The Rape of the Lock – Alexander Pope

A group of aristocrats are playing ombre, a card game, which is described in terms of a heroic battle following the tradition of mock epics: the cards are troops combating on the “velvet plain” of the card-table at a party at Hampton Court Palace. Belinda, the young lady whose lock that is about to be raped wins. Next, coffee is served. The curling steam rising from the coffee cups remind the Baron of his intention to cut off a lock of Belinda’s hair. Clarissa, another young lady who had a fondness for the Baron, gives her scissors for him to do the dratted deed. The exchange of the scissors is described in terms of an arming of a knight for war. The Baron tries three times to cut the lock. The Sylphs who are guarding Belinda blow the hair out of harm’s way and tweak her diamond earring to get her attention. Ariel, a powerful sylph, enters her brain. However, to his surprise, he finds “an earthly lover lurking at her heart” which he interprets as a secret desire to be violated, gives up protecting her. Finally, the scissors close on the pampered lock. One of the sylphs, making a last minute attempt to save the lock, jumps in between it and the blades of the scissors, is cut in two but quickly restored. The Baron gloats while Belinda screams.

On the one hand, The Rape of the Lock can be read as an act of mediation as Pope said to have written it to encourage two families he knew to end a disagreement. On the other hand, it has larger sociopolitical implications. Thus, despite the light tone, the central concerns of this poem are serious and moral. In that sense, following the ethos of the Neoclassical Age, The Rape of the Lock could be read as a condemnation of some practices of 18th-century high society. The poem is a mock-epic. The classical epic, the most serious of literary forms, was dedicated to lofty subject matter such as love and war. Pope mocks his society’s pettiness by describing the trivial activities of the very cream of the English High Society in terms of an epic battle. The poem ridicules the men and women it portrays by showing them as not fit to be subjects of a true epic. 

In The Rape of the Lock contemporary scene brings to the mind image from the classical epics. The powerful gods of the epics are converted into an army of sylphs. Cosmetics, clothing, jewelry, and a pair of scissors replace armor and weapons. The sacrificial fire/altar is replaced by the dressing room and the altar of love. Pope displays his command of the Classical epics through his realistic depiction of the card game in the form of a mock-epic battle. One must remember that Pope by this time had completed his translation of the Greek epic poem Odyssey. Pope suggests the decline of his society by describing a game of cards, a mere front of courting and flirting, in terms of an epic battle scene. The energy and passion the heroic young of the Classical Age spent on earning arête and kleos are now squandered on insignificant pastimes. The “three attempts” which the Baron makes to cut the lock points to the romantic tradition of literature where the hero usually has to try thrice to achieve the desired end. Clarissa’s arming of the Barron also a borrowing from the romances where the hero is granted a favour by his lady-love. Belinda, Baron’s counterpart, is not really an enemy but a woman who has a secret desire to be ravished by him as Ariel discovers by accessing her brain. Therefore, her subsequent distress is largely a pretension. Amidst her melodramatic screams the Baron’s insignificant act is compared to a conquest of nations. 

The prescribed section of Canto III contains many examples of Pope’s command of the heroic couplet: “Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, / when husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last” (Lines 157-8). The heroic couplet consists of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines (lines of ten syllables each, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables). The inherent balance of the couplet form is strikingly well suited to a subject matter that draws on comparisons and contrasts. The above lines also contain an example of the employment of zeugma, a rhetorical device in which a word or a phrase modifies two other words or phrases in a parallel construction, but modifies each in a different way or according to a different sense. Here, the modifying phrase is “shrieks”; it applies to the paralleled terms “husbands” and “lapdogs.” But one does not cry in the same way on both occasions and the effect of the zeugma is to show the palace as a place where both serious matters of statecraft and frivolous occasions such as card games take place.