The Symbolic Structure of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity: Pregnant Men, Brain-Wombs, and Female Muses (with some comments on Pope's Dunciad )

Abstract

The Symbolic Structure of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity: Pregnant Men, Brain-Wombs, and Female Muses (with some comments on Pope's Dunciad) RAYMOND STEPHANSON As studies of eighteenth-century maleness become more frequent in the larger academic agenda of Enlightenment sex and gender histories , many traditional topics, themes, and contexts are undergoing interesting revision. Taking their cue from the methodological insights of feminist and gay critics in the last decade, organizers of conferences have begun to promote investigations of eighteenth-century maleness in its own right,1 and scholars (and editorial boards) have come to realize that the interrelated but separable dynamics informing the most obvious subsets of this large category—the variations of masculinities,2 male literary communities,3 homosocial politics,4 the male body,5 men's friendships6—are worthy of specific study. The results have been most promising.7 It is now increasingly difficult to find a critic who converts these historically-complex issues of eighteenth-century maleness into the older clichés about Patriarchy—that two-dimensional, unchanging, monolithic, cardboard figure which explains and encompasses all males, and is an insidious thing to be overcome intellectually. The profession of eighteenth-century studies seems now agreed that matters are considerably more complex. In this revisionist intellectual climate of Enlightenment sex and gender studies, a significant aspect of eighteenth-century maleness—the structure of male creativity—has suffered a surprising lack of new atten103 104 / STEPHANSON tion despite its historical dominance. Encoded at a casual but nonetheless deep level of cultural utterance in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a collective imaginative approach by male writers to metapoetic questions about their craft, their intimate spaces of inspiration and creativity, and their sometimes unstable position within the larger group of other men. These are the issues that interest me here, and following a brief theoretical sketch of the larger terrain of male creativity and its cultural constructions, I will look more closely at one of the better known features, making some specific suggestions about eighteenth -century male discourse in general. Any study of the symbolic structure of eighteenth-century male creativity must begin with a variety of complex questions: What were the origins and sources of the male poet's creativity as these were understood by Pope's culture? On what traditions and discourses did they depend? Through what imaginative structures were they embodied and culturally defined by Pope and his generation? How did these beliefs occupy a position within the stereotypes which governed Enlightenment sex and gender roles? How were such attitudes related to the hierarchy and degrees of maleness which then prevailed? The inner workings of imaginative impulse and the creative acts of men were certainly not new interests in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but what is striking is just how consistently male literary culture in the period 1650 to 1750 depended on a shared symbolic and metaphorical system to create a myth about its own creativity, linking itself to the historical and material realms of Enlightenment sexuality. There were other kinds of figurative linkage, of course—to politics, wealth, and land—but Pope's contemporaries frequently constructed their notions of the poetic imagination and the poet's life-long output as masculine sexual dramas. Metapoetic utterances and hints about the poetical character itself, in other words, typically inhabited a metaphorized vocabulary of male sexuality and masculinity which—one could justly claim—were the foundations upon which the symbolic codes of male creativity and male literary communities were built. As contentious as this claim might seem, it must be understood within the larger historical context of the hierarchical dynamics and power structures of male literary communities, for after all, one's status as a male poet was directly dependent on one's position within the literary milieu of other men. Indeed, one's authority within literary and critical circles was often specifically linked to "being a man" whose "manly" quaUties—whether literal or figurative—were valued by other men who themselves occupied positions of Symbolic Structure of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity I 105 influence by virtue of their own homosocial connections. Moreover, notions of literary authority were grounded on a dynamic of homocentric...