Table Of Content&
RESEMBLANCE QY DISGRACE
RESEMBLANCE
è
DISGRACE
Alexander Pope
and the
Deformation of Culture
HELEN DEUTSCH
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
1996
Copyright © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Deutsch, Helen, 1961—
Resemblance and disgrace : Alexander Pope and the deformation
of culture / Helen Deutsch,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-76489-7 (alk. paper)
1. Pope, Alexander, 1688—1744—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Literature and society—England—History—18th century.
3. Verse satire, English—History and criticism. 4. Abnormalities, Human,
in literature. 5. Pope, Alexander, 1688—1744—Health. 6. Imitation in
literature. 7. Monsters in literature. 8. Health in literature.
I. Title.
PR3634.D48 1996
821'.5—dc20 95-31183
For my grandfather,
Frederick Deutsch,
with love and gratitude
P r e f a ce
Thine is just such an Image of his Pen,
As thou thy Self art of the Sons of Men:
Where our own Species in Burlesque we trace,
A Sign-Post Likeness of the Noble Race;
That is at once Resemblance and Disgrace.
Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First
Satire of the Second Book of Horace
This book has its roots in my long fascination with the imitative originality of
Alexander Pope's poetry, and its written origins in an Amherst College honors
thesis on the evolution of the epic simile from Homer through Pope's mock-
epic. My gradual move from the propriety of a traditional reading of Pope in
his classical context to the impropriety of my current focus on deformity, seems
to me now to have been determined by the poetry itself. Pope's habits of mind
have conditioned and challenged my own.
When doctoral research first led me to the words of my epigraph and title,
they shocked me not just by their cruelty, but also by their descriptive power.
Pope's poetry, while indebted to a variety of authorial models, is above all about
himself and his particular version of authorship. Pope himself, in his own writ-
ings and those of his readers, singularly embodies imitative originality. To write
about deformity in relation to Pope is not simply to point to the great poet's
weakness, but to discern what makes his life's work unique.
I try in what follows to bring freshly posed questions of the embodiment
of authorship, identity, and originality to the reading of Pope, and thereby to
make Pope's case available to a larger field of literary and cultural inquiry. While
I am greatly indebted to recent criticism of this poet in delineating such a field,
it seems to me that the pleasures of Pope's texts have often been lost in the
process of reframing them. Resemblance and Disgrace incorporates recent per-
Vll
Preface
spectives on Pope into a revision of both the poetic particulars and the person
of the poet on which it depends.
Verses Address'd to the Imitator ... of Horace is hardly alone in its attempt to
mortify Pope by reducing him to an object of visible derision. Preserved in the
British Museum is a four volume bound set of pamphlet attacks on Pope doc-
umenting the flood of published abuse the poet alludes to in his Epistle to
Arbuthnot as "the libel'd Person and the pictur'd Shape" (353). Inscribed in the
first volume are the words, "Job, Chapt. 31, Vers. 35": "Behold it is my desire,
that my adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it on my shoulder
and bind it as a crown unto me." This gesture exemplifies the paradoxes of
agency that Pope's deformity enables. Pope himself had these pamphlets col-
lected and bound; the reference to Job is his own. He rewrites Job's metaphor
as a literal "beholding" of bound book and burdened body. The poet has indeed
taken his adversary's "book" on his shoulder: by fashioning a crown of heroism
out of the cruelest of attacks he authors such a book himself. His abused person
becomes the sign he proudly displays, his shoulder hunched by the weight of
injustice. The writer at the mercy of his readers' derision becomes a self-made
spectacle, inviting his audience to view the proof of his moral integrity. Pope
has "authored," one might say, both his adversary's book and the public image
that such a book documents.
In this book I read deformity as a poetics. While Pope's poetry abounds
with aberrant creatures (Thersites in his Iliad translation, the Cave of Spleen in
The Rape of the Lock, and the "jumbled Race" of the Dunces' monstrous cre-
ation come to mind), such literal monsters are not the focus of a project that
attempts to outline a monstrous methodology. Pope himself mocks and deplores
those sycophants in his Epistle to Arbuthnot:
. . . who to my Person pay their court,
I cough like Horace, and tho' lean, am short,
Amnions great Son one shoulder had too high,
Such Ovid's nose, and "Sir! you have an Eye—"
Go on, obliging Creatures, make me see
All that disgrac'd my Betters, met in me. (115-120)
I distinguish myself from such company by distinguishing Pope from his "Bet-
ters" in keeping with his own poetic project. Pope makes clear in these lines
that his person is not a simple point of comparison or "resemblance." I hope
to show that the resulting "disgrace" becomes in this poet's hands a unique
form of distinction.
viii
Preface
As this book went through many metamorphoses it incurred many debts.
At Amherst College Frederick Griffiths, David Sofield, and William H. Prit-
chard first inspired and encouraged my reading of Pope and interest in literary
imitation. At the University of California, Berkeley, John Traugott—who
brought me into the eighteenth century—William S. Anderson, Richard Fein-
gold, Steven Knapp, and Florence Verducci provided invaluable -guidance and
insight as I wrote the dissertation that contained the germ of this book. Neil
Hertz's early questions and criticisms got me started and kept me going. Lowell
Bowditch, Linda Charnes, Heather James, Ann Kibbie, William Taliaferro, and
Evelyn Tribble all read parts of the dissertation and provided both dialogue and
support. At Northwestern Larry Lipking and Nicola Watson worked with me
for years in the trenches of the eighteenth century, asked crucial questions, and
along with Martin Mueller read and critiqued early pieces of a new project
focusing exclusively on Pope, while Joseph Roach and Christopher Herbert
provided essential votes of confidence. A 1992-93 postdoctoral year at the
UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Wil-
liam Andrews Clark Memorial Library provided me with the time, leisure,
resources, and intellectual community that enabled me to write most of this
book. To the Clark Professors who brought me to UCLA that year—Anne K.
Mellor, Sara Melzer, and Kathryn Norberg, to the director of the Center, Peter
Reill, and to the librarians and staff at the Clark Memorial Library and the
Center, I will be forever grateful. Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press
had faith in the manuscript, and Alison Kent and Kate Brick saw me through
its production with unfailing competence and cheer. David B. Morris and Susan
Staves helped to give the book its final shape. Kimberly Baldus and Jennifer
Michael provided crucial help with final details. A subvention grant from the
University Research Grants Council at Northwestern allowed me to include
the illustrations. Eric Sundquist and the Department of English at UCLA be-
lieved enough in the book to make a California dream a reality. Permission has
been granted to reprint " 'The Truest Copies' and the 'Mean Original': Pope,
Deformity, and the Poetics of Self-Exposure," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, 1
(Fall 1993): 1-26, which appears in expanded form in Chapter 1.
A few friends have been so essential that they elude any narrative frame for
the book's development. Diane Furtney and Jeredith Merrin have been the
ideal readers who transformed my writing life; with them as audience I know
that the risks are worth taking. The intellectual generosity and constant friend-
ship of Eva Cherniavsky first helped me to handle an unruly group of Berkeley
undergraduates and have been indispensable ever since. I owe more than I can
IX
Preface
say to Julia Stern's brilliant reading, conversation, correspondence, open heart,
and unflagging assistance in matters emotional and practical (including the loan
of a computer at the last moment). Sharon Achinstein and Wendy Wall were
more like sisters than colleagues; along with Jules Law and Chuck Wasserburg
they were the best of friends. Deanna Kreisel made the most difficult of tran-
sitions into Thelma and Louise with a happy ending. Heidi Gilpin and Nancy
Salzer made Los Angeles feel like home, and Jayne Lewis's gift of original en-
gagement and genuine friendship began a new era for me there. Ruthanne
Deutsch, Betty Capaldi, and Frederick Deutsch always believed in me and this
book with love. The best this book brought me, and who made this book its
best, I save for last—my partner in work and life, my inspiration, Michael
Meranze.
χ
Description:Like the miniatures of which Pope was so fond, the book is at once particular in its focus and wide-ranging in its conceptual scope. While drawing on recent feminist, historicist, and materialist criticism of Pope, as well as current theoretical work on the body, it also attends closely to the local
