Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock was inspired by a real life incident between Arabella Fermor and Lord Peter, both belonging to the world of high fashionable society.  The snapped lock of hair brought a quarrel on both families and if there ever was any serious attachment between the two young people, it was soon broken regardless of John Caryll’s attempt to bring those two families back together by asking Pope to write some work on the incident. Nevertheless, even though Caryll did not achieve his ends, the poem itself became one of the most read works of Alexander Pope.
He took up this opportunity to create a satire and point out the vices of the contemporary high society and its inverted moral values. One of his aims was to show how trivial matters are treated by the beau monde with seriousness, gravity and importance.
The Rape of the Lock is a mock epic or mock heroic poem and one of its characteristics is a juxtaposition of two different value systems. In fact, this choice of genre helped Pope to make the ordinary seems extraordinary (as the high society would like to be seen) only to unveil the pettiness of its affairs. The first two lines in the Canto I shows us how the author will deal with this issue of paralleling contrary ideas, creating antithesis: “What Dire offense from amorous causes springs,/What mighty contests rise from trivial things,”.   We can see that there is a grandeur in the diction, yet we are told that the subject matter, it will narrate, will be only “trivial”.
Pope uses numerous epic allusions. Firstly, in the organization of the plot, he is incorporating different structural episodes found in epic (i.e. the scenes of combat, religious rites, prayer, offerings, interpretation of omens); secondly, through different narrative techniques (i.e. invocation of Muse, similes, lamentation).  Thus, when Belinda is preparing her morning toilet, she is presented as a goddess and her dressing table is given a role of an altar. This metaphor then extends to the comparison of Bella with an arming hero, only her arms are not spear or arrow, but “Puffs, powder” and “patches”. Similarly, when Belinda appears with all the pomp and power of an epic hero while sailing on the river Thames, it reminds us of the perilous journey of Odysseus or Aeneas, however, Belinda does not undertake her “epic voyage” for the sake of a nation or entire human race,  but only to spend her time in the society of other young women and men, to play a game of Ombre (presented as if it was a heroic war) and to have a cup of coffee, chat and “all that”. Thus we are constantly reminded of the small spectrum of Belinda’s life and the insignificance of the actions that the people of aristocratic society spend their time by.

The poem finishes with deification of the lock, thus again alluding to the world of epic; only here the “lunar sphere” is a place where no heroes are transformed to constellations, but where wits of “beaux’ in snuffboxes and tweezer cases” are kept along with “dried butterflies”, “broken vows and deathbed alms....”Pope employs number of devices (epic allusions, metaphors, hyperbole, zeugma) to made the commonplace look as something spectacular. His aim is not to show the people and their action as something special and amazing, but rather he wants to point out the emptiness in the life of the fashionable society. Often, as a direct result of the juxtaposition of the grant and petty there are created antithesis, paradoxes and anticlimax emphasizing the insignificant. Also, his mode of diction, rather than the content, is trying to make things look great. But when in context with the subject matter, the irony is clearly perceivable. And finally: “This Lock the Muse shall consecrate to fame, /And ‘midst the stairs inscribe Belinda’s name.”  (Canto V, lines 149-150) This time no over/understatement, but rather literal truth. In fact, here Pope made from the ordinary something spectacular (without the satire or irony) -he immortalized Arabella Fermor, who would not be otherwise known to anyone.

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