Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Rape of the Lock, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Triviality of Court Life
Beauty vs. Poetry
Gender
Religion and Morality
Summary
Analysis
Although everyone else is moved by Belinda’s speech, the Baron is not, as “fate and Jove” have prevented him from truly listening to her. Thalestris also reproaches him, but like “Anna” she is unsuccessful. Belinda, like Dido, is overcome with emotion.
Here Pope creates an extended comparison with Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojan hero Aeneas is forced by Jupiter (“Jove”) to abandon his lover, Dido. Dido ultimately kills herself after her pleadings come to nothing, and her sister Anna is likewise unsuccessful. In this allusion, the Baron is placed in the role of Aeneas, Belinda in the role of Dido, and Thaelstris in the role of Anna. But crucially, while that epic scenario is very high-stakes, this fight over a lock of hair is rather low stakes. Therefore, in creating this comparison, Pope comically emphasizes the triviality of the situation. Meanwhile, the Baron’s being compared with Aeneas influenced by “Jove” and Belinda’s being compared to Dido, who was famously tricked into falling in love by Cupid, reminds the reader of the pervasive supernatural influence over mortals in the poem.
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Clarissa grows fed up with the situation and steps forward to give her thoughts. She argues that the emphasis society puts on women to be merely beautiful is absurd, and that men should only praise women who are both beautiful and virtuous. She says that if vain activities, such as dancing all night and dressing oneself all day, warded off smallpox or stopped one from aging, it would make sense to ignore duty and never to learn anything, and it would actively be moral to take pleasure in beautifying oneself.
Clarissa’s name literally means “clarity,” and this speech is suitably clearheaded. It demonstrates her intellectual and moral authority. This both explicitly and implicitly counters the idea that, as a woman, she is the is the intellectual and moral inferior of men, and that the best thing she can be in life is beautiful – an idea which the court’s obsession with female beauty encourages. However, it’s worth remembering that she helped the Baron snip off the lock by offering him her scissors, so it’s possible to read her speech as a tad self-serving, as a means of excusing her own behavior by suggesting that the lock was never really that important!
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But Clarissa then points out that is not the case. A decline in one’s attractiveness is inevitable—all hair eventually turns gray, every face ages, regardless of the make-up covering it, and anyone who is unmarried must die an old maid. She then says that the most sensible thing to do is to cultivate good humor in the face of aging, which often proves more effective than being flighty or haughty anyway. She sums up her argument by stating that, while exterior beauty may attract the eyes, virtue attracts the soul.
Here Clarissa argues that beauty is without true worth because, unlike virtue, it is ultimately fleeting. Decay awaits all bodies, no matter how beautiful, and so any beauty is itself transient and therefore worthless. And while this does make good sense, Pope later challenges this idea in the final lines of the poem.
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No one is very impressed with this speech. Thalestris calls Clarissa a “prude” and Belinda calls “To arms, to arms!” This begins a kind of courtly battle, where “Fans clap” and “silks rustle” and “bass and treble voices strike the skies.” The narrative voice explains that this is exactly like how the gods of Homer fight, and it resembles a battle between “Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes” and Jove and Neptune. Umbriel is delighted with what’s going on and watches gleefully, while the other “sprites” either watch or join the fray.
Here Pope continues the mock epic style of narration, drawing upon epic battle scenes and comparing the characters’ struggles with those of the gods (“Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes”, “Jove” and “Neptune”). The humor here comes from the fact that this courtly fight is clearly not nearly as impressive or dramatic as an epic battle —here the most frightening sounds are the “clap” of “Fans” and the “rustle” of “Silks”.
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Get the entire The Rape of the Lock LitChart as a printable PDF.
Thalestris hurries through the crowd and “scatters death from both her eyes.” At her glance, two courtiers, Sir Dapperwit and Sir Fopling “perish.” Sir Plume is also “killed” “with a frown” but revives again when she smiles.
Sir Dapperwit and Sir Fopling’s names are humorously apt (they evoke the words “dapper” and “fop,” which are associated with male vanity). This emphasizes both the silliness of the court and the fact that, despite their supposed intellectual and moral authority over women, the men in this poem appear especially foolish. Furthermore, the idea that, in this courtly battle, receiving a “frown” is a kind of metaphorical death reinforces the contrast between a bloody battle of epic poetry and the triviality of this court scuffle.
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Belinda approaches the Baron, ready to attack him. She pinches his nose and then releases, but only after throwing some snuff powder at him, which the gnomes push in the right direction. The Baron inhales the snuff powder, causing him to sneeze loudly. She then pulls out a bodkin, but this is no ordinary bodkin. The metal once belonged to her great-great-grandfather in the form of three seal rings, which was then melted down into a buckle for his widow, then passed down to her grandmother as a child in the form of a whistle, and then was turned into a bodkin for her mother, and then finally passed down to Belinda herself.
The Baron had previously promised that he would never surrender the lock while his nostrils breathed air, so this sneeze comically fulfills that promise. The description of the bodkin meanwhile parodies the tradition in epic poetry of tracing the history of a particular weapon, once again comically comparing the high stakes world of epic with the triviality of the court.
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As Belinda prepares to stab the Baron with her bodkin, he shouts out that one day she, too, will be brought this low, but that he fears nothing in death, other than being separated from her. He then begs to be allowed to live, tortured as he already is by the flames of Cupid. She screams at him to return the lock, as angrily as the character Othello screams for the handkerchief in the play by Shakespeare.
Belinda’s comparison of herself to the tragic figure of Othello as he searches for the handkerchief (he believes this to be proof of his wife’s infidelity, over which he ultimately murders her) once again creates a humorous juxtaposition between an incredibly tense and dramatic situation and her own relatively trivial one.
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But, mysteriously, the lock is nowhere to be found. The narrative voice muses that the lock was perhaps too “blest” for any mortal to possess and then informs the reader that many present assumed it had passed into the realm of the moon, where things lost on earth can supposedly be found, everything from “broken vows” to “lovers’ hearts” to “Cages for gnats.” But the narrative voice says that the “Muse” alone watched the lock ascend into the sky, in the same way that Romulus’ ascent to the heavens was seen only by Proculus. Then it shot along like a shooting star, more brightly than Berenice’s locks, and the sylphs watched on contentedly.
The lock’s ascension to the heavens in the style of the mythical locks of Berenice is the high point of Pope’s increasingly silly classical references. Instead of drawing a comparison with an epic scenario to point out how different the courtly scenario is, now the courtly scenario and the mythological scenario appear to merge.
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The narrative voice continues, affirming that the “beau monde,” or the fashionable world, will gaze on the lock in the skies from “the Mall,” and that lovers will often mistake it for the planet Venus and will send up prayers of love from “Rosamonda’s lake.” It also states that “Partridge” will be able to spot this through “Galileo’s eyes” and with it predict the fates of “Louis” and “the fall of Rome.”
The “Mall” is a promenade in St. James’ Park in London and “Rosamonda’s lake” refers to a pond there favored by those unlucky in love. “Partridge” was a contemporary astronomer and “Galileo’s eyes” refer to a telescope. This slew of modern references further adds to the absolute absurdity of the lock’s ascension to heaven — Pope claims that it will be visible to the public, humorously tying together the mythological and the everyday.
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Finally, the narrative voice addresses Belinda herself, telling her not to be sad over the loss of her lock, since its position in the sky means that it will be all the more admired and will outlive her, never turning gray. It concludes by stating that it will inspire the “Muse,” who will then write her name among the stars.
Here Pope finally seems to make a judgement on what the value of beauty truly is. He agrees with Clarissa’s point that beauty is indeed transient, but his reference to the “Muse,” a goddess of art and poetry, seems to suggest that beauty can be valuable and achieve a degree of immortality by inspiring poets like himself to write works which do indeed live on.
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