A primary characteristic that underscores much of Alexander Pope’s work is humor. Rather than acting as just satirical asides, Pope’s utilization of farce allows him to focus “attention on the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual” (Parkin 1953, 197). By making a comparison between what is and what ought to be (or ought not to be), along with being entertaining, Pope is able to reach his audience and communicate his ideas in a clear and precise way, trivializing what is important and underscoring what is frivolous. Rather than making a scene less serious, humor is used as a device to enhance the content of his work, allowing him to discuss topics in a refreshing way. His narrative poem, The Rape of the Lock, operates along these similar lines. However, rather than solely making the content humorous, Pope’s control of mock-dramatic elements allow him to move beyond creating a sardonic text. His parody of the epic acts as an early model of the deconstruction of the typical narrative format.

The structure of the five-act epic can be found as a basis for the dramatic form of Pope’s narrative poem. Whether he was consciously attempting to do so or otherwise, “The simple actions of the epic fall with surprising accuracy into [his story]. Dramatic theory offered him a handy, tested pattern” from which he could outwardly build his poem (Jackson 1287). Influenced by the work of Elizabethan dramatists, who utilized the classical five-act structure throughout their plays and were, in turn, inspired by Virgil, Horace, Homer, and others, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock follows a similar organizational pattern. The exposition is laid out within Canto I, the initial drive to action begins in Canto II, the epitasis of action occurs in Canto III, the situation is intensified in Canto IV, and reconciliation is made through some divine force outside of the narrative’s events in Canto V. Pope desired to evoke this return-to-form of the classical age, for he “felt the classics as an essential part of the continuity of European culture, and it is this which to a large extent offsets the frequently topical nature of some of his poetic subjects” (Sullivan 235). It is additionally important to note that the original version of The Rape, published in 1712, was only two cantos in length and contained the majority of the narrative’s action. The second version, however, published in 1714, “has been made by spacing out the main actions over five cantos and by the addition of the much admired but unessential machinery … [indicating] a strong parallel with the five-part dramatic structure” (Jackson 1285). Moments like Belinda’s dressing scene and the Cave of the Spleen do not appear in the first draft of the text. While these scenes do not have direct impact on the action, their inclusion is vital to ascertain a complete understanding of the text and its characters. The first Canto establishes Belinda as a physical, artificial beauty, protected by her guardians, the Sylphs, while the fourth Canto presents character reactions to the climactic action of the severing of the lock in the previous act, as well as spurning the supernatural guardians to inspire Belinda to action. These episodes help to build the importance (or lack thereof) of the principle action. These scenes, along with the primary plot of the poem, follow the dramatic arc of the epic.

The poem opens with the invocation: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,/What mighty contests rise from trivial things,/I sing—This verse to Caryll, Muse! Is due” (Pope I.1-3). This first couplet and the line following act as the epic proposition, an appeal to the classical Muses of the arts, which occurs in epic poetry. However, even within the opening lines, Pope’s ability to play with diction and syntax comes alive. If an ironic, inquisitive stress is placed upon these lines, “The implication would be, ‘Who says that real offence was (or should have been) taken over this silly quarrel about nothing?’ In other words, the seriousness of the whole affair is undercut at the opening announcement” (Rogers 18). From the outset, Pope recognizes the ridiculousness of the situation about which he writes, observing how the characters will blow something trivial out of proportion. Inversion, especially the inversion of expectations of the epic format, becomes a key motif throughout the poem. Pope’s writing takes on a “chameleon quality which has seldom been matched,” blurring the lines between “the epic, the moral, the pastoral, the satiric, and so on” (Dyson and Lovelock 198). This inversion can be seen in the characters’ embracement of artificial beauty in lieu of the natural. Following the convocation, the chief sylph Ariel, guardian of the female sex, instructs Belinda that she and the other Sylphs will protect her. They go on to deify her and inundate her with “special treatment … such as the head Sylph’s assistance, together with the superhuman value placed on everything connected with her” (Parkin 1954, 31). They become her protectors, obsessed with maintaining her physical state. Belinda becomes their paragon, and as shown later in Canto IV, the consequences for failing her are indeed dire. Belinda, the so-called protagonist, rises from sleep at midday and goes to her dressing toilet. Joined by her custodians, she prepares her appearance for the day:

A heav’nly image in the glass appears,
To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears.
Th’ inferior priestess [her maid], at her altar’s side,
Trembling begins the sacred rite of prides. (Pope I.125-128)

This is comparable to the arming scene of epic poetry. Belinda is “the epic hero, preparing for battle…; she is Aphrodite rising from the sea” (Dyson and Lovelock 199). Her guile takes full form as her servants, both corporeal and ethereal, adorn her. Importance is placed on the artificial, instead of the real, and this self-absorption only leads to her downfall. The young baron, the poem’s antagonist, who is infatuated with Belinda’s locks of hair, vows to add to his altar of love, “Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt./There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves,/And all the trophies of his former loves” (Pope II.38-40). Having erected a monument to memorialize physical representations of his conquests, he prepares himself to seize the grandest prize yet. Belinda herself is an idol to beauty, a physical depiction of divinity and passion. Spurred on by his lust, the Baron prepares himself for the epic battle that is yet to come.

Belinda herself partakes in this grand clash, which beings by taking the form of a game of cards. Having traveled up to Hampton Court to spend the day in pleasure, she “Burns to encounter two adventurous knights/At ombre, singly to decide their doom,/And swells her breast with conquests yet to come” (III.26-28). Throughout the poem, incidents like the card game or Belinda dressing at the toilet are magnified into grand scenes. This game, described over the next seventy-or-so lines, takes the shape of an epic combat, revealing an “ambivalence central to the poem—the attempt at the same time to build up and tear down the importance of the feminine concerns with which the poem deals” (Parkin 1953, 199). Although otherwise an unimportant affair, the card game is turned into an action scene of strategy and battle. These junctures are less about the narrative itself, and more concerned with parodying the narrative format of the epic. Moments like this occur within the Aeneid or Iliad, taking the form of impressive struggles which challenge the hero and help them to grow. “The Rape of the Lock,” however, “proceeds in a series of tableaus, but without the surging energy that informs the epic,” with characters instead subsisting in a “languid world” (Damrosch 197). Beaten and humiliated, the Baron strikes, seizing a pair of scissors handed to him by Clarissa, and rends the prized lock of hair from Belinda, sending her into a state of melancholy and prompting the sylphs to flee and the gnome Umbriel to journey deep into the Cave of the Spleen.

Although on an initial reading it may appear to come from nowhere, Umbriel’s catabasis into the Cave of the Spleen parallels a recurring theme within epic poetry. Like Odysseus and Aeneas before him, Umbriel’s trek “has always been hailed as a brilliant parody of the epic voyage into the underworld … [and] a mock-epic device dramatizing Belinda’s sullen psychosomatic condition resulting from her tonsorial rape” (Delasanta 69). A footnote in the Broadview Anthology notes that “The spleen was thought to be the seat of melancholy or morose feelings, and ‘spleen’ became a term used to cover any number of complaints including headaches, depression, irritability, hallucinations, or hypochondria” (564). The previous canto ends with Belinda thrown into a state of deep despondency, mortified over the loss of her lock of hair. Now, Umbriel must journey into the source of her depression in order to find the strength for Belinda to overcome her gloominess. Before he earns his boon, Umbriel notices the Sylphs imprisoned within the Spleen as punishment for being careless in attending Belinda, “all of [their punishments] within Belinda’s Rhadamanthine power” (Parkin 1954, 32). As a representation of a mythic goddess, Belinda has the power to inflict retribution upon the guardians who fail her. Those Sylphs who hinder her beauty and mar it with prudishness are subjugated with reckoning appropriate to a paragon of elegance. They are stuck with pins, stuffed into vials, and drowned in bitter waters. In other words, they are forced to undergo rituals as though they are preparing to go and make an appearance in public; having their skin poked and prodded at in order to make it presentable, being stopped in jars of fragrant perfumes, or having their bodies forcibly washed and cleaned. As the physical depiction of artificial allure, Belinda is able to inflict her “‘Cosmetic Powers’” upon her subjects, underscoring the importance both she and the Sylphs place on physical beauty (Pope qtd. in Parkin 1954, 32). Passing the castigated Sylphs safely, Umbriel finds her way to the unnamed Goddess of the Spleen. Typically, the descent is utilized within the epic as a challenge for the epic hero to undergo and, from the underworld, the protagonist returns with a gift or knowledge of some kind. This epic is no different, and the Goddess provides Umbriel with:

A wondrous bag with both her hands she binds,
Like that where once Ulysses held the winds;
There she collects the force of female lungs:
Sigh, sobs, and passions, and the war of tongues.
A vial next she fills with fainting fears,
Soft sorrows, melting griefs, and flowing tears. (Pope IV.81-86)

The Goddess grants Umbriel an Aeolian gift, with which he can animate Belinda. Unlike Odysseus’s bag, which was to guide him back home to Ithaca, this bag is meant to stimulate Belinda to action so that she may fight back against the shearing of her hair. Along with melancholy, splenetic disorders can also refer to the abrupt discharge of anger. What the Goddess grants Umbriel “was not merely some vague inspiration to epic battle but, more fitting to her own splenetic divinity, the literal means by which Belinda’s own spleen might be vented from a state of melancholic inertia to one of heroic temper” (Delasanta 70). Finding Belinda cradled in the arms of the Amazon Queen Thalestris, a worthy female guardian for an upcoming battle, Umbriel opens the mythic containers and unleashes Belinda’s inner acrimony, motivating her to attack the Baron who tarnished her.

Lines are drawn and teams are chosen. Suspense thickens as the great battle between Belinda and the Baron is about to begin, but before the first strike can be thrown, the poem’s only voice of rationality speaks up. Clarissa speaks over the crowd, commenting, “‘How vain are all these glories, all our pains,/Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains” (Pope V.15-16). Although she first gave the Baron the shears he would need to obtain the lock of hair, she becomes the figure of common sense toward the play’s conclusion. Beauty fades with time, she argues, while prudence and sound judgment should be more coveted. Perhaps this was why Clarissa first gave the scissors to the Baron, for she recognized the temporary nature of physical attractiveness, pleading for the congregation to instead examine “the compelling perspective of life’s brevity” (Dyson and Lovelock 207). Her appeal ends and falls on deaf ears and Thalestris calls for the fight to commence: “‘To arms, to arms!’ the fierce virago cries” (Pope V.37). In Homeric verse, it is common for a speech to end with its audience applauding the orator, but in this mock epic, only silence fills the room before Belinda’s champion calls for battle. Belinda herself immediately charges at the Baron, accosting him for the return of the lock, but it is nowhere to be found. It disappears from the world, and a Muse spies it ascending to the heavens where it becomes “A sudden star …/[that] drew behind it a trail of radiant hair” (V.127-128). It is not the Muse of Satire who watches the lock rise, “pleased though she must have been—but the Muse of transformations [who is] now clearly evoked. The apotheosis of the Lock, which in mock-heroic terms is the poem’s supreme extravagance, is artistically its moment of truth” (Dyson and Lovelock 209). It is this lock of hair, not Belinda, the Baron, Thalestris, or any of the other characters who undergo any meaningful metamorphosis. The lock evolves from beyond the symbol of Belinda’s beauty into something sublime and beyond the bounds of the physical realm. In this final moment of the poem, “Belinda’s beauty is lost and won forever” (209). Lost to the mortals who appreciated it only for how it accentuated Belinda, and won by the celestial sphere and consecrated for eternity.

The effectiveness of The Rape of the Lock stems from its parodic nature. Like modern narrative deconstruction, parody “does not aspire in a straightforward way to be a discourse of truth. It is interested in questions of truth, but does not pursue them in direct, serious, and analytic fashion” (Phiddian 673). The mock epic acts as a form of satire, attempting to display the difference between what is and what should/should not be. Deconstruction “nests in the structure of the texts and ideas it criticizes … It operates from inside the arguments of metaphysical texts and systems such as structuralism and phenomenology, showing how they cannot totalize the visions they proclaim, and precisely where they double over and collapse” (681). By outlining the ridiculous dispositions of his characters, who place high value on qualities linked to physicality and temporality, Pope is able to depict absurdity while also advocating for his readers to place more importance on true, natural beauty, rather than artificial. The moments within, and the very structure of, the poem assists in the message Pope is attempting to tell. The Rape, apart from being a fantastic representation of the epic, dismantles the structures of its genre and reinterprets them, allowing the author to tell a more effective message than purely stating his opinions.

---

Works Consulted

Damrosch, Leo. “Pope’s Epics: What Happened to Narrative?” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 29, no. 2, 1988, pp. 189–207. JSTOR.

Delasanta, Rodney. “Spleen and Wind in The Rape of the Lock.” College Literature, vol. 10, no. 1, 1983, pp. 69–70. JSTOR.

Dyson, A.E., and Julian Lovelock. “In Spite of All Her Art: Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.” Critical Survey, vol. 5, no. 3, 1971, pp. 197–210. JSTOR.

Jackson, James L. “Pope’s The Rape of the Lock Considered as a Five-Act Epic.” PMLA, vol. 65, no. 6, 1950, pp. 1283–1287. JSTOR.

Parkin, Rebecca Price. “Mythopoeic Activity in The Rape of the Lock.” ELH, vol. 21, no. 1, 1954, pp. 30–38. JSTOR.

Parkin, Rebecca Price. “The Quality of Alexander Pope’s Humor.” College English, vol. 14, no. 4, 1953, pp. 197–202. JSTOR.

Phiddian, Robert. “Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?” New Literary History, vol. 28, no. 4, 1997, pp. 673–696. JSTOR.

Pope, Alexander. “The Rape of the Lock: A Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Cantos.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, edited by Joseph Laurence Black, second ed., vol. 3, Broadview Press, 2013, pp. 555–568. Print.

Rogers, Pat. “Wit and Grammar in The Rape of the Lock.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 72, no. 1, 1973, pp. 17–31. JSTOR.

Sullivan, J.P. “Alexander Pope on Classics and Classicists.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1966, pp. 235–253. JSTOR.