Rape of the lock close reading

Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was written for the purpose of satire. His friend John Caryll requested that he write the poem in order to make a mockery of two friends; Arabella Fermor and her suitor Lord

Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was inspired by a real event witnessed by Pope’s friend, John Caryll. Lord Robert Petre (surname) had cut off a lock of hair from his lover, Arabella Fermor, and the consequent argument had caused a Montague-Capulet-style breach between the two families. Seeking a solution to this disparity, Caryll (described as the “MUSE” in an early passage of Pope’s poem) asked Pope, who was known for his satirical and comical style of writing, to write a poem satirising the event, in at attempt to reunite the families. In the poem, Pope effectively borrows from classical literature and Rosicrucian ideology in order to parody the gods and goddesses of conventional epics, and thus creates a satirical commentary on contemporary society and the actions of people within it.

The Rape of the Lock is a humorous persecution of the vanities and idleness of high society in the 18th century.

The strategy of Pope’s mock-epic is not to satirize the form itself, but to satirize his contemporary society in its very failure to rise to epic standards. Through contrast it is exposed; Pope’s poem, short in contrast to the classic epics, utilises its minuteness as a mirror of the inconsequential nature of contemporary squabbles, especially when compared to the traditional shows of bravery and fortitude associated with classical poems.

“The great battles of epic become bouts of gambling and flirtatious tiffs.”

“The inherent balance of the couplet form is strikingly well-suited to a subject matter that draws on comparisons and contrasts: the form invites configurations in which two ideas or circumstances are balanced, measured, or compared against one another. It is thus perfect for the evaluative, moralizing premise of the poem, particularly in the hands of this brilliant poet.” (sparknotes)

Pope’s humour, although satirical, does not in this extract offer a criticism of women themselves in contemporary society; rather, by attributing their coquettishness, pride and idiocy to the will of supernatural beings, he allows for the blame to be shifted onto the social mechanisms by which women were governed. He gives himself space to critique the conventions of the time, whilst simultaneously exonerating women themselves from being opened to criticism. This idea is nicely summarised in lines 71-77 of canto I, in which Pope describes the sylphs as being in control of women’s actions. This implication leads to the conclusion that women were unable to think for themselves, which, while being perceived as a negative notion and reading of the canto, also implies that women’s follies and vanities were not a result of conducts of their own making, but of the society by which their actions were conducted.

The poem’s structure, heroic couplets, creates a somewhat restricted feeling; at times, the rhyme seems to be more important than the content, meaning that in some lines the word order feels somewhat unnatural. However, the couplet form may therefore be seen as extremely well-suited to the subject matter of the poem; the form invites comparisons and contrasts to be made, and is thereby fitting for a poem comparing and contrasting contemporary and ancient society and literature. And yet, Pope does not entirely adhere to the rules of the heroic couplet; many of his lines, which ought to be written in iambic pentameter, in fact do not follow this rule; they may be written with ten syllables, but rarely fall into strict iambs or follow the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables typically associated with the meter. This seemingly deliberate break from conventionality could be read as representative of women’s refusal to comply with the rules that society imposes upon them, or be seen as emblematic of their desire to be freed from these rules.

There is also a sense of irony in the fact that this extract, taken from a dream imposed upon Belinda by her guardian sylph Ariel, warns against women who are “too conscious of their face,”^[1] and who dedicate too much of their thinking to the topic of men. The irony here stems from the fact that Ariel has imposed this dream upon Belinda; although Ariel blames the gnomes for “Instruct[ing] the eyes of young coquettes to roll, / Teach[ing] infant cheeks a bidden blush to know, / And little hearts to flutter at a beau.”, he is the one crowding Belinda’s mind with these ideas of coquetry and narcissism^[2]; and so, once again, the sylphs can be read as being symbolic of the oppressive and vanity-inducing society of which Pope was a part.

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