some meta-criticsm re: pope and misogyny

I spent more time in the scholarship on this poem than any of the other texts I've read thus far, mostly because of the strong language, and the associations we make with the word "rape" nowadays. There were a few critics I came across who, in years past, made the argument that Belinda's rape was her own fault, essentially, and that she invited it to happen. That sort of thinking doesn't exactly fly these days, at least in my experience engaging in women-related dialogue. On the other hand, I found a fair amount of opinion in the scholarship and the blogosophere where critics call Pope a "misogynist" or woman-hater or defender of the patriarchy, or what have you. While I can certainly see their point--I find the "hair as phallic" argument pretty interesting--I'm not ready to jump onto the bandwagon that is making judgements about Pope and his actual sensibilities toward women. The sense I get from a couple of these critics is that they are seriously, unapologetically angry about Alexander Pope and his poem, even though they know little of his mind or intents. They know little of his influences, nor his circumstances.

Which brings me to what I want to flesh out in the post a little: what I've learned about literary criticism from my feminist project for this class. Since feminist critics are interested in responding to wrongs intended and unintended by writers of the past, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that there is a certain amount of blame to be dolled out in their work. In other words, in discussing a wrong, there is likely to be a discussion of when and how the wrong came to be. So in reference to "The Rape of the Lock" I can understand how much of the criticism is directed toward Alexander Pope's character and sensibilities, considering the title and energy of the poem's narrative. Although I think it's a reasonable stance on occassion, I don't feel particularly convinced that Pope was presenting a misogynist narrative in order to draw attention to some injustice in the way his contemporaries treated women. There's just nothing to say that's any more viable than his being an unabashed chauvinist.

Even so, I think it's very intellectually irresponsible for someone to begin making judgments about the author of text, no matter the author's actual intent (even if they expressed it), because it is a cheap and unreliable way to go. Cheap because it can't exactly be refuted without an Omniscient being reading the mind of a dead man and communicating it to us, and unreliable for a related reason--that human beings are far too complex to be pinned down by something they wrote or said. There's far too much wiggle room and room for error. That's why I think any discussion of an author's sensibilities should be indistinguishable from a discussion about his society's sensibilities: focused on the observable, although conscious of there being room for error by generalization (a society's sensibilities does not describe the sensibilities of each of its members.) I think to do otherwise by making judgements about an author's character and its influence on the text is to mistkenly assume that people are something. It is it mistakenly assume that they do not change, that they do not want or feel different things from one minute to the next. It is also a fairly unforgiving and destructive way to think about any other human being. To assign culpability and blame to an individual, to call them evil for what they have done means one has to dash all thoughts of the writers circumstances and raising and environment and culture and how they have shaped in, and instead place all the blame on him alone. Ok, that's all I have for now. But I think,all I'm saying is that the author is dead, and feminists who seek to redress wrongs ought to be careful of the human tendency to blame and accuse, even when everything indicates it would probably be a safe move to make.