ENG562
Dr. Morillo
Question: What is the
relationship between the poem's opening interest in "strange motives,"
its various structures of mediated agency visible in the poem, and the
genre of satire?
Sylphs, Alienated Agency, and Satire
Pope repeatedly represents human actions as shaped by forces
beyond immediate individual conscious will. His two opening
puzzles--why the Baron cuts the lock and why Belinda responds as
she does--both are addressed in the poem's strongest scenes of such
alienated agency: first, the Baron is acting under the influence of
coffee consumed at the card game; second, Belinda reacts because
Umbriel the gnome bursts a bag of rage and tears over her
head. Although both are clearly comic, both also represent
serious thought about agents of human action as both standing outside
of the body and incorporated into it. Belinda's deepest emotions
are also out of her full control, and Pope offers a picture of all our
emotions as "passions," forces to which we become patients, much as
when our bodies (or minds) are invaded by diseases.
This is further consistent with the whole machinery of the sylphs,
representing a kind of alienated or deviated agency we have come to
accept as very realistic. Pope constructs the sylph world as 1) the
spirits of former women 2) charged with the duty of protecting
virginity 3) trying to offer counsel and protection to Belinda but
perhaps misleading her as much as guiding her well. Together this can
be taken as a picture of what we would now call ideology, in this case
a critically important "ideology of feminine virtue" which guides
Belinda's every move. Pope consistently represents those actions
Freud will also see as most fraught with strange motives, those
involving sex, violence, and gender identity, as beyond our complete,
conscious, willful control. Finally, the shadowy picture of
agency in the poem runs in striking parallel to the way authors of all
kinds hover behind texts as invisible agents the way sylphs hover over
Belinda.
This can have strong consequences for satire. If your theory of human
agency involves such alienations, it becomes hard to successfully blame
and arraign anyone for even the most reprehensible actions. Can
you DO satire without being able to assign motives to individual
character and willful choice? If you end up blaming victims, has your
satire lost all moral authority as a virtuous source of correction to
rampant human vices?
For one excellent essay on one part of this puzzle, the Baron's coffee habit, see
Pope and Drugs:
The Pharmacology of
The Rape of the Lock
by Richard Kroll, online here:
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/v067/67.1kroll.html