Lord Hervey and Pope

Abstract

ion, where heterosexuality, satiated and overrefined, merges with homosexuality, so recurrently associated with ennui, enervation, and cultural decadence. Sporus, the castrated bride of Nero, is Pope's symbol for Hervey's willful abandonment of the standards of manliness: Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss; Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord (Arbuthnot, 11. 324, 329). Pope contrasts himself: Not proud, nor servile, be one Poet's praise ,' That, if he pleas'd, he pleas'd by manly ways (11. 336-37, italics mine). Our own tolerance for sexual ambiguity, in this century enlightened by psychology, is much greater than that of Pope's age, and we may be apt to see more psychic danger than health in rigid sexual personae. There is a visionary fluidity and fullness of being in such literary creations as Spenser's Belphoebe and Britomart, Shakespeare's Rosalind and Cleopatra, Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin that may lead us to perceive the union of masculine and feminine characteristics in the psyche of the artist himself. (This androgynous theme receives dramatic embodiment in the literal sex changes of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge.) In his description of Martha Blount, Pope in fact seems to approach