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Ridicule in Alexander Pope's the Rape of the Lock

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Ridicule in Alexander Pope's the Rape of the Lock Ridicule in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock Vilde Aurora Eriksen Masteroppgave i allmenn litteraturvitenskap Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk Det humanistiske fakultet UNIVERSITETET I OSLO Mai 2018 1 Table of Content Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................... 3 That long disease, my life – the poet and his work ............................................................................................. 5 Ridicule and reality ........................................................................................................................................................ 6 Mimesis ............................................................................................................................................................................. 9 Imagination and make-believe ................................................................................................................................. 11 Spheres of reality .......................................................................................................................................................... 15 Myth ............................................................................................................................................................................ 16 Real-life representation – the eighteenth-century world ............................................................................. 19 Fictional reality ........................................................................................................................................................ 21 Keys to the lock ....................................................................................................................................................... 23 Myth and Machinery ........................................................................................................................................................ 25 The light Militia of the lower Sky – the sylphs and their function ............................................................... 27 A view on women ........................................................................................................................................................ 33 Prudes and nymphs ...................................................................................................................................................... 36 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 38 Having it both ways – on the mock-epic ................................................................................................................... 42 Mock-epic – epic .......................................................................................................................................................... 43 On the adventures of Belinda, or the day of a coquette ................................................................................... 45 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................... 54 A different view on the epic ................................................................................................................................. 54 Values and virtues ............................................................................................................................................................. 57 Brief editorial history .................................................................................................................................................. 57 The speeches and their speakers – Sarpedon and Clarissa .............................................................................. 59 Text and content ........................................................................................................................................................... 60 Untying the satire ......................................................................................................................................................... 66 Conventions ................................................................................................................................................................... 69 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................................................... 72 A constant comic? ........................................................................................................................................................ 72 A double ridicule .......................................................................................................................................................... 73 A ridiculous reality ...................................................................................................................................................... 78 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................................................... 81 2 Introduction The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor’s hair, was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock, which was well received, and had its effect in the two families.1 This small comment tells the story of how one of the most interesting poems of the eighteenth century came to be written – The Rape of the Lock. It is also an instruction on how to appreciate it. In his own words, Alexander Pope shows us how he himself considers his most famous poem: as a humorous attempt to solve an unfortunate situation. This paradoxical approach, using laughter to deal with offence, runs through every part of the poem and gives rise to the chief question concerning it: Should readers laugh at this or take it seriously? The ambition is made clear: Pope will through humour point out and explain the misunderstanding and by the explanation make Miss Arabella and her family forgive and forget the offence that has so upset her. But even though the tone of the letter is good humoured, the tone of The Rape of the Lock is rather quite sharp. Most verses are comic, but they never the less remain criticism. It seems clear that the way in which Pope will make Arabella realise her exaggeration, is through ridicule. The world we encounter in The Rape of the Lock gives the impression of a society that has been carried away by the same extravagance and luxury that defines it, and consequently lost contact with what really matters. The word impression is very fitting. When I started to work on this thesis, I, for some reason, initially thought that the term ridiculous was obvious, and that explaining it would be easy. I thought it would be easy for the same reason that it turned out, on the contrary, to be so difficult: there is a strong impression of ridicule hovering over the poem, and even though impressions seem evident to the individual it turns out that they 1 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men (London, 1820), 20-21. 3 are not. Therefore,it is the ambition of the thesis to answer the question: if The Rape of the Lock is a ridiculous poem, what makes it so? The quotation is a good introduction to the poem’s characters, action and motive. In the summer of 1711, young Lord Robert Petre cut a lock of hair off Arabella Fermor’s unobliging head. This episode started a series of events that would turn out to be of serious consequence to many members of the Roman Catholic community in London. Arabella was deeply offended and the warm relationship between her and Lord Petre froze, as well as that of their respective families. Given the size and vulnerability of the Catholic community in a Prostestant country, someone had to end the feud. This someone was John Caryll, a cousin of Lord Petre and a friend of Pope’s. The twenty-two-year-old poet wrote a poem in two cantos published a year later in 1712. That it was “well-received and had its effect in the two families” would eventually be the case, but when the poem was published in May 1712, the result was that the Fermors got even more offended than before because of Pope’s presentation of Arabella. The Fermors accordingly saw the literary Belinda as a silly, frivolous and vulgar woman. And, in the meantime, Lord Petre married someone else. During the following years, The Rape of the Lock was revised and republished two times more; these revisions made the characters in the poem resemble the original characters even less. By the last edition in 1717, Lord Petre had died of smallpox. The initial ambition, reuniting an estranged couple through laughter, had been replaced by the far grander ambition of making the already well-received and popular poem perfect. The result was a five-canto “heroi-comical”, or mock epic. Still, the story had not gone too far astray from the original. From the very
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