The Rape of The Lock
Name:
divya parmar
Paper:
102 Literature of The Neoclassical period
Roll no: 05
Enrollment no:
4069206420210024
Email id:
divyaparmar07012@gmail.com
Batch:
2021-2023(M. A sem 1)
Submitted to:
S. B. Gardi Department of English, maharaja krishnakumarsinhji bhavnagar University.
The Rape of The Lock by Alexander pope: Summary and Themes
Introduction:
'The Rape of the Lock' written during 1712 to 1717. It is divided into 5 cantos. It is written by the great figure of English Literature Alexander pope. This poem is a mock-heroic poem. Alexander Pope's one of the important poem, The Rape of the Lock (1712), is his most original and readable work. The occasion of the poem was that a fop stole a lock of hair from a young lady, and the theft plunged two families into a quarrel which was taken up by the fashionable set of London. Pope made a mock-heroic poem on the subject, in which he satirised the fads and fashions of Queen Anne's age. Ordinarily Pope's fancy is of small range, and proceeds jerkily, like the flight of a woodpecker, from couplet to couplet; but here he attempts to soar like the eagle.
He introduces dainty aerial creatures, gnomes, sprites, sylphs to combat for the belles and fops in their trivial concerns: and herein we see a clever burlesque of the old epic poems, in which gods or goddesses entered into the serious affairs of mortal. The craftsmanship of the poem is above praise; it is not only a neatly pointed satire on eighteenth-century fashions but is one of the most graceful works in English verse.
Summary and Analysis:
The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem (in five cantos published in 1714) of great power. Here Pope satirises the trivial matter of snipping a lock of hair from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor by Lord Petre in a grand heroic style.
The society darling Belinda wakes at noon and after an elaborate toilet sails up the Thames to Hampton Court. Belinda flirts with all the gentlemen aboard ship and plays the fashionable game of ombre. As Belinda pours coffee, the baron from behind cuts off a lock of the hair. Belinda cries and the ladies decide to take stem measures against the men. Tossing snuff at the Baron's nose, Belinda causes him to sneeze. At the point of a hair pin he is ordered to return the lock.
Dr. Johnson called the poem "the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions". Pope satirises the fashions and follies of the society. The didactic success of the poem is achieved by the big gap between the silliness of the episode and the deadly seriousness with which its participants regard it. The mock heroic style brings the whole quarrel into absurdity. The delicate manner and gay wit are its principal charms.
Pope imitates the maximum elements of epic poetry - its invocation, games, battle, journey similes and descriptions and supernatural machinery sylphs and gnomes. The contrast between the grand style and the silly matter produces irony. The sylphs and gnomes give the delicacy to the poem. Indeed, the satire is full of delicate fancy and humour. Here the imaginative fervour of Pope is in evidence in his nature-descriptions
An excellent supplement to The Rape of the Lock, which pictures the superficial elegance of the age, is An Essay on Man, which reflects its philosophy. That philosophy under the general name of Deism, had fancied to abolish the Church and all revealed religion, and had set up a new-old standard of natural faith and morals.
Of this philosophy Pope had small knowledge; but he was well acquainted with the discredited Bolingbroke, his "guide, philosopher and friend," who was a fluent exponent of the new doctrine, and from Boling broke came the general scheme of the Essay on Man. The poem appears in the form of four epistles, dealing with man's place in the universe, with his moral nature, with social and political ethics, and with the problem of happiness. These were discussed from a common-sense viewpoint, and with feet always on solid earth. As Pope declares:
Know then thyself, presume not God nto scan; The proper study of mankind is man.... Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest and riddle of the world.
Pope's most famous poem is The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, with a revised version published in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirises a high-society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the "Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her permission. The satirical style is tempered, however, by a genuine and almost voyeuristic interest in the "beau-monde" (fashionable world) of 18th-century English society.
Throughout the poem these two doctrines of Deism are kept in sight: that there is a God, a Mystery, who dwells apart from the world; and that man ought to be contented, even happy, in his ignorance of matters beyond his horizon: "All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear: whatever is, is right."
The result is rubbish, so far as philosophy is concerned, but in the heap of incongruous statements which Pope brings together are a large number of quotable lines, such as: "Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honour lies."
It is because of such lines, the care with which the whole poem is polished, and the occasional appearance of real beauty (such as the passage beginning, "Lo, the poor Indian") that the Essay on Man occupies such a high place in eighteenth- century literature.
It is hardly necessary to examine other works of Pope, since the poems already named give us the full measure of his strength and weakness. His talent is to formulate rules of poetry, to ist fashionable society, to make brilliant epigrams in faultless couplets. His failure to move or even to interest us greatly is due to his second-hand philosophy, his inability to feel or express emotion, his artificial life apart from nature and humanity. When we read Chaucer or Shakespeare, we have the impression that they would have been at home in any age or place, since they deal with human interests that are the same yesterday, to-day and forever; but we can hardly imagine Pope feeling at ease anywhere save in his own set and in his own generation. He is the poet of one period, which set great store by formality, and in that period alone he is supreme.
Themes of The Rape of the Lock :
In this mock heroic poem ALEXANDER POPE Satire on so many things like religion, class difference, society etc. In this poem we can see the theme of beauty, religion and morality, femininity, pride, love, pursuit, morality of the upper class etc.
1. Beauty:
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” offers an ironic glance of court life in the 18th-century, highlighting societies centralized on beauty and appearance. The poem’s center of focus is around the experience of a beautiful woman, Belinda, who lost her lock of remarkable hair to a nobleman known as the Baron. As the poem starts to go along, it steadily becomes sillier and sillier and the characters collapse into a battle over the lock. Pope’s added Clarissa’s speech into the poem, which argues that women spend much time on their looks rather than thinking to become a better person and serve society. The main thesis of Pope was that this kind of self-obsession is useless and radically nonsense. However, the poem’s conclusion seems to suggest that true beauty would be of some value, but if it becomes the subject of poetry, thus it achieves a kind of literary immortality.
Pope mocks Belinda’s obsession with her beauty by comparing it with a hero which is about to go into battle. She beautifies herself all day and appears at court as insignificant. When she lost the lock of her hair, her furious reaction allowed Pope to poke fun at her vanity. Alexander Pope kept defending the intellectual and moral authority of his female characters through the wisdom of Clarissa’s speech, demonstrating female intellect and morality. He further questioned the wisdom of such a maternal system by outlining the Baron’s behavior as immoral. His fellow male courtiers are foolish. They allowed him to suggest that a maternal society is both unfair and unfounded.
It is important to note that at the time the Pope wrote the poem it was generally believed that women were both intellectual and moral inferiors of men. The Pope seems to say that vanity itself is folly, but to appreciate great art, thus it can be said that one should be careful not to underestimate the role of beauty in inspiring great works like poetry. By using a mock epic into the poem, he not only glamped up the whole scenario by giving it huge fairy dust powder, but also entertained the question of responsibility in the poem.
2. Religion and Morality:
Religion and morality is also also on of the major themes in Rape of the Lock. Pope’s poem is full of moral questions about religious culture and life in the 18th-century. The time when the poem was written, England’s last Catholic monarch had been deposed. England, once again, became a Protestant Nation. At that time, Protestant bitterly criticised Catholics, believing that Catholics had strayed from the worship of God. Pope was from a Catholic family. Throughout the poem, it is possible to detect humorous evaluation of Protestantism. Protestants made life very difficult for Catholic families to own a land or live in London. Pope parodies the hypocritical religious rhetoric of that time and suggests that Christianity is not the best lens. It cannot be used to understand the mysteries of human behaviour and self-obsession.
This has profound significance for the Pope's treatment of Christianity. At the heart of Christianity is that people are in control of their wills and actions, but God will judge people accordingly.
The Pope shows his ideology that the whole Christian religion, Catholic or Protestant, follows human actions. These actions are mysterious and their motives are opaque. Because of this, it is absurd to believe that anyone could be straightforwardly judged.
3. Theme of Immorality and Carefree Nature of Upper Class:
Pope has presented that in a matter of times the careless and casual response of high society is dangerous. He presented the society where the upper class is busy in pursuit of their own goals through trivial and vain. He portrayed that upper class people just think about themselves and obsessions. In this poem, the society displayed is one that fails to distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. What they care about is their personal life, luxuries, pomp, vanity. A life that is matchless to the ordinary and the common. He makes fun of their stupid deeds and self-obsessed attentions. He has disguised that this society just leads to immorality and distraction between humans. Alas, in the end, all upper-class people stay empty-handed.
It is serious that a woman’s hair is cut but she has rejected a lord and such crimes are frivolities and fun of life in ease of nobility.
4. Female Desire and Passion:
Pope has made fun of women; they just think and are concerned about their beauty aids alone. He presents Belinda like an epic heroine. He symbolises that this mock-heroic epic is Belinda’s maidenhood. The Pope says that women do not have a fair chance because they are even more self-conscious and limited by society’s rules and regulations than men are. Clarissa’s speech is a fine example of this attitude and also deals with the situation ideally with a smile rather than doing anything to change it. Women, in the poem, are illustrated as being more in control of society than men are.
It is obvious to us that if you put a bunch of attractive, well-off, and bored young men and women together. They will get attracted to one another, feel desire for one another, have dreams about one another; maybe they even fell in love. Pope depicts in The Rape of the Lock the trouble with the society is absolutely threatening and no way for anyone in it to safely express or act on his or her sexuality, desire, lust, life, feelings or love.
5. Theme of Love in Rape of the Lock:
The Pope thinks that love has no importance for the characters in this poem. For the Alexander Pope, the upper class believes only in victory and defeat. Love has no value in their unthinking minds. Belinda meets with a smile but yields and bow down to none. The poem has also symbolised Belinda’s character as a strong modern woman, who loves her beauty more than anything else. Baron loved to have an affair but without feelings and pure attention, it would be considered a victory. The society portrayed in The Rape of the Lock seems constructed to deny each other’s real feelings. For them, live-in relationships were common, but love in those relationships was counted as something odd.
6. Theme of Pride in Rape of the Lock:
Pride is also one of the major themes in the Rape of the Lock. We can say that the pride of a woman is natural to her, never sleeps, until modesty is gone. Beauty can be without pride and our dear Belinda handles it best of all. She takes care that no one would go without looking at her with a full glance. Baron decides to take revenge on Belinda by stripping her beloved lock of hair. Baron tried to get Belinda by force but not by marrying her, he tried to win over her but failed. Belinda's pride, self-respect and beauty were more important for her than anything else.
The Rape of the Lock, reveals that the central concerns of the poem is pride, at least for women like Belinda and other social ones found in that society. The Pope wants us to recognize that if Belinda has shown all her typical female weakness, then that would be against her pride, partly it is because she has been educated and trained to act in this way. The society as a whole community is as much to blame as she is or the men free from this judgement.
Conclusion:
Thus to conclude we can say that mock heroic epic by Alexander pope is very well satire on society. The characters of the poem makes clear satire. The theme of beauty, religion and morality, femininity, pride and love etc. portray very well in this poem by Alexander pope.
Word count : 2505 words
Resources :
https://literaryenglish.com/major-themes-in-the-rape-of-the-lock/
https://www.englishliterature.info/2021/03/the-rape-of-lock-summary-analysis.html
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