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Melancholy as Despair: Pope's Eloisa to Abelard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

John F. Sena
John F. Sena
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Eloisa, the medieval nun torn between “grace and nature” in Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, has proved to be one of the poet's most fascinating and popular female creations among religious scholars as well as literary critics. Yet there appears in Pope's masterpiece another female figure who has been largely ignored and whose nature and function in the poem have never been accurately described. In the midst of Eloisa's spiritual and emotional conflict between her carnal memories of Abelard and her religious obligations as a nun, she imagines that she sees sitting in front of her the figure of “Black Melancholy,” a woman spreading spiritual gloom over the entire scene:

But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves,

Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves,

Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws

A death-like silence, and a dread repose;

Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,

Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green,

Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,

And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , October 1983 , pp. 443 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1983

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References

1 Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, in the Twickenham Edition of The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems (ed. Tillotson, Geoffrey; 3d ed.; London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University, 1962) 11. 163–70. All quotations from Eloisa to Abelard are taken from this edition and will be cited in the text by line reference.Google Scholar

2 For informative discussions of Eloisa's struggle—although not of the significance of “Black Melancholy”—see Henry Pettit, “Pope's Eloisa to Abelard: An Interpretation” (University of Colorado Studies: Series in Language and Literature 4, 1953) 67–74; Hehir, Brendan P. O., “Virtue and Passion: The Dialectic of Eloisa to Abelard” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 2 (1960) 219–32Google Scholar; Robert Kalmey, “Pope's Eloisa to Abelard and ‘Those Celebrated Letters,‘” Philological Quarterly 47 (1968) 164–78; Krieger, Murray, “‘Eloisa to Abelard‘: The Escape from Body or the Embrace of Body,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1969) 28–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morris, David, “‘The Visionary Maid’: Tragic Passion and Redemptive Sympathy in Pope's ‘Eloisa to Abelard,’” Modern Language Quarterly 34 (1973) 247–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Hagstrum, Jean, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958) 219.Google Scholar

4 For a recent statement of this function of “Black Melancholy,” see James A. Winn, “Pope Plays the Rake: His Letters to Ladies and the Making of the Eloisa,” in Erskine-Hill, Howard and Smith, Anne, eds., The Art of Alexander Pope (London: Vision, 1979) 108.Google Scholar

5 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 219.

6 Bruckmann, Patricia, “Religious Hope and Resignation: The Process of ‘Eloisa to Abelard,’” English Studies in Canada 3 (1977) 15.Google Scholar

7 Panofsky, Erwin, Klibansky, Raymond, and Saxl, Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964) 345.Google Scholar

8 Scholarship on the concept of accidie in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is plentiful. For the most comprehensive and informative discussions, see: Bloomfield, Morton, The Seven Deadly Sins (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1952)Google Scholar; Wenzel, Siegfried, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1960)Google Scholar; Kuhn, Reinhard, The Demon of Noontide (Princeton' Princeton University, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. All these works contain lengthy bibliographies.

9 Among the “proliferation of names for this single concept,” Kuhn lists: tristitia, siccitas, desidia, pigritia, otium, tepiditas, mollitia, somnolentia, dilatio, larditas, negligentia, remissio, dissolutio, penuria, and incuria (Demon of Noontide, 39–40).

10 John Cassian De coenobiorum institutia, in Waddell, Helen, trans., The Desert Fathers (New York: Henry Holt, 1936) 221–22.Google Scholar

11 David of Augsbury, Formula novitiorum, in Marguerin de La Bigne, Maxima bibliotheca veterum patrum el antiquorum scriptorum ecclesiastkorum (Lyon, 1677) 13. 438.

12 For informative discussions of the concept of melancholy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see Panofsky, , Saturn and Melancholy, and Lawrence Babb, The English Malady (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1951).Google Scholar

13 De coenobiorum institutia 10. 2 (Waddell, Desert Fathers, 221–22).

14 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. Holbrook Jackson; London: Dent, 1932) 1. 390.Google Scholar

15 The Kalendar and Compost of Shepherds (1493) (ed. Heselline, George G.; London: P. Davis, 1930) 141.Google Scholar

16 Claude Dariot, A Briefe and Most Easie Introduction to the Astrologicall Judgement of the Starres (trans. F. W.; London, 1598) sig. D2. The Latin original was published in 1557; the author was a French physician. The relationship between Saturn and melancholies is ably epitomized by Babb in Elizabethan Malady. “Saturnine men are melancholy; melancholy men are Saturnine” (57). See also, Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 191–94, and Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy, 185.

17 See: Wenzel, Sin of Sloth, 17; Bloomfield, Morton, “The Origin of the Concept of the Seven Cardinal Sins,” HTR 34 (1941) 121–28, esp. 126 n. 26; idem, Seven Deadly Sins, 49, 223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Parson's Tale, in Robinson, F. N., ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (2d ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957) 249–51.Google Scholar

19 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 1. 4.39–40, in Padelford, Frederick M., ed., The Works of Edmund Spenser (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1932).Google Scholar

20 A photograph of this woodcut may be found in Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy, PI. 92.

21 Photographs of this and other windows from the Church of Etienne may be found in Lutz, Jules and Perdrizet, P., vol. 2 Speculum Humanae Salvationis (Mulhausen: Meiniger, 1909).Google Scholar

22 A photograph of this woodcut may be found in Panofsky, Saturn and Melancholy, PI. 89b.

23 A photograph of this illustration appears in Richard Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting (New York: New York University, 1957) vol. 7, section iii, PI. Ig.Google Scholar

24 “The Visionary Maid,” 259: “she (Eloisa) is intelligent and Belinda is not” (Bruckmann, “Religious Hope and Resignation,” 155).

25 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 3. 392.

26 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica pt. II-II, q. 20, art. 4 (trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province; New York: Benziger, 1947).Google Scholar

27 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 3. 395.

28 Cassian De coenobiorum institutia 10. 2 (Waddell, Desert Fathers, 222).

29 Ibid. (Waddell, Desert Fathers, 221).

30 Ibid. (Waddell, Desert Fathers, 221–22).

31 The episode of the “blameless Vestal” occurs in lines 207–22.

32 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 3. 343.

33 Ibid.

34 Laurentius, Andreas, A Discourse on the Preservation of the Sight: of Melancholike Diseases; or Rheumes, and of Old Age (1599) (Shakespeare Association Facsimiles 15; Oxford: Oxford University, 1938) 100.Google Scholar

35 “And, as I followed it to its climax and beyond, to the final acceptance in its falling action, I recognized the inadequacy of its one-sided resolution to account for all that has been going on in Eloisa's mind and in her language” (Krieger, “‘;Eloisa to Abelard,’;” 46).

36 “Besides the necessity of actual grace, its absolute gratuity stands out as the second fundamental question in the Christian doctrine on this subject. The very name of grace excludes the notion of merit” (The Catholic Encyclopedia [New York: Appleton, 1909] 6. 698). For an informative discussion of this concept, see the entry “Grace.”Google Scholar

37 “Evagrius, like so many others, believed that each sin has as its counterpart a virtue that manifests itself as soon as the corresponding vice has been eliminated. … The most dramatic substitution of this sort occurs when the monk succeeds in expelling acedia, which is automatically replaced by the highest of all virtues, namely, joy. … It is in this state of joy that the highest mystical experience, the encounter with God, becomes attainable” (Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide, 44).

38 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, 219.