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

The castration of Eloisa in Popes Eloisa to AbelardIf Popes intent in writing an Ovidian heroic epistle is to show the integral range of his protagonists emotions from meekness to violent passion, then he was wise to hold 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 devotees and brutally castrated him. Years later, Eloisa by chance intercepted a earn from Abelard to a friend chronicling their love affair. The letter reawakened Eloisas long repressed passion for Abelard, and she struggles to give up her sexual passion with her religious profane swearings. As she has taken a vow of still, the only mode of expression left to Eloisa is her emotion, which she often expresses by weeping. She tells Abelard in her mindTears still are mine, and those I need not spare,Love but demands what else were shed in prayrNo happier task these attenuate eyes pursue,To read a nd weep is all they now can do. (lines 45-48)Eloisa then lives in her mind, communicating mentally with God and now her former lover Abelard alternately. Popes 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 expression 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 really in the stormy process of being written (34). The richness of Popes address juxtaposed with the rigidity of his straddle form have suggested to critics both the perspicaciousness of Eloisas emotion and the restraints placed on her by the Church and her vows. This juxtaposition has roiling some critics (including Krieger) as a mismatch. These critics argue that a writer in Eloisas emotional state would produce writing that is much less sylphlike and constrained than Popes perfec t couplets. In fact, that Pope records Eloisas emotional language in the confining couplet verse structure is precisely what Krieger calls the poems failure. I appoint that Pope intended Eloisas emotional outbursts to strain against his own exacting poetic form. I believe Pope constricts Eloisas florid language within the couplet in order to emphasize the severity of the imprisonment she suffers in the monastery. Further, I would argue that Eloisas 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