The Rape of the Lock

The poem of The Rape of the Lock satirises a minor incident of life, by comparing it to the epic world of the gods, and is based on an event recounted to Alexander Pope by his friend John Caryll.

Arabella Fermor and her suitor, Lord Petre, were each a member of aristocratic recusant Catholic families, at a time in England when, under such laws as the Test Act, all denominations except Anglicanism suffered legal restrictions and penalties.

He utilised the character Belinda to represent Arabella and introduced an entire system of "sylphs", or guardian spirits of virgins, a parodised version of the gods and goddesses of conventional epic.

The abduction of Helen of Troy becomes here the theft of a lock of hair; the gods become minute sylphs; the § Description of Achilles' shield becomes an excursus on one of Belinda's petticoats.

He also uses the epic style of invocations, lamentations, exclamations and similes, and in some cases adds parody to imitation by following the framework of actual speeches in Homer's Iliad.

Although the poem is humorous at times, Pope keeps a sense that beauty is fragile, and emphasises that the loss of a lock of hair touches Belinda deeply.

An imperfect copy having been offered to a Bookseller, you had the good nature for my sake to consent to the publication of one more correct: This I was forced to, before I had executed half my design, for the Machinery was entirely wanting to complete it.

The Machinery, Madam, is a term invented by the Critics, to signify that part which the Deities, Angels, or Dæmons are made to act in a poem: For the ancient poets are in one respect like many modern ladies: let an action be never so trivial in itself, they always make it appear of the utmost importance.

I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a lady; but 'tis so much the concern of a poet to have his works understood and particularly by your sex, that you must give me leave to explain two or three difficult terms.

The best account I know of them is in a French book called Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its title and size is so like a novel, that many of the fair sex have read it for one by mistake.

The human persons are as fictitious as the airy ones, and the character of Belinda, as it is now managed, resembles you in nothing but in Beauty.In the beginning of this mock-epic, Pope declares that a "dire offence" (Canto 1 line 1) has been committed.

Ariel, disturbed by the impending event although not knowing what it will be, summons many sylphs to her and instructs them to guard Belinda from anything that may befall her, whether she "forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade, Or lost her heart, or necklace, at a ball" (line 108–109).

This happens three times, but in the end the Baron succeeds (also cutting a Sylph in two although Pope reassures us, parodying a passage in Paradise Lost, that "airy substance soon unites again" [line 152]).

Pope was familiar with John Ozell's English-language translation (made in 1710) of Alessandro Tassoni's early 17th-century Italian mock-heroic poem La secchia rapita (The Trophy Bucket[8]).

[19] Early Italian verse translations of the poem include Andrea Bonducci's Il Riccio Rapito (Florence 1739), followed by Antonio Schinella Conti's version, begun much earlier and finally published in Venice in 1751.

[24] Scandinavian versions appeared near the start of the 19th century, beginning with the Swedish Våldet på Belindas låck (Stockholm, 1797) by Johan Lorens Odhelius (1737–1816).

[25] In 1717 Giles Jacob published his bawdy parody, The Rape of the Smock, the plot of which turns on voyeurism and enforced seduction,[26] building on erotic undertones present in Pope's poem which were to be taken up by its illustrators, and reached an apotheosis in Aubrey Beardsley's work.

[28] Although the work of this artist has been described as unimaginative,[29] he goes beyond his literal brief in making Belinda sleep in unwarranted décolletage in the first canto, while in the second giving the "painted vessel" on its way down the Thames the tilted perspective of the Ship of Fools.

Furthermore, Du Guernier's frontispiece owes its iconography to a print by Étienne Baudet after a painting by Francesco Albani of Venus at her Toilette, making for an identification of Belinda with the goddess.

[31] It has been observed, however, that the places they depict are not specifically English and that the scene of the game of ombre in Canto 3 is "clearly based on a Leipzig coffee-house", complete with lapdogs tumbling on the floor.

[38] In the following century, Charles Robert Leslie's 1854 period piece, Sir Plume Demands the Restoration of the Lock, takes place in a cluttered drawing room in which the kind of lap dog present in many previous pictures feeds from a dish on the floor.