Themes - The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope PDF

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MEN AND MASCULINITY What makes a man a man, anyway? If you were raised on reading classical Greek and Roman literature, like Pope and so many of his upper-class, educated male peers, but you lived in a more modern age, you might find this a hard question to answer. Those Greek and Roman guys— Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, and all of their ilk—were heroes. Armor-wearin', battle-tested, butt-kickin', honorable heroes (they probably had six-pack abs, too… although maybe that's just in the movies). So many of the hip men of the upper classes in Pope's day seemed to have fallen woefully short of that heroic, manly ideal. They drank tea. They took snuff. They wore silk and satin. (Sometimes pastel silk and satin—have you seen Wolfgang Mozart's ensembles in the movie Amadeus? Check it out.) They wore wigs. And as for honor—they seemed to care more about gossip, backstabbing, and personal gain than the good of society, or of their country. It's not surprising that when, in The Rape of the Lock, Pope juxtaposes the heroic classical ideal of manhood from the ancient epics, with the reality of the beaus who moved through his own society, that he found the latter sadly lacking. WOMEN AND FEMININITY Women. They couldn't live with 'em, they couldn't live without 'em. As you might have guessed from this poem, women were a problem in the 18th century. We are way, way before the era of feminism and equal rights, but by the early 1700s many women were insisting that they at least deserved a decent education. Plenty of men (and women, too) felt that women were vastly inferior to the male sex, however, and those feelings are fairly obvious here in Pope's poem: think of the double-edged compliments our speaker pays to Belinda, or the negative portrayal of "female problems" in the Cave of Spleen. On the other hand, The Rape of the Lock also lets us know that women don't have a fair shake because they are even more constrained and limited by society's rules and regulations than men are. Clarissa's speech is a fine example of this attitude, although it does advise its hearers to simply suck up and deal with the situation—ideally with a smile—rather than do anything to change it. Are truly feminine women the ones who, like the Queen of Spleen, sigh and fade away with affected headaches and imaginary ailments? Are they like Belinda, sweet and pretty but totally superficial? Are they like Thalestris, tough girls quick to anger? Or are they like Clarissa, keeping good humor whatever happens? We're given a lot of models here. And little guidance. SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL IDENTITY It's fairly obvious to us that if you put a bunch of attractive, well-off, and bored young men and women together, sparks are bound to fly in one way or another. They'll get attracted to one another, feel desire for one another, have dreams about one another, maybe even fall in love. That's the trouble with the society Pope depicts in The Rape of the Lock: there's absolutely no way for anyone in it to safely express or act on his or her sexuality, desire, lust, or love. The rules forbid it. And so, instead, sexuality gets warped and twisted into materiality and narcissism: Belinda's love of her own face; the Baron's desire for her locks; Sir Plume's love of his cane and snuffbox. Even when Ariel finds "an Earthly Lover" in Belinda's heart, that fact only serves to put her more in danger of losing her hair to the Baron. THE SUPERNATURAL

Time to talk seriously about those Sylphs. Did we just say that? Yes, we did. As silly and frivolous as the Sylphs and Gnomes are in The Rape of the Lock, they still perform some very important functions for Pope. They raise the whole question of agency: i.e., to what degree are the people in the poem responsible for their actions, and to what degree can we point to the Sylphs or the Gnomes and say, "look, it's not Belinda's fault—it's the Gnomes who did that." By putting mock-epic "machinery" (remember Pope's dedicatory letter?) into the poem, he not only glams up the whole thing by giving it a huge powdering of fairy dust (another nice thing about those Sylphs), but he also entertains the question of responsibility....