ABSTRACT
One of the earliest of the still relatively few pieces of feminist work on the period bears the telling title 'The female monster in Augustan satire'. If feminism has - until very recently - left Augustan satire alone, it is partly no doubt because it can expect few rewards from an area which offers more obvious scope for recrimination than for critical insight. It is hardly accidental that Augustanism, coloured as it is by the ethos of a like-minded coterie. But despite that real need to free readings from the pall of misogyny, there are acute problems for feminism in these uncongenial waters. Feminism thus fits neatly if anachronistically into Pope's account of critical malpractice in the Essay on Criticism. Language and structure enable various utterly 'respectable' readings of the poem - Christian, proto-Freudian, straightforwardly didactic. A feminist reading would want to resist the hermeneutic move to write out the issue of gender from the poem.
