The son of a linen merchant, Pope was a member of the rising middle class of eighteenth-century English society. His family’s prosperity ensured that he was well-educated, and he became one of very few Englishmen of his day to make his living entirely from publishing. That he was such a prolific writer is remarkable given that he suffered from ill health throughout his career; a rare form of tuberculosis as a boy resulted in a severe curvature of the spine so that he never grew beyond some four-and-a-half feet in height. He also suffered almost constantly from headaches. And yet Pope lived to the age of 56, a pretty fair span by eighteenth-century standards.
Pope’s major works include a translation of Homer’s Odyssey and a six-volume edition of the works of
William Shakespeare. But he is best known for his verse satires, of which The Rape of the Lock is the most famous.
The eighteenth century has been called the Age of Reason or Enlightenment for its advancements in scientific knowledge and philosophy. The Copernican revolution in cosmology that placed the sun rather than the earth at the center of the known universe had become universally accepted. Telescope technology, which had allowed Galileo to obtain evidence supporting Copernicus’ theory of a heliocentric universe, was becoming ever more refined. The invention of its exploratory counterpart, the microscope, hailed the rise of modern biological and chemical sciences, revealing a world teeming with creatures hitherto unknown and leading to the discoveries of molecular chemistry and atomic structure.
This greater understanding of the material universe was
supported by two major philosophical movements: empiricism and rationalism, or
what we might call philosophies of sense and of reason. Empiricists held (and
hold) that all knowledge arises from sensory experience of the material world,
while rationalists believe that what we know can be ascertained by strictly
following the logic innate to our reasoning minds. This is a bit of an
oversimplication, of course. For one thing, the empirical and rational schools
of philosophy have often been (and continue to be) at odds with each other. What
they have in common—a still revolutionary idea in Pope’s day—is a
rejection of received knowledge and wisdom, and an embrace of first-hand
experience and empirical data as our best guides for understanding the nature of
reality. Recall what Satan says to Eve in Paradise
Lost—“Look on me”—and what
she in turn says to her husband: “Of my experience,
Adam, freely taste, / And fear of death deliver to the winds” (9.687 and
9.988-89, my emphases). For Milton, the Fall is in part a fall into empirical
knowledge. As if to make sure we get it, he has his narrator describe Eve, just
prior to eating the fruit, as follows (my emphases):
Fixt on the Fruit she gaz’d, which to behold
Might tempt alone, and in her
ears the sound
Yet rung of his perswasive words, impregn’d
With Reason, to her seeming, and with Truth;
Mean while the hour of Noon drew on, and wak’d
An eager appetite, rais’d by the
smell
So savorie of that Fruit, which with desire,
Inclinable now grown to touch or
taste,
Sollicited her
longing eye ...
This skepticism toward received ideas had a profound impact on the religious and political spheres, leading to major transformations in both. The Toleration Act of 1689, for example, dissolved the all-encompassing authority of the Church of England by granting freedom of worship to Dissenters (the numerous Protestant sects that wanted nothing to do with the state church)—though it should be noted that such freedoms were not explicitly granted to Catholics and Jews, and certainly not to atheists or agnostics.
More significant, perhaps, and also in the same year (1689), was the Bill of Rights which, among other important changes, officially established Parliament rather than the king as the supreme power of the realm.
These momentous developments in science, religion, and politics were accompanied by considerable economic expansion. An enlarged middle class grew prosperous from the benefits of an emerging capitalist economy rooted in greater global trade, new goods and markets, and the continued rise of the British empire and colonial expansion in the U.S., Canada, and India.
As exciting and progressive were such developments, they also introduced a degree of doubt and radical change that many found depressing and frightening. The “new Philosophy,” wrote John Donne many decades earlier, “calls all in doubt.” He was referring in particular to Copernican cosmology, which threatened to upset the beautiful and hierarchical order of the old Ptolemaic universe, as well as the social, political, and religious orders that were based on it. Discoveries in microbiology were in some respects even more unsettling, for they overturned longstanding ideas about the natural world, human bodies included, and revealed just how little we knew about the most fundamental realities of our existence. Philosophical empiricism and rationalism, moreover, forced the question: on what authority do we base our knowledge of the world? Religious beliefs, all traditional sources and forms of wisdom: these were, so to speak, put under the microscope—subjected to the same level of scrutiny that scientists and philosophers applied to material nature and human thought.
For some, this absence of authority included an absence of moral authority, which led to concerns about (and actual) libertinism and cynicism. If, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued, human beings are fundamentally predatory and self-serving, why not indulge the appetites as fully as possible? Hamlet had called man “an angel” and “the paragon of animals”; what if he were more animal than angel?
Economic expansion, moreover, though providing greater
opportunity for a greater number, created losers alongside its many winners.
Commercial exploitation under the emerging capitalist economy benefited some
while leaving others behind. There was equal unrest among the upper classes.
Families whose wealth and prestige derived from lineage—i.e., from their
ties to the ancient English nobility and its vast land titles—resented
the nouveau riche, those mercantile families whose
entrepreneurial efforts were rewarded with increased wealth, prestige, and
power.
Given the skeptical mood toward received knowledge and traditional hierarchies, it is perhaps not surprising that the dominant literary mode during the Enlightenment age was satire.
Satire exposes and ridicules human folly. It can be
lighthearted and humorous, gently mocking the various foibles, hypocrisies,
pretensions, and lapses in reason shared by all. It can also be scathing,
biting, even mean and hateful. The gentler variety was associated with the Roman
writer Horace (1st century bce), the harsher with the
verse invectives of Juvenal (2nd century ce).
Satire deploys a variety of techniques, including
overstatement (and understatement), sarcasm and invective, and ironic
misdirection. Though The Rape of the Lock uses all
of these methods to ridicule its targets, its most prevalent satirical strategy
is to combine the lofty and the lowly—to bring serious matters, revered
traditions, and persons of high social rank into contact with trivial things,
ideas, and persons. The lofty typically is brought low by such association, but
sometimes the opposite obtains: the lowly or trivial is made to look even more
ridiculous when viewed alongide that which is in some sense superior. The most
sophisticated satires manage to cut both ways.
Pope’s poem is a species of satire known as the mock-epic or mock-heroic. We saw something of this in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where the barnyard antics of a
rooster, his hens, and Reynard the Fox are described in the lofty terms of epic
poetry. Here, epic conventions, including many of those featured in Paradise Lost, are used ironically to elevate the
comparatively trivial domain of a fashionable eighteenth-century social
gathering. Rather than epic heroes, the characters in Rape are the beaux mondes (literally “men
of the world”), the fashionable men and women of well-heeled London society. The
battle scenes and heroic deeds amount to no more than a game of cards, exchanges
of wit, and the flirtatious “struggle” between male suitors and disdainful
“coquettes.” The epic “machinery” or gods are mere Sylphs and Gnomes,
insect-like spirits of minute proportion and significance when compared with
Milton’s devils and angels or Homer’s Greek pantheon. Other satirical contrasts
include the epic catalogue of arms or military hardware, here Belinda’s toilette
(her make-up table); the epic feast between battles, here a brief pause for
coffee, gossip, and flirting; and the journey to the underworld, which in
Virgil’s Aeneid sees Aeneas seeking his father
Anchises in Hades, but which here is a sylph’s journey to the Cave of Spleen to
fetch tears and sighs with which Belinda might oppose the gentleman who has
“raped” (i.e. cut off and stolen) a lock of her hair (which also might be a
euphemism for her virginity).
Two general questions to consider as we study the poem
together: