Page 248 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 24: Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock

that Pope’s supernatural beings, who are supposed to imitate Homer’s deities and Milton’s angels, Notes
are tiny, frail and powerless. Although they are an amalgam of epic machinery, Rosicrucian lore, an
English tale…, they are essentially Pope’s inventions. As for epic battles, the game of ombre at the
centre of the poem is presented in terms of a mighty epic contest, catching repeated echoes of Trojan
War and the war in the heavens. As for the epic underworld, there is an effective counterpart in the
Cave of Speen in “The Rape of the Lock”, which is contrasted with the Golden glittering beauty of
Belinda’s delightful environment.
Pope was also mindful of the fact that a mock-epic should have a moral just as an epic does. Clarissa’s
speech in “The Rape of the Lock” opens out the moral of the poem about the fashionable society.
The speech can be taken as an attempt to redefine for contemporary women a concept of honour,
which apply to male epic heroes. In the world of belles, honour becomes courage to face decay with
humour and duty, to use the power of beauty well.
Pope’s age is known as the “Augustan age,” the first half of the eighteenth century saw an explosive
rise in literary production. Due to the influence of Enlightenment thought, literary works during
this period often focused on explicitly political and social themes, allowing for an increase in the
production of political writings of all genres. Among the most popular genres were both moral
works (sermons, essays, dialogues, etc.) and satire. Satire in particular flourished in a variety of
forms: prose, poetry, drama. Some of the satires produced during this period commented on the
general flaws of the human condition while others specifically critiqued certain individuals and
policies. All, however, were transparent statements about the greater political and social environment
of the eighteenth century.
During the neoclassical impulse of the period, eighteenth-century satirists described themselves as
the heirs of the Roman poets Horace and Juvenal. Horatian satire tends to take a gentle and more
sympathetic approach towards the satiric subject, which it identifies as folly. Augustan examples of
Horatian satire include Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels (1726). By contrast Juvenalian satire identified the object of its satire as evil, launching a
contemptuous invective to ridicule it. Characterized by irony and sarcasm, this satiric mode rejected
humor in favor of moral outrage. Eighteenth-century examples of Juvenalian satire include Swift’s
A Modest Proposal (1729) and his misogynist poems such as “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to
Bed” (1731), “The Progress of Beauty” (1719-20), and “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732).
One of the most popular satiric modes during the Augustan period was the mock epic, a literary
form that creates a burlesque of the classical epic. The satirist imports the formula characteristic of
the epic—the invocation of a deity, supernatural machinery, etc.—to discuss a trivial subject. The
use of classical epic devices thereby establishes an ironic contrast between the work’s structure and
its content, exposing the triviality of the satirical subject. The best-known mock epics in the English
language are John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1676), an attack on Thomas Shadwell and Pope’s The
Rape of the Lock. Pope’s The Dunciad (1728, 1742) also took mock-heroic form and drew on Dryden’s
satire on Shadwell to attack Lewis Theobald (1728) and, later, Colley Cibber (1742).
Several like-minded Augustan satirists formed the Scriblerus Club, founded in 1712. Its members
included Jonathan Swift; Alexander Pope; John Gay; John Arbuthnot; Henry St. John, Lord
Bolingbroke; and Thomas Parnell. Their professed object was to satirize the abuses of learning,
which led to the publication of The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Both Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels and Pope’s The Dunciad grew out of projects for this group.

Self Assessment

Multiple Choice Questions:
1. Who is Shock?
(a) Belinda’s horse (b) Belinda’s lapdog
(c) The Baron’s horse (d) The poet’s muse

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