포프의 시골지주저택시 연구—「배서스트에게 부치는 서한시」

Abstract

This essay examines Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst as a country house poem. The country house poetry genre, which starts with Ben Jonson’s To Penshurst, emphasizes the bounty and hospitality of the landlord of the country house. The background of Epistle to Bathurst is the South Sea Bubble, which represents the developments of the new economic system with speculation replacing land. Pope thinks that the new monied order is corrupting the English people. Here he presents the country house ideal as an alternative, which is the hospitality and bounty of the landlord. In this sense, the poem belongs to the country house genre. Country house poetry considers the country house as an embodiment of the Golden Age. In that depiction, country house poetry functions in three ways. First, it serves a unifying social function. Second, it has the pedagogical function of praising the hospitality and bounty of the landlord. Third, it functions as a social critique using the standard of the country house ideal. Pope tries to emphasize the country house ideal in the poem, because English society is preoccupied with the new economic order represented by stock-jobbers. Pope finds the country house ideal in the Man of Ross. Ross cares for his tenantry, and fulfills all of his obligations. His community represents a mutually reciprocal society, with hospitality on the part of the lord and service on the part of the farmer. On the other hand, the description of Old Cotta’s inhospitable hall gives the negative reflection of the country house ideal. The portrait of his son also disavows the ideal by describing his irresponsible prodigality. The tale of Balaam concludes the poem. It is about the career of a new money-man who enters into the financial system of stocks, and sinks deeper into monied corruption. Pope emphasizes the country house ideal represented by the Man of Ross, and opposes the new economic change by the standard of the ideal, but such exemplary figures are rare and isolated, and their isolation illuminates the economic changes they cannot deal with.