The issues of women, chastity, reality, emotions are all topics conveyed in many literary works. The legitimization of these issues is still a debate; however, authors and poets and artists have managed to reflect different ideas that provide readers different perspectives in looking at these issues. One of these literary figures is Alexander Pope and his reflection of women in his mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock. In this poem, Pope shows us the understanding of women of the era and how this understanding can be altered by using concepts that are also related to the world of women. In general, the era defines women as a part of the imaginary and emotionally unstable world. In the poem, Pope uses the idea of fairies as a tool to give the poem a sense of seriousness and rationality, which provides the poem with a sense of stability and therefore ties the very imaginative and dream-like events to the ground.
From the first Canto, we understand that the fairies are an answer to two concepts: immortality and being a guide when losing control to desire and emotions. The former is a topic for yet another essay; this paper focuses on the latter. The fairies, as we understand from Pope’s lines; “Oft, when the world imagine women start, The Sylphs through mystic mazes guide their way…” (2529) When the women lose perspective, the fairies will help so she can engage in provocative actions and fulfill her desires. This then gives permission and legitimization, a license to the many things the woman is doing and wants to do in her life. By doing so, the fairy ties the woman to the ground and interrupts the woman desires and emotions with reason to pull the woman into the rational world. In this sense, the fairy that visits Belinda at the beginning of the play also acts in this way. It comes to Belinda when Belinda has woken up, and although it pulls Belinda into a dream yet again, the dream is a rational one; where the fairy talks to Belinda about her many beautiful qualities and her desires. In the lines, “Hear and Believe! Thy importance knows, Nor bound thy narrow views to things below.”(2528) The fairy talks to Belinda about her importance and how she should not just focus on things and people below her like her maids, but also look at things and people from a wider perspective. Here we see how the Pope creates and plays on the tension between the fairies and the rational. He takes something supernatural like the fairies and uses it as a tool to emphasize the importance of rational and reason. He reflects the importance of the imaginary world having a firm grasp on reality so that it is consistent through the binary use of fairy-reality. In a sense, we as the reader understand the importance of having sense along with emotions through something that is not real. Further, into the canto, the Pope talks about the functions of the Sylphs and how they are guides to women in controlling their emotions and passions. In the lines between 83 and 90 Pope says,
“Then gay Ideas crowd the vacant brain,
While peers, and dukes, and all their sweeping train,
And garters, stars, coronets appear,
And in soft sounds, ‘your Grace’ salutes their ear.
’Tis these that early taint the female soul,
Instruct the eyes of young Coquettes to roll,
Teach infant cheeks a bidden blush to know,
And little hearts to flutter at a beau.” (2529)
These lines show how the Sylphs act like so-called fairy godmothers for women who are supposedly falling for men who flatter them. Pope says that once the men start to talk and flatter women, the women should ‘roll their eyes’ and the young girls should ‘blush their cheeks.’ These actions that are normally genuine and natural are ‘taught’ by the Sylphs to the women so that they do not give the rein to the men. In this way, we see that Pope once again uses the Sylphs and their functions as tools to emphasize the importance of women having rational thought to restrain the overpowering of women. The reason that the Pope tries to do this is possible that of the way women were thought to be during the era. The Restoration was an era where women were considered to be over-sensitive, over-powered by emotions, intellectually inferior from men and therefore subject to being subjugated, and also emotionally unstable. It seems that according to Pope, these Sylphs can be guides to women in having a more firm step on the ground. The irony here is that women who are emotionally unstable are thought to be made more rational and reasonable with beings that are not real and that promote an imaginary world.
In a broader perspective on how Pope uses the Sylphs within the poem, we see that Belinda’s dream introduces the core of the poem, which is how supernatural beings affect the events and actions of the characters as the poem unfolds. In the poem, the sprites that guide Belinda are iconic of the benevolent but malicious Greek and Roman traditions, that are always part of the earthly matters, albeit being part of the divine world of mythology. The plot also uses traditional hierarchies and other ancient systems of order. Within the poem, we see that Ariel, the Sylph who is mad of Belinda, says that when women die the spirit returns “to their first Elements.” Within the poem, we see that in parallel with the four humors we see each female personality type being changed into a specific kind of sprite. In this sense, we once again see the effects of the ancient and medieval concepts and ideas on Pope. Gnomes, Sylphs, Salamanders, and Nymphs all correspond to the four elements of earth which are, in turn, earth, air, fire, and water. Sylphs, or element air, are the ones who are ‘light Coquettes’ on earth. We see in the poem that Belinda is an airy sylph, because of this these sylphs have a particular interest for Belinda and the poem focuses on this feminine nature of Belinda. In the first Canto, we see that the Pope already illustrates the airy sylph character of Belinda, not through her actual personality but indirectly through the characteristics of the Sylphs. The precedences of these beings as Pope points out are the social concerns of women from Belinda’s class. The ‘joy in gilded Chariots’ shows the complex on artificial grandeur, and the ‘love of Ombre,’ a card game, reflects the obsession on gaiety and entertainment. The artificiality and sexually charge the atmosphere of these social concerns induces yet another problem: the protection of chastity, which creates the plot of the poem. Marrying well is an important issue in the lives of these women, advocating the self and manipulation of the groom-prospects without compromise are actions that women learn at an early stage in their lives. In this sense, the Sylphs become an allegory for the monitoring of traditions that direct the attitudes and manners of the women. A life-altering principle like honor and virginity become trivial and simple elements of traditional communications. In the poem, Pope points out that these women are not genuine and real in conveying the morality of these principles, but are guided by sophisticated tools-like the Sylphs. Using the sylphs as a tool give Pope the opportunity to criticize this in-genuine social behavior of women, it also creates and emphasizes the tension between the supernatural beings and rational and also keeps the level of mocking at a minimum rate, therefore keeping women from being too severely judged by the public. Pope wants the reader to see that as it was during the era, Belinda, like other women, was taught to act like the traditionally accepted female weaknesses; and the Sylphs help to strengthen these weaknesses so that the women have a stable sense of rational and emotional. The society, who do not exclude men from these judgments, is to be blamed. The young lords fight for the attention of the beautiful ladies as related throughout the poem, and later we see this fight turn into a battle of vanity, vanity that come out from these judgments of the society. The lines in these scenes point to the unnecessary reflection of pride and ostentation. Pope emphasizes how trivial and crazy it is to differentiate between things and people that are the same.
The Rape of the Lock is an early 18th century based mock-epic poem about the actual disagreement between two aristocratic families. It is the exaggerated and mocked story of the stealing of Belinda’s lock of hair and Lord Petre’s desire to attain the lock. Pope uses his imagination, wit, and gentle satire to simplify the problem into a great big Greek tragedy with cosmic results. By mocking the Baron and Belinda and their disagreement, the Pope tries to put forth the ridiculous vanities and idleness of the 18th-century high society. In doing so, he specifies his attention to the reflection of women through fairies to arouse the tension between reality-imagination. The former reflected through the functions of the Sylphs, the latter reflected through the mere existence of the Sylphs. As a result, the bridge between rational and passion is created, and the message is conveyed: the women need no be intellectually inferior nor emotionally unstable if they can control their emotions and learn to act in certain ways under certain conditions.
It is also possible that Pope intended this poem to be a guide for the future and then-present men and women on how to live a simple, honorable and “normal” life. As a conclusion, Pope makes the audience think about the morals, virtues, and honors that a person should have and how these should be reflected upon the society, and also how we can use our inner world that is our spiritual world to control our unstable passions and use our rational thinking to manage situations and crises events.