ABSTRACT
The shape of this book has been patterned, throughout, on a model of ethically-inflected, gender-informed response: whereas chapter one posited the Augustans’ satiric project as a primarily visual one, chapter two presented Montagu’s critique of this project as objectifying, and as dependent on a gaze inherently coded as “male.” Chapters three and four depicted Pope’s and Swift’s own recognition of the terms of Montagu’s critique, and outlined their consequent attempts to use poetry and print in such a way as to foster a gaze both scrutinizing and ethical; but the second intervention by Montagu that I examined, in chapter five, suggests that even these principles are, to a large extent, gendered: I showed how she therefore establishes an alternative system of right and wrong, based not legality but on equity; such equity, Montagu implies, is arrived at by examining not facts but motives, and is thus most effectively pursued not in vision-based modes of satire but rather in narrative—a literary form that was fast becoming ever-more closely associated with the novel, and, significantly, with women. In these final pages, although Montagu herself will not reappear, I nonetheless want to perform the kind of analysis that her poetry exemplifies, and to apply it to the satiric and typographic strategies described in my sixth chapter: in that chapter, I traced Pope’s “theatricalized” page-design (a practice that was itself a defiant response, of sorts, to “novelistic” uses of print); in the paragraphs that follow, I want to examine the ethical and gender-related implications of this theatricalized mode of print. Significantly, moreover, I will be suggesting that, unlike the Augustans’ earlier typographical innovations, this last one may accommodate a gender politics of which we could imagine Montagu approving.
