ABSTRACT
Alexander Pope's poem “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717) is set at the moment that the titular heroine, immured in a cloister, intercepts a letter that her erstwhile lover had written to a friend detailing the “history of his misfortune.” 1 Pope defined himself from early in his career onwards as the upholder of good taste and propriety, rejecting in his programmatic “Essay on Criticism” (1711) expressions of “vile obscenity” that he connected with the reigns of William of Orange and Charles II (when “love was all an easy monarch's care”) and presumably with the plays of Wycherley and other Restoration playwrights, the poetry of the Earl of Rochester and his libertine coterie, as well as the sort of doggerel that he associated with print and the lapse of the Licensing of the Press Act in 1695 (lines 530, 536). Still, given the historical Abelard's fate—castrated at the behest of his beloved's caretaker and uncle, Cardinal Fulbert—it was doubtless difficult for Pope to avoid conjuring images that bordered on the indecorous. When the heroine recalls the act that doomed her to a life of imperfect enjoyment, we read: “Alas how changed! what sudden horrors rise! / A naked lover bound and bleeding dies!” (lines 99–100). Here Pope sidesteps any anatomical specificity, although the reader can easily enough fill in the blanks. But beyond the invocation of this central traumatic event, what is perhaps more surprising about this relatively short, early-career poem is how openly and evocatively it deals with the topic of female sexuality throughout. A lugubrious but deeply voluptuous meditation on thwarted desire, the poem includes descriptions of female orgasm where the euphemistic tropes familiar to readers of William Shakespeare, John Donne, and other seventeenth-century poets are not avoided but embraced and lovingly extended. Thus, when Eloisa compares her sinful urges to those of a “blameless vestal”—who plays the role of her imagined and fortunate counterpart in the poem—we are clearly intended to read the solitary ecstatic experience as innocent because it is unconscious and not because of its actual content: Desires composed, affections ever even; Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to heaven. Grace shines around her with serenest beams, And whispering angels prompt her golden dreams. .………………………………………. For her the spouse prepares the bridal ring, For her white virgins hymeneals sing; To sounds of heavenly harps she dies away, And melts in visions of eternal day. (lines 213–222)
