The Castration of Eloisa in Popes Eloisa to Abelard :: Pope Eloisa to Abelard Essays

The Castration of Eloisa in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard If Pope's intent in writing an Ovidian heroic epistle is to show the entire range of his protagonist's emotions from meekness to violent passion, then he was wise to choose the twelfth-century story of Eloisa and Abelard as his subject. Eloisa and her teacher Abelard retired to different monasteries after her family discovered they were lovers and brutally castrated him. Years later, Eloisa by chance intercepted a letter from Abelard to a friend chronicling their love affair. The letter reawakened Eloisa's long repressed passion for Abelard, and she struggles to reconcile her sexual passion with her religious vows. As she has taken a vow of silence, the only mode of expression left to Eloisa is her emotion, which she often expresses by weeping. She tells Abelard in her mind: Tears still are mine, and those I need not spare, Love but demands what else were shed in pray'r; No happier task these faded eyes pursue, To read and weep is all they now can do. (lines 45-48) Eloisa thus lives in her mind, communicating mentally with God and now her former lover Abelard alternately. Pope's poem is his idea of what Eloisa would write to Abelard in a letter, albeit a letter whose writing would have spanned several years until her death. In his seminal 1969 article "The Escape from Body or the Embrace of Body," Murray Krieger states that "the poem represents at once a finished letter and a letter that, apparently finished, is actually in the stormy process of being written" (34). The richness of Pope's language juxtaposed with the rigidity of his couplet form have suggested to critics both the depth of Eloisa's emotion and the restraints placed on her by the Church and her vows. This juxtaposition has troubled some critics (including Krieger) as a mismatch. These critics argue that a writer in Eloisa's emotional state would produce writing that is much less polished and constrained than Pope's perfect couplets. In fact, that Pope records Eloisa's emotional l anguage in the confining couplet verse structure is precisely what Krieger calls the poem's failure. I propose that Pope intended Eloisa's emotional outbursts to strain against his own exacting poetic form. I believe Pope constricts Eloisa's florid language within the couplet in order to emphasize the severity of the imprisonment she suffers in the monastery. Further, I would argue that Eloisa's imprisonment in a monastery, combined with the vow of silence and marriage to the Church required of her as part of her religious confinement, is a symbolic act of