Page 232 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 24: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

After the game, coffee is served to the ladies and gentlemen at Hampton Court. The vapors of the Notes
coffee inspire the Baron with new strategies for stealing Belinda’s locks. With the assistance of
Clarissa, who presents him with her scissors, he endeavors to cut Belinda’s hair. He fails three times
to clip her lock from behind, without her knowledge; the Sylphs frustrate his every attempt. They
intervene by blowing the hair out of danger and tugging on her earrings to make her turn around.
In a last-ditch effort to protect his charge, Ariel accesses Belinda’s mind with the intent to warn her,
but he is shocked to find “an early lover lurking at her heart” (144). Belinda’s strong attraction to
the Baron places her beyond Ariel’s control, and he retreats, defeated. The scissors’ blades finally
close on the curl. As the shears close, a Sylph gets in the way and is cut in two. As a supernatural
being the Sylph is easily repaired; the curl, however, cannot be restored. The Baron celebrates his
victory while Belinda’s “screams of horror rend the affrighted skies” (156).

Analysis
Pope’s rendering of the card game as a heroic battle advances his epic parody and foreshadows the
scuffle over the lock in the fifth canto. He again figures Belinda as an epic hero, and the extended
metaphor of the game as a battle reinforces her masculine approach. During the game, Belinda’s
strategy is aggressive and ambitious, and Pope shows Belinda’s desire for the recognition that the
“battle” will bring to her: “Belinda now, whom thirst of fame invites, / Burns to encounter two
adventurous knights / And swells her breast with conquests yet to come” (25-8). In keeping with the
martial theme, Pope portrays Belinda as a cunning general: “The skillful nymph reviews her force
with care” (45). He further depicts her cards—her army—as virile male characters: “Now move to
war her sable Matadores / In show like leaders of the swarthy Moors” (47-8). Pope emphasizes this
hyper-masculine depiction of Belinda when she wins the game. Rather than graciously acknowledge
her victory with modest reserve, Belinda gloats over the losers: “The nymph exulting fills with shouts
the sky” (99). Unlike the ten years of violent combat over Troy in The Iliad, however this evening’s
card game is the pastime of young aristocrats. By elevating this trivial amusement with the language
of the epic struggle between two civilizations, Pope suggests that the bravery once exhibited on the
battlefield by Greek and Trojan heroes is now limited to the petty games and flirtations of the upper
classes.
The heroic theme extends to the severing of the lock. The Baron’s three attempts to cut Belinda’s
hair mirror the hero’s trials before completing his quest, which Pope emphasizes at the end of the
canto by comparing the Baron’s victory to the conquest of Troy. Likewise Clarissa’s arming of the
Baron with her sewing scissors evokes the tradition of lovers’ farewells before battle. Of course, the
theft of Belinda’s hair is an insignificant squabble in comparison to the abduction of Helen and a
decade of war.
With the complicity of Clarissa in the severing of Belinda’s lock, Pope introduces a criticism of the
relationships between women, which he explores in the poem’s sexual allegory. Clarissa’s willingness
to participate in the metaphoric “rape” of Belinda suggests that rather than a sisterhood united
against male sexual advances, women seek to undermine each other in the competition to find a
suitable husband. Belinda’s sexual fall would remove her from the marriage market, ensuring less
competition for rich or titled young men such as the Baron. Of course, a woman does not have to
compromise her virtue to lose her honor, which Pope depicts during the gossip at the beginning of
the canto: “At every word a reputation dies” (16). In this society, the loss of reputation has much the
same result as sexual transgression. Pope’s depiction of unkind womanly attitudes towards each
other serves to criticize society’s sexual double-standard in which a woman must attract a husband
without compromising her virtue.
In the third canto Pope expands his social critique beyond the trivial entertainments and petty
squabbles of the aristocracy. Using the structure of the heroic couplet (rhyming pairs of lines in
iambic pentameter), he creates parallel constructions that expose the harsh realities of life outside of
the amusements of Hampton Court Palace. He describes Hampton Court as the place where Queen
Anne “dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea” (8). Here Pope employs a zeugma, a

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