Themes of The Rape of The Lock

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THEMES OF THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the genre of
mock-epic. The epic had long been considered one of the most serious of literary forms; it had
been applied, in the classical period, to the lofty subject matter of love and war, and the Christian
faith. The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of18th-century
high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families of his acquaintance, Pope
intended his verses to cool hot tempers and to encourage his friends to laugh at their own folly.

The strategy of Pope’s mock -epic is not to mock the form itself, but to mock his society in its
very failure to rise to epic standards, exposing its pettiness by casting it against the grandeur of
the traditional epic subjects and the bravery and fortitude of epic heroes: Pope’s mock -heroic
treatment in The Rape of the Lock underscores the ridiculousness of a society in which values
have lost all proportion, and the trivial is handled with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be
accorded to truly important issues. The society on display in this poem is one that fails to
distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks them, it portrays
by showing them as unworthy of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic
resembles the epic in that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but the fact that the
approach must now be satirical rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has
fallen.

Gender Roles

In The Rape of the Lock, Pope constantly manipulates traditional gender roles to satiric effect.
He portrays Belinda, the poem’s protagonist, alternately as an epic hero preparing for battle
(I.139-44). The poem thus describes Belinda in specifically male terms: heroism, battle, anger.
Other women in the poem similarly demonstrate masculine characteristics. Thalestris displays
her prowess on the battlefield while Clarissa provides a weapon to Baron. By contrast, the men
act with feminine delicacy, fainting during the battle. Pope figures the Baron in mostly feminine
terms. He is a fop, willing to prostrate himself before the altar of Love, and he cannot act on his
desire without the explicit assistance of a woman. All this gender manipulation calls attention to
the perverse behaviors of this fictional society. The poem certainly alludes to the expected
behavior of each gender role: women should act with modesty while men should embody heroic
and chivalric ideals. However, these characters flout the rules of traditional society.

Female Sexuality
Pope frequently focuses on female sexuality and the place of women in society throughout the
corpus of his poetry, and it was a popular topic in the early eighteenth century.

The Rape of the Lock is not, however, concerning the evils of women. It instead makes a
considered exploration of society’s expectations for women. The rules of eighteenth-century
society dictate that a woman attract a suitable husband while preserving her chastity and virtuous
reputation. Pope renders this double-standard dramatically in his depiction of Belinda’s hair,
which attracts male admirers, and its petticoat counterpart, which acts as a barrier to protect her
virginity. Of course, a woman who compromised her virtue either by deed or reputation usually
lost her place in respectable society. Pope examines the loss of reputation in the poem’s sexual
allegory, i.e., the “rape” of the lock. By figuring the severing of Belinda’ hair as a sexual
violation, Pope delves into implications of sexual transgression. After the Baron steals her curl,
Belinda exiles herself from the party, retiring to a bedchamber to mourn her loss. Pope thus
dramatizes the retreat from society that a sexually-compromised woman would eventually
experience.

Religious Piety

The Rape of the Lock demonstrates Pope’s anxieties concerning the state of religious piety
during the early eighteenth century. Pope was Catholic, and in the poem he indicates his concern
that society has embraced objects of worship (beauty) rather than God. His use of religious
imagery reveals this perversion. The rituals he depicts in the first and second cantos equate
religion with secular love. During Belinda’s toilette, the poem imbues the Bibles and love letters
on her dressing table with equal significance.

The Baron’s altar to Love in the second canto echoes this scene. On the altar itself an integral
part of Christian worship, Pope symbolizes this equation of religious and erotic love in the cross
that Belinda wears. This central symbol of Christianity serves an ornamental, not religious
function, adorning Belinda’s “white breast”. The cross remains sufficiently secular that “Jews
might kiss” it and “infidels adore” it. Of course, Pope leaves ambiguous the implication that the
Jews and infidels are admiring Belinda’s breasts and not the cross. This subversion of established
principles of Christian worship critiques the laxity of early eighteenth-century attitudes towards
religion and morality.

Idleness of the Upper Classes

The idleness and ignorance of the upper classes is integral to Pope’s analysis of contemporary
society in The Rape of the Lock. His satire focuses largely on the bad habit of the upper classes
and gentry, who he depicts as interested only in trivial matters, such as flirting, gossip, and card
games. In reality an excuse for flirting and gambling, the card game represents the young
aristocrats’ only opportunity to gain heroic recognition. This is not, of course, true heroism, but
rather a skill that serves no purpose in the outside world. Chief among the upper classes’ other
pastimes is gossip, but Pope limits their conversation to the insular world of the aristocratic
lifestyle. They care most about “who gave the ball, or paid the visit last,” the irrelevant structures
of upper-class socializing.

Temporary Nature of Beauty

Beauty’s short-lived nature reinforces Pope’s critical project in The Rape of the Lock. His poem
attempts to discourage society from placing excessive value on external appearances, especially
since such things grow fainter over time. Clarissa’s lecture in particular questions the value that
society places on appearances. She notes that men worship female beauty without assessing
moral character. Pope demonstrates that this is essentially a house without foundation: because
“frail beauty must decay,” women must have other qualities to sustain them. Though Clarissa is
complicit in the general merriment and pettiness that Pope censures in the poem, her expressed
ethics with regard to appearances serve his social critique.

Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and loaded with moral implications. Pope’s use
of the mock-epic genre is intricate and exhaustive. The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which
every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the
classical world view, and the pieces are wrought together with a cleverness and expertise that
makes the poem surprising and delightful

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