September 28, 2003

More on Pope

To add to the discussion of Pope mentioned below: I owe to him the title of this blog, as he was grinding his teeth about scribbling women long before Hawthorne made his famous comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d—ned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

Pope's infamous attack on Eliza Haywood in The Dunciad
(published in 1728 and expanded in 1744)

See in the circle next, Eliza placed,
Two babes of love close clinging
To her waist.

was supplemented by a note, in case anyone missed the point: "In this game, is expos'd in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those Shameless Scribblers (for the most part of that Sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or imprudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortune of both sexes, to the ruin or disturbance, of public fame or private happiness." Haywood is offered as the prize in a urinating competition: ‘Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky,’ (II, 15.3-5). The second prize was a chamber pot. Jonathan Swift used similar language when he wrote, "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."

Alas, I cannot claim to the be first (or even the fiftieth, I am sure) to attempt to reclaim this slur and refashion it into a badge of honour, for there is Scribbling Women, a project of the Public Media Foundation which dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast in the U.S.A.; Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (1997), a book edited by Elaine Showalter; Style and the "Scribbling Women": An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Mary P. Hiatt; Domestic Goddess, a.k.a. "scribbling mobs of women," a moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction; a proposed collection called Scribbling Women: The Form of the Short Story, 1850-present; and many individual references. Clearly I cannot claim originality, though I would point out that all these other references are without exception to American women writers via the Hawthorne quote, while I of course, as an eighteenth–centuryist and a reader of British literature, prefer to be insulted by Swift and Pope.