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Character of Belinda in the light of morning dream and toilet scene
Sometime during the summer of 1711, the circle of prominent Catholic families in the
home counties was disturbed by the rash act of Robert, 7th Lord Petre, in removing
part of her coiffure from a famous beauty, Arabella Fermor
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A common acquaintance and well wisher to both families, John Caryll, an
intimate friend of Alexander Pope, desired him to write a poem to make a jest of it and
laugh them together again
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The characters of a mock-heroic poem are necessarily caricatures of familiar social
times, rather than sharply individualized life-like personalities
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Though the characters of The Rape of the Lock were derived from
contemporary society, Pope had to pine explaining in his prefatory epistle to Arabella,
the historical origin of his Belinda
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The societ,y in
which the poem is wrought is patriarchan, where women's position is clearly defined
with restraints but Pope’s “Belinda“ tries to transcend them
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The poem lacks sweetness as Pope
himself declares the purpose of the poem “is to laugh at the little unguarded follies of
the female sex”
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The Rape of the Lock introduces the readers to a typically little world of fashions and
frivolities, obsessed with its gaity, dressing, flirting, card-playing in the old London of
Queen Anne
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She is
the pivot around whom the gay world of vanity and luxury move with its show men and
women, leading lives of ostentatious dainties
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Pope
suggests that the sun recognises in Belinda “the rival of his beams” and fear her
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The brilliance of her eyes makes the sun rays shy
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Belinda's comparison to the sun again occurs in the poem, in the opening of Canto 2
,where we find an instance of Elizabethan hyperbole
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She is like the sun not only because of her bright eyes and domination over
her special world, but because of her generous munificence, with which she “shine[s]
on all alike”
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She is a coquette who desires to be admired
but is never willing to give her heart to anyone
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Belinda rises from slumber, like
“sleepless lovers” who spends sleepless nights, at midday, rings her hand bell thrice to
call her maids at her service and strikes a slipper against the floor impatient not getting
any response
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Waking up so late

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