The Triviality of Court Life
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” recounts a seemingly trivial episode of 18th-century royal court life. Belinda, a beautiful and charming young woman, spends a day at court where she encounters the Baron, an aristocrat greatly taken with her beauty. The Baron snips off one of the two large curls into which Belinda has styled her hair, and this prompts her to begin a kind of courtly war, demanding the Baron return…
read analysis of The Triviality of Court Life
Beauty vs. Poetry
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” offers a satirical glimpse into 18th-century court life, emphasizing society’s focus on beauty and appearance. Centered around the experience of a beautiful young woman, Belinda, who loses a lock of her hair to the scissors of an infatuated Baron, “The Rape of the Lock” steadily becomes sillier and sillier as it goes along and the characters descend into a kind of pretend battle over the lock…
read analysis of Beauty vs. Poetry
Gender
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” follows a beautiful but vain young woman named Belinda, who loses a lock of her remarkable hair to a nobleman known as the Baron. Belinda’s furious reaction allows Pope to poke fun at her vanity. But it is also possible to read the poem as largely sympathetic to Belinda as a figure whose concern for her looks stems from the pressure put on her by a…
read analysis of Gender
Religion and Morality
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is perhaps not the most obvious place to turn for an understanding of religious culture in early 18th-century England, but the poem is full of moral questions about religious life and values. By the 18th century when this poem was written, England’s last Catholic monarch had been deposed, and England was once more a Protestant nation. In this time, Protestants bitterly criticized Catholics, believing that Catholics had strayed…
read analysis of Religion and Morality
