SOURCE: “Pope and the Figure of the Silenced Woman,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 304, 1992, pp. 775-79.

In the following essay, Stephanson considers Pope's identification with the female voices of Eloisa to Abelard, “On the statue of Cleopatra,” and Sapho to Phaon as an artistic strategy designed to represent his insecurities about women and his own sexuality.

The figure of the silenced woman occurs often in Pope's early works. Particularly complex is Pope's impersonation of a woman whose ‘speaking’ or whose speech is paradoxically about female silence. Three of his early female impersonations—Sapho to Phaon (1707),‘On the statue of Cleopatra, made into a fountain by Leo the Tenth’ (1710), Eloisa to Abelard (1716)—have received relatively limited attention. I want to suggest that Pope's imagining himself as female is a strategy or a symbolic drama—perhaps not always fully concscious—by which he can both represent...