The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope: Summary

The poem The Rape of the Lock which is considered to be one of the masterpieces of Pope is the blend of burlesque, witty, humorous, ironic, and morality, which is rare in English poetry, was published in 1712.


Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

In a trivial drawing room episode, Pope made it an epic theme and he succeeded to treat the social customs of the age with an assumed epic seriousness. The poem pictures the artificial tone of the age and the frivolous aspect of femininity. We see in this poem the elegance and the emptiness, the meanness and the vanity, the jealousies, treacheries and the intrigues of the social life of the eighteenth century; and Pope has shown himself as the spokesperson of his age.

The poem from the beginning acquaints us with the idleness, late rising, and fondness for domestic pets of the aristocratic ladies. Belinda wakes up at noon. The superficiality of the ladies, who loved glided chariots, and their ambition to marry peers and dukes, or men holding other high positions, are indicated in the opening canto. The poem brings out the varying vanities of the women. These ladies learnt early in their life, how to roll their eyes and to blush in an intriguing manner. Their hearts were like toy shops which moved from one gallant to another.

He tells us that the vanities of society-ladies do not end even with the death of the ladies. He also gives us a satirical division of ladies of different temperaments into different categories. Pope makes fun of Belinda by telling us that, when she wakes up, her eyes first open on a love letter in which letter writer has spoken of "wounds, charms, and ardors", the poet laughs at the conventional vocabulary of those love letters. The poet ridicules women's excessive attention to self-decoration. Belinda is described as commencing her toilet operations with a prayer to the cosmetic powers. At her dressing table is "the various offerings of the world" - India's diamond, perfumes of Arabia, white comb of ivory, and "pins, puffs, powders, patches and Bibles". Ladies are told to take special pins to curl their hair.

A woman's tantrums are satirized in which Belinda's reaction to clipping of a lock of her hair is described. Lightning flashes from her eyes and screams of horror from her tear the sky. The superficiality of the ladies of the time is ridiculed in the lines in which the domestic pets of the ladies are equated with their husbands. The death of the domestic pet caused as much grief to a lady of fashion as the death of her husband would have caused. And even the breaking of a China-vessel in the house had the same effect. The women's tendency quickly to give way to sorrow and grief is ridiculed in the lines, which describe the contents of the bag and of the phial, which Umbriel brings from the cave of Spleen. The contents are sighs, sobs, soft sorrows, melting grief and flowing tears. The moral bankruptcy of the ladies if further ridiculed when Thalestris points out the need for sacrificing everything, even chastity, for the sake of maintaining a good reputation.

In one of the stanzas, Baron is described as building an alter a love and setting fire to it with his amorous sighs and with tender love letters. The Baron's worship of love here is comparable to Belinda's worship of the cosmetic powers. The conversation of ladies and knights at the court amuses us by its emptiness and shallowness. The talk generally centered round dance-parties, court visits, and sex-scandal. The pauses in conversation were filled with fun, swinging, singing, laughing etc. The hollowness of the upper classes of the time exposed to mockery. The Judge and jurymen who all the time hurries to get back are also not spared by the poet. Coffee making ceremony is also ridiculed in the poem because of the extravagant importance that it receives at the cost of serious concerns of life.

The satire in The Rape of the Lock on aristocratic manners is a commentary on polite society in general, and on fashionable women in particular and to sum up in Mathew Arnold's phrase, poem is a criticism of life, "under the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."

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Sharma, K.N. "The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope: Summary." BachelorandMaster, 20 Oct. 2013, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/the-rape-of-the-lock.html.