Alexander Pope's 'Rape of the Lock' passage analysis

Lines 1-12 WHAT dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things, I sing-This Verse to Caryll, Muse! is due; This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view: Slight is the Subject, but not so the Praise, If She inspire, and He approve my Lays. Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou'd compel A well-bred Lord t'assault a gentle Belle? Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor'd, Cou'd make a gentle Belle reject a Lord? In Tasks so bold, can Little Men engage, and in soft Bosoms dwells such Mighty Rage?  Do you ever say a quick prayer to some higher power before trying to do something really difficult, like nail a foul shot in a basketball game or take a hairy test in Algebra class? Ancient Greek and Roman poets like Homer (in the Iliad) and Virgil (in the Aeneid), and British heavyweights like John Milton (in Paradise Lost) would do the same thing as they began their epics, dedicating their poetic efforts to (and asking for inspirational help from) the Muses, the Greek gods, or (in Milton's case) God himself.  In the first six lines of Canto I, Pope is doing just that, but in a very tongue-in-cheek way. Instead of a divinity, he dedicates the poem to his and Arabella Fermor's friend John Caryll, who originally asked him to write it, and to "Belinda" (i.e., Arabella, the woman the poem is ostensibly about). This is called an invocation.  Here Pope sets the stage for the action that's coming, and gives us a bit of a mystery to follow as we read. Why (as he asks the "Goddess"-probably a Muse) would a Lord assault a young Lady? Why would a young Lady get angry at a Lord? Why would a society man do such a thing? And are society women really capable of getting into a rage about it?  Also here at the very beginning of his long poem, with this mock-dedication, Pope is setting his readers up for a theme that will come back over and over again: the Rape of the Lock as what literature historians call a mock epic: a poem that takes as its model far more serious epics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Paradise Lost, using high-flying poetic language and grand metaphors just like they do. But mock epics are about something trivial and small, like a young society woman losing a piece of her hair, instead of about a great war between the Trojans and Greeks, or the founding of the Roman Empire, or the fall of Adam and Eve.  Pope isn't just making fun of grand epics, though: he's also paying an affectionate tribute to them, and demonstrating at the same time how well he knows epic poetry. Every educated person of Pope's day knew epic poetry really well, better even than you know the lyrics to the latest Katy Perry single. That's because the early 18th century loved Classical Greek and Roman culture. Historians call it the age of neoclassicism.  This makes The Rape of the Lock especially fun for people who have read the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Have you ever listened to Weird Al Yankovic doing his "Polka Face" spoof of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face," or his "Party in the CIA" version of Miley Cyrus's "Party in the U.S.A"? They're really funny and clever all at the same time, especially if you know the original song really well. The Rape of the Lock is a lot like that. This is only the first of many mock-epic moments in the poem; we'll point them out to you as we go through it.  Following the mock-epic theme, then, the first twelve lines go aboutjuxtaposing the grand and the trivial. Notice how the first line contains "dire Offence" (i.e., a horrific

surreptitiously cut a lock of hair from the head of the beautiful Arabella Fermor, whom he had been courting. Arabella took offense, and a schism developed between her family and Petre's. John Caryll, a friend of both familes and an old friend of Pope's, suggested that he work up a humorous poem about the episode which would demonstrate to both sides that the whole affair had been blown out of proportion and thus effect a reconciliation between them. Pope produced his poem, and it seemed to have achieved its purpose, though Petre never married Arabella. It became obvious over the course of time, however (especially after a revised and enlarged version of the poem, which existed at first only in manuscript copies, was published in 1714) that the poem, which Pope maintained "was intended only to divert a few young Ladies," was in fact something rather more substantial, and the Fermors again took offense -this time at Pope himself, who had to placate them with a letter, usually printed before the text, which explains that Arabella and Belinda, the heroine of the poem, are not identical. The Rape of the Lock is the finest mock-heroic or mock-epic poem in English: written on the model of Boileau's Le Lutrin, it is an exquisitely witty and balanced burlesque displaying the literary virtuosity, the perfection of poetic "judgement," and the exquisite sense of artistic propriety, which was so sought after by Ne-classical artists. Repeatedly invoking classical epic devices to establish an ironic contrast between its structure and its content, it functions at once as a satire on the trivialities of fashionable life, as a commentary on the distorted moral values of polite society, and as an implicit indictment of human pride, and a revelation of the essentially trivial nature of many of the aspects of human existence which we tend to hold very dear. The world of the beaux and belles of The Rape of the Lock is a an artificial one, a trivial realm of calm and decorum sustained by the strict observance of rigorous rules, a micrososm in which very real and very powerful human emotions and passions have been ignored or sublimated. The narcissistic inhabitants of this world assume that they are something more than human, but Pope shows us vulnerable, how fragile, their pretended perfection and their isolation from reality makes them. The Rape of the Lock, with all of its implicit and explicit sexual and emotional implications, shatters the calm, the order, the balance, and the decorum of their artificial world. They are undone by what Pope identifies -here, as in An Essay on Man and "An Essay on Criticism" -as their most important weakness: Pride. A final note: it is obvious that the poem was written for a limited and very specialized audience: in Pope's day, literary art was the province of the upper classes; the domain of a culture which was pervasively literary. Contemporary readers of The Rape of the Lock would, in consequence, recognize and delight in the enormous number of literary allusions which the poem contains. The readers of a poem so concerned with imitation ought, obviously, to be familiar with what is being imitated, and in Pope's day, if not in our own, this was largely the case. What else, though, does this pervasive emphasis on imitation, on distortion, on satire, on parody, and on irony tell us about the cultural milieu or context within which Pope created the poem, and about his relationship with the society he is reproducing in microcosm? In his postscript to his translation of the Odyssey, Pope noted that "Tis using a vast force to lift a feather": in The Rape of the Lock, however, the feather is heavier than one might suspect.[THE VICTORIAN WEB]

Alexander Pope has been the most representative poet of the eighteenth century. He is as representative of his age as Chaucer was of the late fourteenth century and Tennyson of the Victorian Age that his age is known as the Age of Pope speaks of the sovereign position in his age. His most representative poem 'The Rape of the Lock' very faithfully mirrors at least a certain section of English society in the eighteenth century. It captures perfectly the ethos of the aristocratic society of the day. "No writer", says Leslie Stephen, "reflects so clearly and completely the spirit of his own day as Pope does." And it is in the Rape of the Lock that he reflects the life of the fashionable aristocratic society of his time completely. The artificial tone of the age, the frivolous aspect of feminist nowhere more exquisitely pictures than in this poem. It is the epic of trifling; a page torn from the petty, pleasure-seeking life of fashionable beauty.

2022

Alexander Pope’s mock epic The Rape of the Lock portrays a common scenario of aristocrat society in the seventeenth century. Literature during the 17th and 18th century was not only influenced by culture but also social, political, language and many other aspects of society. The epic poem The Rape of the Lock is one of his masterpieces where Alexander Pope demonstrates a significant European influences. He portrays the wealthy lifestyle of the upper class people using mockery. He used many words and elements in a statistic way to mock them. As a result, the mention of Ombre, the allusions to Le Comte de Gabalis, and his word selection in this poem all illustrate the European influence.

Alexander Pope has been the most representative poet of the eighteenth century. He is as representative of his age as Chaucer was of the late fourteenth century and Tennyson of the Victorian Age that his age is known as the Age of Pope speaks of the sovereign position in his age. His most representative poem 'The Rape of the Lock' very faithfully mirrors at least a certain section of English society in the eighteenth century. It captures perfectly the ethos of the aristocratic society of the day. " No writer " , says Leslie Stephen, " reflects so clearly and completely the spirit of his own day as Pope does. " And it is in the Rape of the Lock that he reflects the life of the fashionable aristocratic society of his time completely. The artificial tone of the age, the frivolous aspect of feminist nowhere more exquisitely pictures than in this poem. It is the epic of trifling; a page torn from the petty, pleasure-seeking life of fashionable beauty.

Connotations, 2009

2011

Alexander Pope‟ s The Rape of the Lock is a legend of the rape of a woman named Belinda. But with this there is entwined another story of rape, that is, the ravishing of the British Empire, the metaphorical female. Whereas the real female figure is active in the ...

Journal of Language Horizons, Alzahra University, 2018

The present study aims to focus on Alexander Pope’s controversial mock epic, The Rape of the Lock, to investigate the effects of Repressive and Ideological State Apparatus on the formation of characters’ identities in this 18th century poem. It seeks to analyze the ideological atmosphere in The Rape of the Lock and discusses the complexities of notions such as materialism, virtue, womanhood and conciliation in characters’ actions, words and belief on the basis of Louis Althusser’s theories of interpella-tion and Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses. It analyses the details of the poem to determine Alexander Pope’s views as a social critic who tries to question the ideologies of his time by his satirical portrayal of the superficial social interactions, the corrupted political system and the process of women’s identity formation in this poem. The analysis re-veals that Pope manages to resist being interpellated and avoids judg-ment of the characters by depicting the ambiguous nature of the sociopo-litical ideologies and by resorting to the ideals of art instead.

Jamshedpur Research Review, 2021

Without making Pope into a post-Jungian and Ariel into an animus figure, one can regard The Rape of the Lock as working out ideas of feminine psychology in terms of ‘irrational’ mythologies. Indeed The Rape of the Lock illustrates a mock-epic of excellent caliber. The focal affair of the grand narrative is the heist of foppish Belinda’s hair-lock by a cocky and haughty Baron. The transpiring clash between both of the familial parties also captures major attention of the readers. All the paramount characteristics of an epic encircle the incident. The style is elevated. There is the use of supernatural machinery in the form of the Sylphs, a voyage, a visit to the underworld and battles, almost leaning towards a comical gothic. Pope’s popular fame resides largely in his satires, devastating, final as one would think, directed not against individuals, though personal hatred and scorn entered into the original conception in some of his portraits, but against negative qualities, passions destructive of society or of civilized living. The paper will try to examine Pope’s use of parody and mockery at the relativity of Being and genealogy of the Real through a cultural mirroring of selves in a broader plane. Keywords: mythology, theft, supernatural, mockery, selves.