rape of the lock Flashcards
why did pope write the poem?
there was a conflict between two Catholic families, the Fermors and the Petres. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair and was boasting about it. John Caryll asked Pope to write somethign which might laugh the families together
how does pope suggest to make a hero in his ‘a receit to Make an Epick Poem’
take all the best qualities you can find in all the best celebrated Heroes of Antiquity; if they will not be reduced to a consistancy, ly ‘em all on a heap upon him
how does pope suggest to make an undercharacter in his ‘a receit to Make an Epick Poem’
gather them from Homer and Virgil
main message of sarpedons speech to glaucus
- contemplates the nature of glory
- calls glaucus to battle
- everyone dies and suffers, its better to die in battle and die honourably than die of old age
what was pope working on at the same time as rack of the lock?
homer’s illiad
overlaps between clarissa’s speech and sarpedons and glaucus
‘admir’d as heroes, and as gods obey’d’
‘but since, alas, ignoble Age must come,
disease, and death’s inexorable doom’
what was the pseudonym Pope adopted when writing a key to the Lock?
Esdras Barnivelt
what is said in the key to the lock regarding authorial intention (and how can this be linked to another narrative text?)
‘when the meaning of any thing is dubious, one can no way better judge of the true intent of it, than by considering who is the author, what is his character in general, and his disposition in particular
what is the main message in A key to the lock?
Pope, as a catholic, wanted to write a papist piece which attacked the state.
He suggests that Belinda is a metaphor for the Queen
why did pope add Clarissa’s speech + according to who?
An eighteenth-century reader would recognize that Pope was now giving ‘the moral’ demanded by theorists and so anticipating the objections of Dennis, who had found Pope’s purpose not sufficiently clear
(Reuben Brower)
what is editorially significant about Clarissa’s speech
it was added later, in pope’s collected Works in 1717
How does being modelled on Sarpedon’s speech to Glaucus affect the value of Clarissa’s speech?
‘Sarpedon’s nobility is a measure of Clarissa’s lack of it’ (Andrew Varney)
why is syntactically ambigious about the description of Belinda’s necklace
whether the jews/ infidels kiss/ admire her breast OR the necklace
Pope on imitating milton
the imitators of Milton, like most other imitators, are not copies but caricatures of their original
- Johnson on novelty in Rape of the lock
- what can this be used as an argument for
‘new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new’
- colonisation: new things (products, places, people) are made familiar. In this colonial narrative, Belinda’s body is the colonial subject to be taken
size of the poem and according to who?
we seem to be watching Belinda’s world through the wrong end of the telescope. Everything seems to be miniturised (Hammond)
what is the cave of spleen episode? according to who
‘a journey into a monstrous womb that represents the dark side of Belinda’s sexualized imagination’ Hammond
in which ways is the rape of the lock ‘unpleasantly reminiscient of some 18th-century pornography’?
- frequent use double entendre to emphases the sexuality of words
- Belinda is ‘drugged up on coffee’ not fully in control of her faculties when the rape happens
- clarissa can be seen as a brothel madam (for organising the operation) (hammond)
addison in the spectator on the dress of women
The single Dress of a Woman of Quality is often the Product of a hundred Climates. The Muff and the Fan come together from the different Ends of the Earth. The Scarf is sent from the Torrid Zone, and the Tippet from beneath the Pole. The Brocade Petticoat rises out of the Mines of Peru, and the Diamond Necklace out of the Bowels of Indostan.
what does pope believe you need to do with words in poetry?
you cant use simple ones, but must use complicated (e.g. uses forfex instead of scissors)
what is periphrasis
talk about something simple in a complicated way
how does pope merge the modern and the epic worlds?
through his amalgamation of domestic objects, in an epic form.
in epics it would be very rape to come across objects (unless symbolic objects).
how does pope mock the symbolic object (of epics)
masculine object are rendered childish/ feminine (e.g. Agamemnon’s sceptre turned into a bodkin)
what is the effect of pope’s zeugma
it initally attempts to trick us into finding a simple binary which allows us to distinguish between moral/ trivial objects. This erodes away, along with the zeugma
what does Pope question (objects/ people)
when does something become a commodity, when is a alive. Hair: technically alive, but can be seen as a commodity
-the baron wants to commodity the hair
what is the purpose of the last rhyming couplet?
this foregrounds the complicated relationship between the commodities/ living things. By writing about Belinda’s hair/ her story, it becomes commodified, however this allows it ton be preserved forever.
what is the effect of Clarissa’s speech on both the reader and the characters
- annoying to the characters: goes unheard, its ignored
- boring and irritating to the reader: it is an interruption in the key moment/ climax of the poem
why can Clarissa’s speech not be read seriously
- must be read through the satirical lens through which we see the rest of the poem
- the lighthearted nature of the rest of the poem makes it stand out as disjointed/ artificially superimposed
- actual a mock of the critics who believed that all literature has to be didactic
sitter on Pope’s use of voice
the first step to appreciating Pope’s voice is to think of the word as plural: Pope wrote in many voices
why is pope’s use of heroic couplets interesting?
what narrative text can this be linked to?
- they hadnt been used in around 200 years
- similar to Paradise lost in regards to the epic form. Traditionally used in classical poetry and then adopted by Spenser to write the faerie queene, there hadnt ever been a christian epic before
what did pope say was the role of rhyme/ heroic couplets in annecdotes?
-‘i have nothing to say for rhyme, but that i doubt whether a poem can support itself without it.’
how can Pope’s view on rhyme be associated to the content of the rape of the lock, and then linked to other narrative texts?
- Rape of the lock: Belinda is able to come with the trauma of her rape by finding comfort in the regularity of the rhyme- much like what Wordsworth suggests about metre in his preface to lyrical ballads
- link to how the form of the wasteland (one voice taking over another) is comforting to the characters/ prevents them from disintegrating
how does the content of the poem link to the form (cynthia wall) and example
- the themes that occupy those social and psychological spaces are reproduced in the structures of the heroic couplets themselves
- ‘sol thro’ white Curtains shot a tim’rous ray’: this line shows the personified male sun penetrating into the most private of space, as the poet penetrates the most private of dreams
what is belinda’s mind according to Wall
a strange and transformative place of its own (cave of spleen, repetition where things become themselves e.g. with sword knots sword knots strive)
visual and grammaticial description of the sylphs (wall)
3, boundaries, couplet structure, role of present participles
- the description of the sylphs flutters, both visually and grammatically, dissolving the usual boundaries between time and space
- the description, the action, the verbs themselves create images that seems to slide beyond the exigencies of the couplet structure itself
- the present participles capture a temporal transience [and]… turn structural boundaries porous
the extent of the influence that translating homer had on his writing of rape of the lock (which critic)
(hugh shankman) the rape of the lock, would probably never have been written had Pope not been reading Homer by day and meditating upon him by night
link between illiad and rofl (pride/ destruction) and who says it
hugh shankman; both poems, specifically explore the ways in which it is the pride of those admired most by society that is responsible for social disorder […] both Achilles and Belinda, in their reactions, become as guilty as the offending party and […] do more to threaten the stability of the social order than did the original offenders
what is the effect of Pope dressing Belinda as an epic hero?
it enables pope to ‘combine traditional gibes at female vanity with celebration of tje imperial commerce’
what is the issue with Pope’s presentation of women?
-too dichotomous: one the one hand there is Thalestris, the amazonian named who incites aggression, on the other, clarissa (whose name connotes brightness) who is overly moralising (valerie rumbold)
feminist reading of the ending of the poem
- Pope foregrounds the superiority of masculine art due to its eternity over the ephemeral/ transient nature of feminine beauty (valerie
