Rape of the Lock

The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

1660: Charles II restored to the throne

1688-89: The GloriousRevolution.deposition of James IIand accession of William of Orange

1700: Death of John Dryden
1707: Act of Union unites Scotland and England, which thus became “Great Britain”
1714:Rule by Hanover begins with accession of George I
1744-45: Deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift
1784: Death of Jonathan Swift

Neoclassicism: An Introduction

• Neoclassicism dominated English literature from the Restoration in 1660 until the end of the eighteenth century, when the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge marked the full emergence of Romanticism. • The English Neoclassical movement was predicated upon and derived from both classical and contemporary French models, (see Boileau's L'Art Poetique (1674) and Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (1711) as critical statements of Neoclassical principles) • It embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence — ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, "correctness," "restraint," decorum, and so on, • Ideally such principles would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals.

• Neo-classical period is often divided into three periods:

1. The Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden were the dominant influences; 2.The Augustan Age (1700-1750), in which Pope was the central poetic figure, 3. The Age of Johnson(1750-1798), which was dominated and characterized by Samuel Johnson. It also saw the beginnings of attitudes which, in the context of the development of a cult of Nature, the influence of German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the rise of Methodism, and political events like the American and French revolutions — established the intellectual and emotional foundations of English Romanticism. • According to Neoclassical theorists man was an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited. • They replaced the Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention and experimentation, and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on restraint, on common sense, and on religious, political, economic and philosophical conservatism. • They maintained that man himself was the most appropriate subject of art, and saw art itself as essentially pragmatic — as valuable because it was somehow useful — and as something which was properly intellectual rather than emotional. • Hence their emphasis on proper subject matter; and hence their attempts to subordinate details to an overall design, to employ in their work concepts like symmetry, proportion, unity, harmony, and grace, which would facilitate the process of delighting, instructing, educating, and correcting the social animal which they believed man to be. • in poetry, the favorite verse form was the rhymed couplet, which reached its greatest sophistication in heroic couplet of Pope: The hungry judges soon the Sentence sign, And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine.
The heroic couplet, lines in iambic pentameter rhymed in pairs, appeared early in English — it was Chaucer's favorite meter — and came into vogue in poetic drama in the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century, in the hands of masters like Dryden, Pope, and Johnson, it became for many years the dominant English verse form. In the Neo-classical period the heroic couplet consisted of a couplet of end-stopped lines which formed a short stanza, and substituted for the Greek and Latin heroic hexameter.

Pope and the Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock had its origins in an actual, if trivial, incident in polite society: in 1711, the twenty-one year old Robert, Lord Petre, had, at Binfield,surreptitiously cut a lock of hair from the head of the beautiful Arabella Fermor, whom he had been courting. Arabella took offense, and a schism developed between her family and Petre's. John Caryll, a friend of both familes and an old friend of Pope's, suggested that he work up a humorous poem about the episode which would demonstrate to both sides that the whole affair had been blown out of proportion and thus effect a reconciliation between them. Pope produced his poem, and it seemed to have achieved its purpose, though Petre never married Arabella. It became obvious over the course of time, however (especially after a revised and enlarged version of the poem, which existed at first only in manuscript copies, was published in 1714) that the poem, which Pope maintained "was intended only to divert a few young Ladies," was in fact something rather more substantial, and the Fermors again took offense — this time at Pope himself, who had to placate them with a letter, usually printed before the text, which explains that Arabella and Belinda, the heroine of the poem, are not identical. • The Rape of the Lock is the finest mock-heroic or mock-epic poem in English: written on the model of Boileau's Le Lutrin, it is an exquisitely witty and balanced burlesque displaying the literary virtuosity, the perfection of poetic "judgement," and the exquisite sense of artistic propriety, which was so sought after by Ne-classical artists. • Repeatedly invoking classical epic devices to establish an ironic contrast between its structure and its content, • it functions at once as a satire on the trivialities of fashionable life, as a commentary on the distorted moral values of polite society, and as an implicit indictment of human pride, and a revelation of the essentially trivial nature of many of the aspects of human existence which we tend to hold very dear. • The world of the beaux and belles of The Rape of the Lock is a an artificial one, a trivial realm of calm and decorum sustained by the strict observance of rigorous rules, a micrososm in which very real and very powerful human emotions and passions have been ignored or sublimated. The narcissistic inhabitants of this world assume that they are something more than human, but Pope shows us vulnerable, how fragile, their pretended perfection and their isolation from reality makes them. • The Rape of the Lock, with all of its implicit and explicit sexual and emotional implications, shatters the calm, the order, the balance, and the decorum of their artificial world. They are undone by what Pope identifies — here, as in An Essay on Man and "An Essay on Criticism" — as their most important weakness: Pride. • A final note: it is obvious that the poem was written for a limited and very specialized audience: in Pope's day, literary art was the province of the upper classes; the domain of a culture which was pervasively literary. Contemporary readers of The Rape of the Lock would, in consequence, recognize and delight in the enormous number of literary allusions which the poem contains. The readers of a poem so concerned with imitation ought, obviously, to be familiar with what is being imitated, and in Pope's day, if not in our own, this was largely the case. What else, though, does this pervasive emphasis on imitation, on distortion, on satire, on parody, and on irony tell us about the cultural milieu or context within which Pope created the poem, and about his relationship with the society he is reproducing in microcosm? In his postscript to his translation of the Odyssey, Pope noted that "Tis using a vast force to lift a feather": in The Rape of the Lock, however, the feather is heavier than one might suspect.

The following comes from the Twickenham Edition of Pope's poems:

"The families concerned in the Rape of the Lock--the Fermors, Petres, and Carylls--were prominent members of that group of great intermarried Roman Catholic families owning land in the home counties, most of whom came within the circle of Pope's friends and acquaintances and to whom Pope considered his own family to belong. Some time before 21 March, 1712, when Pope sold his poem to Lintott, Robert, Lord Petre had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor's hair, and John Caryll had suggested to Pope that he should write a poem to heal the estrangement that followed between the two families:
The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor's hair, was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock.
The incident behind the poem has never been authoritatively tracked down to place and time. It is improbable, but possible, that it happened, as the poem states, at Hampton Court; and the counter-claims of the houses of the Fermors, Petres, or Carylls have never been substantiated." (Twickenham, Vol II, p. 83)
Was Belinda, as the poem hints, willing to marry the Baron? "Arabella may well have been considered as the possible bride for Lord Petre. The rape of the lock may well have been an incident in the period of circumspection--how thorough such circumspection was likely to be may be gathered from the correspondence of Caryll during 1710-11 when he was choosing a wife for his son. If two such families who 'had lived so long in friendship before' are estranged through a fairly trivial incident, it seems there is thunder in the air. All the fun of the poem read very differently when, less than two months before the poem was published, Lord Petre married Catherine Warmsley, a Lancashire heiress some seven or more years younger than Arabella and much richer." (Twickenham 93)
By the time Pope revised the poem in 1717, Lord Petre had died (of smallpox) and Arabella was married. Whatever the original purpose of the poem may have been, by the time Pope finished revising The Rape of the Lock the feud between the families was no longer particularly relevant.

Characters

Belinda - Belinda is based on the historical Arabella Fermor, a member of Pope’s circle of prominent Roman Catholics. Robert, Lord Petre (the Baron in the poem) had precipitated a rift between their two families by snipping off a lock of her hair.
[pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic][pic]The Baron - This is the pseudonym for the historical Robert, Lord Petre, the young gentleman in Pope’s social circle who offended Arabella Fermor and her family by cutting off a lock of her hair. In the poem’s version of events, Arabella is known as Belinda.
Caryl - The historical basis for the Caryl character is John Caryll, a friend of Pope and of the two families that had become estranged over the incident the poem relates. It was Caryll who suggested that Pope encourage a reconciliation by writing a humorous poem.
Goddess - The muse who, according to classical convention, inspires poets to write their verses
Shock - Belinda’s lapdog
Ariel - Belinda’s guardian sylph, who oversees an army of invisible protective deities
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Umbriel - The chief gnome, who travels to the Cave of Spleen and returns with bundles of sighs and tears to aggravate Belinda’s vexation
Brillante - The sylph who is assigned to guard Belinda’s earrings
Momentilla - The sylph who is assigned to guard Belinda’s watch
Crispissa - The sylph who is assigned to guard Belinda’s “fav’rite Lock”
Clarissa - A woman in attendance at the Hampton Court party. She lends the Baron the pair of scissors with which he cuts Belinda’s hair, and later delivers a moralizing lecture.
Thalestris - Belinda’s friend, named for the Queen of the Amazons and representing the historical Gertrude Morley, a friend of Pope’s and the wife of Sir George Browne (rendered as her “beau,” Sir Plume, in the poem). She eggs Belinda on in her anger and demands that the lock be returned.
Sir Plume - Thalestris’s “beau,” who makes an ineffectual challenge to the Baron. He represents the historical Sir George Browne, a member of Pope’s social circle.
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Pope

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Belinda 1777 engraving by Matthew Williams Peters and R. Dunkarton

The rape of the lock by Aubrey Beardsley

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The rape of the lock by Aubrey Beardsley

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The morning dream

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The baron’s prayer

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The cave of spleen

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The battle of beaux and belles

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The dream of Belinda by Henry Fuseli

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The battle of beaux and belles by Louis Du Guernier and Claude Du Bosc

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The cave of spleen by Henry Fuseli

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The frontispiece by Du Guernier

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The toilet by Beardsley

[pic]the new star

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1. Belinda 1836 engraving by Eliza Sharpe and H. Robinson.