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
