An analysis of a specific element in Alexander Pope's “The Rape of the Lock”

Discussion

Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock is the most famous (and most frequently anthologized or reprinted) poem of the Restoration and 18th century, the foremost example in English poetry of the mock-epic, and one of the most outstanding examples in English of satire and of the heroic couplet. Pope was 23 when he sold in 1712 the two-canto version of the poem to Lintot; especially in its expanded version two years later, it assured his reputation as a major English poet (Rogers & Pat, pp. 17-39).

The Rape of the Lock was by inception an occasional poem, though it grew far beyond its occasion. Robert, Lord Petre, had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair. The two prominent Catholic families became estranged over the incident; John Caryll, from a third important Catholic family, asked the young Pope to write a poem which would laugh the two families back into reconciliation (Rogers & Pat, pp. 17-39).

This two-canto version, a mock-heroic burlesque in heroic couplets, retells the incident of the stolen lock. Arabella Fermor (now Belinda) rises late and journeys on the Thames to Hampton Court Palace, where she joins Lord Petre (now the Adventurous Baron) and the rest of their party of belles and beaux. The Baron has already resolved to secure the lock and has made appropriate sacrifices and prayers to receive this boon. Their world of high fashion takes refreshments (coffee and tea) and disports themselves. Clarissa hands the Baron the scissors; he cuts off Belinda's lock of hair. Upset and enraged, she and the other belles attack the beaux (chiefly verbally) and win the battle when she throws snuff in the Baron's face and threatens him with her bodkin (no longer an Elizabethan dagger, now simply an ornamental hairpin). But in the altercation the lock has been lost and cannot be restored. Pope consoles Belinda with the relative permanence of art: through this poem, the lost lock has in the best Ovidian fashion been stellified, has become a shooting star which will outlast even the life of Belinda (Rogers & Pat, pp. 34-41).

Within the next year Pope resolved (against the advice of Addison, who found the poem merum sal as it stood) to add ``machinery'' to The Rape of the Lock. From the Rosicruceans he borrowed the sylphs and the gnomes (in their previous existences, coquettes and prudes), making Ariel and the other sylphs serve the mock-epic function of benevolent protective deities, sending Umbriel, the chief gnome, down into the Cave of Spleen, that haven of female neuroses, to fetch back a bag of sighs and a vial of tears to precipitate the altercation between the belles and the beaux. To this earlier mock-epic battle he adds a second, that of the game of ombre (Pope, pp. 21-25).

Pope modified this 1714 version of The Rape of the Lock (immediately and immensely popular) once again in 1717 by adding Clarissa's summation speech to Belinda and the ...