SOURCE: “Violence and Representation in Windsor-Forest,” in A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope, Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 67-85.

In the following essay, Knellwolf investigates the myth of artistic origins in Windsor-Forest in relation to contemporary conventional thought on femininity and aesthetics, highlighting the fundamental value of violent themes in art.

Although it appears to be a simple youthful exercise in the pastoral genre, and a panegyric of patriotic sentiments at that, Windsor-Forest is a challenging attempt to show the embeddedness of theories of power and violence in the eighteenth-century imagination. Since Pope was still at an early stage of his career and unflinchingly bent on questioning the foundations of the culture and society of his time, self-consciousness is, not surprisingly, a central feature of the poem. The symbolic origin of art coincides with a moment of self-consciousness which is simultaneously the consequence...