Thinking Activity: The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

 This blog is a response to the blog task we have given by Vaidehi Haryanvi Ma’am as a thinking activity.

1.) According to you, who is the protagonist of the play Clarissa or Belinda? Why? Give your answer with logical reasons.

In the mock-heroic poem “The Rape of the Lock” it is Belinda whom the story of the whole poem is woven. She is a complex character but on the other hand, she is an ideal girl for Pope which we can see through her detailed description of her daily routine on some other occasions, Pope compares Belinda to a rival of the sun and he describes her brighter than the sun.

2.) What is beauty? Write your views about it.

Nowadays we think that beauty means qualities that pleases our aesthetic senses especially sight, something that is perfect, which we are predicting over someone's physique. But what I think is that beauty can be found anywhere you just need the sight to identify it. The definition of beauty can differ from person to person. Like in traditional Japanese aesthetics the, wabi-sabi described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature.

                           

                        

3.) Find out a research paper on "The Rape of the Lock". Give the details of the paper and write down in brief what does it say about the Poem by Alexander Pope.

Interrogating the ethics of mockery in Pope's The Rape of the Lock: a political turn

Keywords: mythology, theft, supernatural, mockery, selves

Issue: 46

Volume: 3

Page Numbers: 37-43

Publication Date: 2021

Publication Name: Jamshedpur Research Review

Abstract:

Without making Pope into a post-Jungian and Ariel into an animus figure, one can regard The Rape of the Lock as working out ideas of feminine psychology in terms of ‘irrational’ mythologies. Indeed, The Rape of the Lock illustrates a mock-epic of excellent calibre. The focal affair of the grand narrative is the heist of foppish Belinda’s hair-lock by a cocky and haughty Baron. The transpiring clash between both of the familial parties also captures major attention of the readers. All the paramount characteristics of an epic encircle the incident. The style is elevated. There is the use of supernatural machinery in the form of the Sylphs, a voyage, a visit to the underworld and battles, almost leaning towards a comical gothic. Pope’s popular fame resides largely in his satires, devastating, final as one would think, directed not against individuals, though personal hatred and scorn entered into the original conception in some of his portraits, against negative qualities, passions destructive of society or of civilized living. The paper will try to examine Pope’s use of parody and mockery at the relativity of Being and genealogy of the Real through a cultural mirroring of selves in a broader plane. Keywords: mythology, theft, supernatural, mockery, selves. 

In this research paper, the scholar mainly focuses on the Pope’s treatment or use of the supernatural elements in The Rape of the Lock and also how Pope Exposed the aristocratic lords and satires in the absence of moral sense. 

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