Name::- Sneha Agravat
Batch:- 2020-22(MA sem 1)
Paper 2:-The literature of Neo-classical period
Topic:- Rape of the lock - as a darker mirror
Roll no.:-17
Enrollment no.:-3069206420200001
E-mail Id :- snehaagravat2000@gmail.com
Submitted to:- S.B.Gardi Department Of English Maharaja krishnkumarsinhji Bhavngar University
Rape of the lock - as a darker mirror
Introduction:-
Perhaps no other great poet in English Literature has been so differently judged at different times as Alexander Pope. Accepted almost on his first appearance as one of the leading poets of the day, he rapidly became recognized as the foremost man of letters of his age. He held this position throughout his life, and for over half a century after his death his works were considered not only as masterpieces, but as the finest models of poetry. With the change of poetic temper that occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century Pope's fame was overshadowed. The romantic poets and critics even raised the question whether Pope was a poet at all. And as his poetical fame diminished, the harsh judgments of his personal character increased. It is almost incredible with what exulting bitterness critics and editors of Pope have tracked out and exposed his petty intrigues, exaggerated his delinquencies, misrepresented his actions, attempted in short to blast his character as a man.
About Alexander Pope:-
Alexander Pope is seen as one of the greatest English poets and the foremost poet of the early 18th century. He is best known for satirical and discursive poetry, including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translation of Homer.
BORN:-May 21, 1688
Died:-May 30, 1744 (aged 56)
His best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.
Here we will talk about his Notable work Rape of The lock.
Brief summary of poem:-
The poem is a mock-epic that satirizes the upper-class in London at the time. The story focuses on the central character, Belinda, whose lock of hair is cut off at a social gathering. Although trivial to most, Belinda is outraged that her lock of hair has been cut by the Baron.
Pope started something that resulted in a piece of literature that has remained to this day a leading example of the mock epic satire. John Caryll, a good friend to Pope, asked him to write a little poem about the affair in order to help heal the wounds of the two families. The poem became a trivial story of the stolen lock of hair as a vehicle for making some thoroughly mature and sophisticated comments on society and humankind. Pope draws on his own experience in the classics in combining epic literary conventions with his own wit and sense of values. The entire poem is written in five cantos, making use of the popular rhymed iambic pentameter verse, along with balance, antithesis, bathos, and paranomasia.
The poem is a mock epic because it uses the epic form, a genre meant for serious subjects, such as the Trojan war in Homer's Iliad, and applies it to such a trivial issue as the loss of a lock of hair. The humor comes in the grandiose and overblown way this hair theft is described, complete with lamentations, exclamations, and the lock of hair ascending to the moon at the end of the poem. Pope populated his mock-epic world with sylphs and made as much of Belinda's petticoat as Homer did of Achilles's shield.
Pope wanted to use humor to heal an argument but also to show that the aristocrats and leaders of his day lacked the heroism of figures from classical literature. By poking gentle fun at them, he hoped to inspire them to worry about more important subjects than card-playing, hair, and flirtations.
Let's see this poem as a darker mirror:-
One of famous author Andrew Macdonald-Brown shows how Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock progresses from satirising the foolishness of wealthy young women to exposing the violence that results from unequal power relations, whether between men and women, rich and poor or imperial powers and colonised nations. He describe Rape of the lock as a darker mirror.
He used themes to evaluate his article:-
1)Gender and sexuality:-
Examine representations of gender and sexuality in Restoration and 18th-century literature including Paradise Lost and The Rape of the Lock, and explore the works of early women writers such as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney and Margaret Cavendish.
2)Satire and humour
Discover how writers of the 17th and 18th centuries used satire and humour to address issues around politics and power, inequality and class, gender and marriage – as well as to entertain readers and audiences.
Alexander Pope very significantly represent the 18th century through this poem. This poem also represents darker mirror theme. Let's see in deeply.
A few young Ladies:-
In his dedicatory letter to Arabella Fermor, prefacing the 1714 edition of The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope claims that his poem ‘was intended only to divert a few young Ladies, who have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their sex’s little unguarded follies, but at their own’.
Most of Pope’s mockery in the poem is indeed directed at women, or, more specifically, at ‘Belles’: privileged young women of Augustan high society. Through Belinda, the poem’s beautiful heroine-victim, Pope relentlessly satirises an array of stereotypical ‘Female Errors’, most obviously triviality and vanity. Whether his text presents these as uniquely ‘female’, or even makes the Belles particularly culpable for them, is another matter.
Belinda resembles you in nothing but in Beauty:-
Later in his preface, Pope plays on the vanity of his dedicatee, Miss Arabella Fermor, admitting that he must have ‘some regard for this piece, since I dedicate it to You’, and assuring her that ‘the character of Belinda resembles you in nothing but in Beauty’.
Pope’s tiptoeing is understandable, for Arabella was the victim of the real-life ‘rape’ which had inspired the poem’s first, two-canto version (1712): at a party, one Lord Petre had snipped a lock of hair from her unsuspecting head. In turning Arabella’s ‘trivial’ misfortune into ‘heroi-comical’ verse, the risk of adding insult to the lady’s injury was high.
Slight is the subject, but not so the praise:-
Female triviality and vanity soon make their appearance in the poem. While Belinda sleeps in her bed at noon, Ariel, her guardian sylph, addresses her in a dream as ‘Fairest of mortals’ (Canto 1, l. 26), and urges: ‘thy own importance know’ (l. 34). Ariel’s flattery reflects the adoring gaze of Belinda’s social circle (‘ev’ry Eye was fix’d on her alone.
Pope’s elaborate description of Belinda’s dressing table ritual is part mock-religious (her maid Betty, ‘th’inferior Priestess’ (l. 135), performs ‘the sacred rites of Pride’ (l.136)) and part close parody of Achilles’s arming scene in Homer’s Iliad: ‘Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms’ (l. 147). The mock-epic feature, by inviting comparison between vain, trivial Belinda and the mighty epic hero, makes her ridiculous.
What guards the purity of melting maids?
But there is more to the arming scene than Homeric parody and mockery of Belinda’s vanity. For one thing, Pope’s text is itself so in thrall to her beauty that our eyes too ‘are fix’d on her alone’. The poem repeatedly celebrates and enacts beauty’s ‘awful’ power.
Pope also shows how Belinda’s vanity is the product of a society which obsessively prized, flattered and fetishised female beauty – of young women of Belinda’s class, in particular.
Jolly though that all sounds, Ariel portrays the Belle’s position as perilous: constantly on display, she must both attract and repel the attentions of competing, predatory ‘Beaux’; to encourage suitors, with blushing and eye-rolling and fluttering of her fan, but never to lose her ‘purity’. On the other hand, rejecting suitors too proudly could see her branded a ‘Prude’. And as Belinda’s friend Clarissa, warns later in the poem: ‘She who scorns a Man, must die a Maid’ (Canto 5, l. 28).
But however well a Belle behaves, her ‘Honour’ is still vulnerable in a society where ‘At ev’ry Word a Reputation dies’ (Canto 3, 16). In this context, the ‘arming’ metaphor of Belinda’s dressing table ritual seems rather apt: to win a husband and preserve her honour, a Belle had to be a kind of warrior.
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw
Equally apt, given their commodification in the marriage market, is the parallel Pope repeatedly draws between women and precious ornaments. Aware that ‘some dire Disaster’ (Canto 2, l. 103) has been foretold for Belinda, Ariel wonders ‘Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, / Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw. / Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade…’ (ll. 105–107).
The juxtaposing of serious and trivial disasters suggests a society which has lost its sense of perspective. But how exactly? ‘break Diana’s Law’ is a self-consciously pompous euphemism for ‘lose her virginity’. Is Pope mocking his society’s obsessive prizing of (female) virginity?
‘The various off’rings of the world appear’
In juxtaposing virginity and honour with china jars and brocade, Pope may also be commenting on the rampant materialism of his age. Luxury items crowd the text’s glittering social world: the ladies’ silk dresses, fans and jewellery; the gentlemen’s canes, snuff boxes and crystal rings. Carriages are ‘gilded’, and the Baron’s ‘French Romances’, which he burns on Love’s altar, are ‘neatly gilt’. The serving of coffee at Hampton Court is described in fetishistic detail.
Such conspicuous consumption was enjoying a spectacular boom in 18th-century Britain. Encouraged by the government’s mercantile imperialist policy, the East India Company and other traders poured exotic cargo into London, where it was eagerly bought up by the nation’s wealthy elite.
The Cave of Spleen:-
That darker mirror comes to the surface in the Cave of Spleen.
Here the gnome Umbriel seeks remedy for Belinda’s loss from the subterranean Queen of Spleen. the word spleen, in Pope’s time, was a catch-all term for many mysterious ailments, including anxiety, depression and hysteria. Fainting, headaches, nausea – all could be attributed to the ‘vapours’ supposedly sent up to the brain by spleen. It could afflict either sex, but was predominantly associated with women.
Fans clap, Silks russle, and tough Whalebones crack:-
So Belinda, her rage unsalved by the balm of sweet reason, flies to arms against the rapacious Baron and the whole tribe of men. Female ‘good Sense’ and ‘good Humour’ are buried in the decorum-trashing glee of riot:
crack’ (Canto 5, l. 40.). (Hear the damage done there to the gentle iambic pentameter: sound perfectly echoing sense.)
In the climactic battle of the sexes (Canto 5), the ladies win. Belinda looms over the vanquished Baron: ‘Restore the Lock! she cries; and all around / Restore the Lock! the vaulted Roofs rebound’. One could read the moment as one more mock-epic joke at women’s expense. But Pope’s purpose has consistently been more complex and generous than that. Enjoy instead Belinda in all her hard-won glory; not enfeebled by spleen or diminished by mockery or set straight by moralising, but righteous and triumphant. For all her triviality, Belinda transcends objectification. She alone in the poem has an inner-life, harbouring ‘secret passions’ (secret even from herself, perhaps). And she alone suffers and acts heroically.
Conclusion:-
The crux of the above discussion is that Alexander Pope has portrayed a complete picture of the aristocratic society of the eighteen century. “The Rape of the Lock” is just not a mock epic but is a historical poem; it reveals the attitude of a young generation of the eighteenth century. Pope has also demonstrated the attitude of judges and government officials towards their duties. The easy flow of money made the life of many people easier. The primary purpose of the poem may have something else but its secondary purpose is to deal with London life. “The Rape of The Lock” is a mirror to the eighteenth century aristocratic society as it brings to light the idiosyncrasies of a class of aristocrats in the Eighteenth-century aristocratic English society.
References:-
1) Brown-MacDonald Andrew, 2018, www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/the-rape-of-the-lock-a-darker-mirror.
2)Butt Everett John, 1995, www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Pope-English-author
Word count:-2061
3)Pope, Alexander. "The Rape of the Lock" – via Wikisource.
Word count:- 2105
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