SOURCE: “Assumptions and Ironies,” in Women's Place in Pope's World, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 1-24.

In the following essay, Rumbold investigates post-Restoration cultural attitudes about women and gender in light of Pope's religious and political sympathies as well as his physical infirmities, suggesting implications for both his career and poetry.

1

Although the few celebrated poems in which Pope sets women in the limelight provide the natural focus for any attempt to understand his attitude to the sex, it is important to remember that the vast bulk of his output is concerned only tangentially with issues of gender. In effect, he can write at length about the human race as if it were entirely masculine. Furthermore, when his attention is not specifically drawn to some female friend or heroine, his casual references to women frequently relapse into dismissive commonplace.

This was a period in which women of the middle...