To the Victor Go the Spoils: Pope's Ideology of Violation in "The Rape of the Lock"
Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" creates a dilemma for readers and critics alike. While it is an enduring work of art, encompassing mastery of the heroic couplet with humor and insight, it nonetheless inscribes an ideology of violation. Pope's masterpiece, while on one level sympathetic toward the lack of women's opportunities in a patriarchal society, on the other, perpetuates the commodification of women and, in doing so, violates the reader as well, by including the reader as an implied accomplice to the rhetoric of misogyny.
"The Rape of the Lock" has traditionally been read as a mock heroic criticism of the superficiality inherent within Pope's culture of the time. Pope is intent upon exposing the absurdity of the often superficial context of Augustan era lives. He is aware of the culturally limited parameters placed around women and is, in one sense, sympathetic. He is aware that "she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid" (v.28). Indeed, men are not treated especially well in the poem: the Baron is most surely "barren" and Sir Plume is an idiot. Yet, women in the text seem to remain the object of both ridicule and criticism. Readers continue to think of Belinda in terms of suffering from a type of "fall"; Donald B. Clark argues that Belinda "cannot transcend her own prudishness," and as a result, "she 'falls'" (48).
Further, as Kate Beaird Meyers relates, "when the 'hero' 'rapes' the lock of the egotistical Belinda, he figuratively exposes-castrates an already emasculated ("effeminate") social group. Belinda is the butt of the joke" (43). If both men and women are "guilty" and worthy of criticism, and if Pope is conscious of woman's limited opportunity within the dominant power structure, why does both Pope write Belinda into the text as the butt of a joke and the reader often find so much humor in Belinda's situation?
Even though initially Pope attempts to approach Belinda sympathetically, he trivializes and mocks her and thus, implicitly, all women. Laura Brown shows that Pope trivializes Belinda "throughout the ironic juxtaposition of her [insignificant] story with classical epic" (19). Further, the heroic material of the epic style Pope emulates also trivializes Belinda. "Her trivial, commodified and amoral world is castrated," as Brown notes, "with grandeur of epic, a world of gods and goddesses, of heroes larger than life, where history is made and great nations find their identity" (20).
Pope's patronizing tone is evident even before the "official" poem begins in his letter to Arabella Fermor. Pope "apologizes" to her before the text of the poem begins by stating that the poem "was intended only to divert a few young Ladies, who have good Sense and good Humour enough, to laugh not only at their Sex's little unguarded Follies, but at their own" (217). Pope's misogynistic "apology" subverts his stated intention. As Meyers illustrates, "the choice of 'divert' is perfect: Pope hopes to divert attention away from his act of misogynous judgement and focus it on what he calls the 'folly' of female nature" (45).
Women are, for Pope, laughable creatures in need of appraisal as to their faults. Women are thus both object and subject of ridicule and are even extended the invitation of joining in and enjoying the humor at their own expense.
Pope also views women, as later exemplified in his portrayal of Belinda, as trivial and ignorant beings: "For the ancient Poets are in one respect like many modern Ladies; Let an Action be never so trivial in it self, they always make it appear of the utmost Importance" (217). Pope goes on to explain that he is aware that women are not capable of understanding difficult language, so he will "explain two or three difficult Terms" (217). Pope, however, is overtly "ridiculing women for a lack [of knowledge ] created by the patriarchal society he represents and inviting all his readers to join in his misogyny" (Meyers 45-6). Moreover, the poem is intended for John Caryll and the educated men who will comprise his audience and, as Meyers explains, "Pope's humor illustrates the fact that women did not know the esoteric terminology of epic machinery because they were denied the opportunity to learn it" (45).
As a result of Pope's false premises, his qualitative preface rings untrue. Furthermore, as Meyers (in discussing Susan Schibanoff's contentions concerning the subject) relates, the "letter actually makes the poem more offensive":
Authorial apologies to the female reader for anti-feminist texts
are . . . something other than heart-felt laments. They are
attempts both to intimidate her and . . . to immasculate her.
They warn her that the written traditions of antifeminism have
contemporary custodians who will not allow these texts to
disappear. (45)
Pope employs terminology throughout the poem which heightens the view of women as commodified object, necessarily reliant upon and subject to men. While men are "Peers," women are often either "coquettes" or "Prudes." Women suffer from "faults" and "fem ale errors." Women are "degraded," men "The Victor." Men have "Wits" which are measured against "the Lady's Hair," but as women's brains are "vacant," there is little surprise that the "Wits mount up, the Hairs subside" (v.74). Pope's rhetoric is a discourse of violation in which women become the signified and the reader remains outside of the text, yet serves as privileged insider to the ideology of the patriarchal cultural elite. Pope's Everywoman, Belinda, is, as Ellen Pollak articulates, "an empty vessel laden down with a cargo of disembodied object" (432) and the reader is invited to join in Pope's criticism of her materialistic superficiality. Admittedly, Pope is critical of more than just Belinda, but as Pollak explains,
though Pope criticizes the sterility of a world in which the
signs of things have actually become substitutes for the things
themselves, where virtue has been reduced to reputation and men
themselves to swordknots, where in effect people live in a
materialistic and metonymic void, he never does controvert the
premise that female sexuality is a material property over which
man has a natural claim. (432-3)
Female sexuality is equated with commodities in "The Rape of the Lock," and Belinda's dressing scene in the first canto serves as evidence. Women are valued for their beauty, yet must resort, as Belinda does, to a type of external self-construction in order to attain peak performance. With the help of "Cosmetic Pow'rs," "a heav'nly Image...appears" (i.124-5). Belinda appropriates the "various Off'rings of the world" (i.130), and as "awful Beauty puts on all it Arms" (i.139) with the aid of combs, pins, "Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux," (i.138) "the Fair each moment rises in her Charmes" (i.140). Pope convincingly makes the point that Belinda, at least in the eyes of men, is not "naturally" beautiful. This scene in the poem bears striking similarity to Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room," in its cataloguing and its cosmetic emphasis. Like Celia, Belinda is now a type of elaborately contrived monster. As Laura Claridge relates, "Belinda, as an object embodying Pope's fears of woman, enacts the position of woman as potential monster, a 'power less transcendent of nature than her male counterpart' and therefore more treacherous in her artifice" (130). The result of this passage is that, as Brown contends,
Belinda's beauty can only be seen through the commodities that she wears . . . . The poem identifies her in terms of products of
mercantilist expansion; and it begins to develop a rhetoric of the
commodity through which she and her culture can be described –
a language of commodity fetishism where objects become the only
reality. (13-4)
Belinda's "Labours" result in a "purer Blush," (i.143) yet this natural blush is tenuous at best, as it is simply a cosmetic aid to enhance her "natural" blush. However, for Pope, even this false blush signals danger. "Belinda's art," as Claridge assert s, "is so dangerous that her artfully constructed face can cause us to 'forget' 'Female Errors' (ii.17,18); in fact, this face conduces to the 'Destruction of Mankind' (ii.19). She is a trap" (132). This is why, as Meyers shows,
Pope must stress such points as the artificiality of Belinda's
"purer" blushes, created by rouge, not by Nature (i.143). It is
crucial that woman be separated from Nature -- kept in her
place,
threatened with ostracism, convinced of her ignorance, denied
knowledge of her strength beyond cultural forms. (46)
Belinda, as a commodity herself solely because of her gender, heightens the inscription of her own marginalization unknowingly. By taking on, literally, the characteristics of mercantile imperialism which she then hides behind, by painting herself into a socially prescribed and acceptable text, she implicitly endorses commodity fetishism and the inscription of the marginalization of women and becomes, both literally and symbolically, a walking commodity. Thus, "woman's display of beauty" through Belinda , as Pollak explains, can be
identified with man's display of booty . . . . While according
to rational analysis Pope's coquette is "masculinized" female,
by symbolic accretion she is a complex manifestation of
male prowess itself -- its inspiration, its conquered object,
its result. (435)
Pope further encodes an ideology of violation through the device of the Sylphs. While critics such as Elizabeth Gurr argue that "the function of the sylphs is to define the bounds of acceptable behavior" (32), the fact remains that the Sylphs are the spirits of dead coquettes and, as such, are pale mirror images (and ineffectual at that) of women. The Sylphs rally to Belinda's aid, guard and watch over her, and attempt to ensure that she will stay within the acceptable parameters of chastity. Yet the Sylphs are textual non-entities. They are mere wisps of what women "should be"; as soon as Belinda recognizes (consciously or no) alleged sexual longing, the Sylphs are forced to retire.
The Sylphs' very inability to resist perpetuates Pope's literature of violation. Those women who behave "coquettishly" will maintain ghost-like lives of deprivation, unable to achieve anything. The reader, again, is entrusted with Pope's dark moral and implicitly encouraged to agree and condone. Pope, as Meyers contends, pushes an agenda of "'the cult of passive womanhood'":
his linking of Belinda to the Sylphs can be read as a warning to
all women that they will only enjoy the protection of male
society as long as they co-operate in the "inviolable
preservation" of their chastity. The woman who strays loses the
protection of the same society that led her astray in the first
place. (46)
The final irony, however, surrounding the Sylphs is, as C.E. Nicholson maintains, that they "cannot protect Belinda herself. The elaborate fiction of their particularized domain collapses when she succumbs, 'in spite of her Art,' to the natural occurrence of sexual desire" (72). Finally, as Claridge submits, the Sylphs "remind us of the ways in which women function as transparent signifiers who transport meaning for others: they wait upon meaning, whether to be filled with child or penis or pen" (133). Pope's use of the Sylphs as a textual device, then, furthers the patronizing "moral" he alludes to throughout the text and, in the process, further marginalizes women. Pope's reliance upon the reader, moreover, to share in his discourse assumes: 1) the reader is male and therefore intelligent enough to appreciate the dynamics of gender-based power structures, 2) the reader is female and in need of his moral," or 3) the reader is a sympathizer, regardless of gender.
Pope's willingness to participate in and endorse the commodifcation of women, and his desire to include the reader in his "joke," is further illuminated in the final two cantos. After Belinda has been "raped," we are exposed to the Cave of Spleen episode . We see surreal Freudian examples of quite possibly Belinda (and perhaps all women) in the state of "degraded Toast" (iv.109). In a scene reminiscent of William Burroughs,
Unnumber'd Throngs on ev'ry side are seen
Of Bodies chang'd to various Forms by Spleen.
Here living Teapots stand, one Arm held out,
One bent; the Handle this, and that the Spout:
Pipkin there like Homer's Tripod walks;
Here prove with Child, as pow'rful Fancy works,
and maids turn'd Bottels, call aloud for Corks.
(iv.47-54)
Women are receptacles, waiting to be filled by male corks. While both genders are assigned commodity status, it is the woman who is reliant upon others (men): corks provide closure; bottles (as vessels) require the aid of corks in order to be (ful)filled and marketable.
Pope's exploration of Belinda's psycho-sexual longings seems suspicious. The implication that Belinda is a waiting vessel, anticipating the Baron's immanent (sexual) arrival is disturbing. Belinda is the victim of a rape, however symbolic it may appear: she is the violated. Yet, Pope very patronizingly dwells on the sexuality which is overrunning HER. Pope's hintings at Belinda's unconscious desire of sexual fulfillment, presumably at the baron's hands, strikes one as perhaps too closely resembling the rhetoric of the "Blame the Victim" syndrome (my term): the idea that the Baron should be exonerated because Belinda must have wanted it. Yet, Belinda is the one violated by a man incapable of controlling excess emotion.
Pope's use of the word, "steel," helps further the idea of blaming Belinda. Pope quite clearly states at the end of canto iii that Belinda has been shorn by "unresisted Steel" (178; emphasis added). The steel is unresisted because, as Claridge illustrat es, "the hair offers no resistance.... But, more problematic, the steel may be 'unresisted' because the hair wants to be cut" (137-8). Moreover, "while Pope uses this implication to seduce Belinda-Arabella into assuming her proper social role as wife and commodity," a larger issue is at stake:
this is the attempted theft of femaleness, a power that far
exceeds the literal state of the hymen . . . . Paradoxically, we
could even suggest that, rather than stealing Belinda's
virginity, the Baron seeks her fertility -- to castrate her into
being a virgin.
(Claridge 138)
Pope's insistence that Belinda "wanted it" might be further clarified in her astonishing statement: "Oh hadst thou, Cruel! been content to seize/Hairs less in sight, or any Hairs but these!" (iv.175-6). The fact that she publicly acknowledges the Baron's rape of her virginity as a viable option, indeed preference, seems to indicate Pope's thoughts on the subject. Yet, even though Pope seems to implicate Belinda as an active participant in the rape, the dynamics of her thought process might be more complex than Pope realizes. Belinda, whose locks give her a great deal of power in their phallic symbolism, is, as Myers explains, "figuratively castrated," and in the process, "the 'hero' regains control of his society" (48). Belinda has been taught her lesson (by Pope?) and is not actually willing to give up her virginity in order to regain her power.
As Belinda as a character is meant to be ridiculed, Pope offers both Belinda and the reader a model of the "appropriate" form of woman in the character of Clarissa. Clarissa tells Belinda that "she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid," (v.28) and advocates "good Humour" and, implicitly, marriage, since "frail Beauty must decay" (v.25). Clarissa's "pragmatic" solution to Belinda's image/identity/sexual "problems" serves to perpetuate Pope's view of the cultural status quo.
Clarissa's speech advocates the sublimation of feminine consciousness as a pragmatic method of survival. As Howard D. Weinbrot writes,
Clarissa's speech, then, is the moral centre of The Rape of the
Lock. It rejects spleen, girlhood, hostility, isolation,
powerlessness, inutility, folly and frustration in favour of
good humour, womanliness, affection, community, power, use and
virtue. (46)
Weinbrot's comments comprise the very point Pope wants us to think: marriage and rote mindless acceptance will result in "true" womanliness, use and virtue!
The logical problem with Clarissa, as Claridge points out, is the question: "is she a mouthpiece of the author's, conveying the moral message, or a prude, or a jealous would-be object of the Baron's affection?" (140). More importantly,
Clarissa is [actually] a man, in gender, of course, not in sex
. . . . [She] reads as a male in this text because she is too
simple, in the world and context which Pope creates, to be
female. . . . Thus marriage, which is what Clarissa really urges
. . . allows for the kind of control and heroic closure to
chaotic desire that Belinda . . . represent[s]: marriage defines
a hero's endeavors by conferring meaning upon the chaos of
sexual energy. (Claridge 140)
As Pollak notes, then, for "Belinda, the passage from girlhood to womanhood – from the simply 'female' to the truly 'feminine'-- must involve not merely a giving up of sexual independence, but all other forms of independence as well" (432).
The poem's ending, in which the lock rises into the air, reminds us of Pope's moral. In the end, the woman is unable to regain/retain the power available to her and she remains the butt of the joke. Within the paradigms of gender consciousness, she is seen as a clownish object, cosmetically enhanced, reeking of commodification. As Meyers relates,
intended to remind women of Belinda's heavenly reprimand,the
astro-lock becomes . . . a symbol of the lengths to which the
guardians of a phallocentric culture will go to retain control
. . . . [Finally] the uppity woman is put in her place; the
status quo is restored.
(49, 46) v Pope attempts to placate both Belinda and women in general by telling Belinda that he will write her into textual immortality. However, as Claridge shows, he simply "reappropriates generative power through his anxious claim to superiority over the female . . . . He will contain the female by inscribing her" (130).
Pope's inscription of women through the vehicle of his poem inscribes the reader as well, through an ideology of non-attainment and containment. Pope's discourse maintains a privileged agenda; we are exposed to the rhetoric Pope values. Pope's objectification exposes within us a type of awareness deprivation in which we are forced to acknowledge gaps in the text; we ourselves are held hostage to Pope's implicit ideology of violation.
Pope, in utilizing the mock-heroic as a device, further displays the dialectics of commodity fetishism. Pope mirrors imperialist mercantilism in stealing (styles, phrases, archetypes, et cetera) from his predecessors, requisitioning their materials and taking them for his own. This act further perpetuates commodity fetishism and violates the reader in the process by making the reader an implied accomplice. In the very act of reading, the reader acts as a symbolic receiver of appropriated property and t akes on the mantle of victim.
Finally, The Rape of the Lock can be read as a Reader Response text which perpetuates an ideology of violation. Pope seeks to stimulate the reader's task by offering a variance of signified and signifiers and asking the reader to respond. Pope's sympathy toward female plight is likely well meant; nonetheless, the fact remains that both Belinda and the reader are well aware that Belinda has three options: she can die a Maid, become a degraded Toast, or get married. Belinda, the object of Pope'e encoded patriarchy, remains essentially option-less and the subject of patronizing humor. Pope's poem is, whatever literary qualities it may possess, an argument for and product of a patriarchal commodified polemic which rapes both Belinda and the reader in its defense of traditionally male values.
Works Cited
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