Pollak, 42-3.

22

Pollak, 59.

23

Pollak, 66.


24

Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women:

1660-1750 (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1984), 148.

25

Pollak, 78.

26

Pollak, 79.

27

Nussbaum, 154.

28

Nussbaum, 151.

29

Penelope Wilson, “Feminism and the Augustans: Some Readings and

Problems,” Critical Quarterly 28 (1986): 88.

30

Clive T. Probin, “Pope’s Bestiary: The Iconography of Deviance,” in The Art of

Alexander Pope (NY Barnes and Noble, 1979), 222.

31

Catherine Ingrassia, “Women Writing/Writing Women: Pope, Dulness, and

‘Feminization’ in The Dunciad,” Eighteenth-Century Life (November 1990): 40.

32

Thomas C. Faulker and Rhonda L. Blair, “The Classical and Mythographic

Sources of Pope’s Dulness,” Huntington Library Quarterly 43 (1980): 213-46; Douglas

Brooks-Davis, Pope’s Dunciad and the Queen of Night: A Study in Emotional Jacobitism

(Manchester, UK: Manchester, UP, 1985).

33

Faulkner and Blair, 220-21.

34 “‘Sooterkin: A joke upon the Dutch women, supposing that by their constant

use of stoves, which they place under their petticoats, they breed a kind of small animal

in their bodies, called a sooterkin, of the size of a mouse, which when mature slips out.’ –

Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.” The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed.

John Butt (New Haven: Yale U P, 1963): 726.

35

Thomas, 197.


36

David B. Morris,” The Kinship of Madness,” Philological Quarterly 51 (1972):

813-31.

37

Morris, 814.

38

Morris, 813.

39

Morris, 821.

40

Morris, 826.

41

Emrys Jones, “Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet: Pope and Dulness,”

Proceedings of the British Academy 54 (1968): 253.

42

Dennis Todd, “The ‘Blunted Arms’ of Dulness: The Problem of Power in The

Dunciad,” Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 194.

43

Pollak, 12.

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