Seminar

“18th-Century English Satires: Swift and Pope”
SS 2001 

Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock   

by

 Daniela Esser   

12. Semester 

Table of Contents  

1 Introduction 3 - 4   

2 Pope and the genre of mock-epic 4 - 8   

3 The Rape of the Lock – A versified mockery of folly and pride 8 - 20  
3.1 The plot 8 - 16 
3.2 The sylph machinery 16 - 18 
3.3 The aim of The Rape of the Lock 18 - 20   

4 Conclusion 20 - 21   

Bibliography 22 - 23  

What the weak head with strongest bias rules,Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
(Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism)

 What is your sex’s earliest, latest care,Your heart’s supreme ambition? – To be fair.
(George Lyttleton, Advice to a Lady)

 1 Introduction

The success of his Essay on Criticism (published in 1711) brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who were then collaborating on the journal The Spectator. To this journal Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah” (1712). He was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the first version of his mock-epic, The Rape of the Lock (two canto version, 1712; five canto version, 1714), to reconcile two Catholic families. It was John Caryll who brought the family quarrel to the attention of Pope. Lord Petre had stolen a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s hair, which caused an animosity between the Petres and the Fermors, who had lived in great friendship before. Caryll had been staying with Lord Petre at Ingatestone in Essex, which was the assumed setting of the ‘rape’.¹ “Caryll suggested that Pope should ‘write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again’.”² Pope treated the dispute between the families as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society they lived in seem ridiculous.

“The Rape owes its richness and resonance to its overstructure of powerful, dangerous motifs.”³ With this opinion, Warren rejects the romantic view of the Rape as a ‘filigree artifice’ of the play with the fires of sex and religion, and he substantiates his argument with the notion that religion in Pope’s mock-epic is replaced by the Baron’s and Belinda’s “altars to Pride and Love”. Pride indeed appears to be the main theme of The Rape of the Lock, and it is closely connected to the follies of the beau monde that esteems semblances: Pope satirizes the “irrational materialism of bourgeois values that objectify human beings by giving primacy to surface over substance.”⁴ 

2 Pope and the genre of mock-epic

The mock-epic or mock-heroic is a form of satire that adapts the sophisticated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. Trivial actions are granted the dignity of big words, thus because of the created contrast the mock-heroic exhibits at the same time belittlement and aggrandizement. The genre originated in classical times with an anonymous parody of Homer’s Iliad⁵, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and Mice) and “was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th- century Neoclassical period.”⁶ Pope understood Neo-classicism as the “living child of living parents.”⁷ For the neo-classicist, the Renaissance was still going on, and old life was giving birth to new. This did however not imply that neo-classicist thoughts were unoriginal, as Pope puts it: “They who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers.”⁸ Sometimes the mock-epic was used by the ‘moderns’ of this period to ridicule contemporary classicists, but more often it was applied by ‘ancients’ to point out the unheroic character of the modern age by exposing contemporary events in a heroic manner. The classic example of this is Nicolas Boileau’s Le Lutrin⁹ (1674-83; The Lectern), which sets out with a dispute between two ecclesiastical dignitaries about where to place a lectern in a chapel and ends with a combat in a bookstore in which champions of either side fling their favourite ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ authors at each other. Jonathan Swift varied this theme in his mock-heroic prose work The Battle of the Books¹⁰ (1704).

[...]

1 Cf. eg. Cunningham, J. S.: Pope: The Rape of the Lock. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1970 (1st ed. 1961), p. 9f. Hereafter cited as: Cunningham, J. S.: Pope: The Rape of the Lock.

2 Notes to The Rape of the Lock in: Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock. In: Alexander Pope. A selection of his finest poems (Oxford Poetry Library). Ed. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 185. Hereafter cited as: Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock.

3 Warren, Austin: “The Rape of the Lock as Burlesque.” (Extract) In: Critics on Pope. Readings in Literary Criticism (series). Ed. Judith O’Neill. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1973, p. 81.

4 Ellen Pollak: “The Rape of the Lock: A Reification of the Myth of Passive Womanhood.” In: Pope. Ed. Brean Hammond. London and New York: Longman, 1996, p. 64.

5 Homerus: The Iliad. Trans. A. T. Murray. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985 & 1988 (2 Vols.).

6 Britannica Online. Vers. 1999-2001. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2 June 2001
<http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=54459&tocid=0>

7 Rosslyn, Felicity: Alexander Pope. A Literary Life. London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 16.

8 Ibid.

9 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas: Epitres. Art Poétique. Lutrin. Ed. Charles-H. Boudhors. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967.

10 Swift, Jonathan: The Battle of the Books. In: A Tale of a Tub and other Works. Ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.