Beauty vs. Poetry Theme Analysis

Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” offers a satirical glimpse into 18th-century court life, emphasizing society’s focus on beauty and appearance. Centered around the experience of a beautiful young woman, Belinda, who loses a lock of her hair to the scissors of an infatuated Baron, “The Rape of the Lock” steadily becomes sillier and sillier as it goes along and the characters descend into a kind of pretend battle over the lock. Coupled with the Clarissa’s wise speech, which argues that women waste too much time focusing on their looks rather than thinking about how to be better people, it might appear at first glance that Pope’s central thesis is the idea that this kind of obsession with beauty is fundamentally absurd. But the poem’s conclusion, in which the lock ascends to heaven as a new constellation, seems to suggest that perhaps true beauty might really be of some value after all, but only if it becomes the subject of poetry and thus achieves a kind of literary immortality.

Pope mocks Belinda’s fixation on her own beauty by comparing her with an epic hero about to go into battle, which makes her own process of beautifying herself for a day at court appear relatively low-stakes and insignificant. In Canto I, Pope describes Belinda’s completed “toilet” as “awful Beauty” having prepared its “arms.” Here, Pope compares Belinda’s having finished grooming herself at her dressing table to an awe-inspiring warrior putting on all of his armor and weapons. The cliché of the hero getting dressed in his armor in preparation for battle in a commonplace of epic. So here, Pope is in effect mockingly comparing Belinda’s seeking to make herself as attractive as possible with a warrior of epic preparing for battle. But while an epic hero normally goes to battle nobly to fight for some great cause, Belinda’s efforts appear almost entirely self-serving. She is not fighting for a cause but is instead trying to beautify herself for her own pleasure. This emphasizes just how unimportant her interest in beauty is. Relative to the great concerns of the epic hero, Belinda’s own interests, Pope emphasizes through the comparison, stem from her own vanity and have no life and death consequences.

Furthermore, towards the end of the poem, Pope uses Clarissa’s speech on the value of beauty to emphasize the ultimate futility in placing value in such a transient thing as beauty. For instance, in Canto V, Clarissa attempts to de-escalate the quarrel over the lock by reminding the court that there is no point obsessing over the bodily perfection the lock represents. This is because “beauty must decay, / Curled or uncurled, since locks will turn to gray.” In simpler terms, Clarissa’s point here is that, since one day everyone will grow old, it is important to remember that all beauty will fade and all hair ultimately turns gray, no matter how nicely styled. Therefore, to devote so much focus to the snipped lock is to misplace effort: all beauty is transient, so losing beauty today isn’t much different from losing it later on. Instead, Clarissa suggests that women focus their energies on becoming the best moral beings they can, as “Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.” In effect, she states that moral worth is more powerful than beauty anyway, as beauty attracts the eyes but morality attracts the soul. In addition, morality is not subject to decay through “small pox” or “old age” and so it lasts longer, making it more worth pursuing.

But Pope complicates this seemingly straightforward moral at the poem’s conclusion, as the lock ascends to the skies where it becomes a constellation, suggesting that it is not as worthless as Clarissa argues it is. Clarissa states that “locks will turn to gray” as a means of illustrating that ultimately all beauty fades, but after the lock ascends into the skies, the reader learns that, while all other “tresses shall be laid in dust; / This lock, the Muse shall consecrate to fame, / And midst the stars inscribe Belinda’s name!” It can be difficult to understand what the reader is expected to gain from this, but one interpretation might be that Pope is speaking metaphorically about the power of poetry. Pope mentions “Berenice’s lock,” referencing a poem by the Roman poet Catullus (66), itself inspired by the work of Greek poet Callimachus, in which a lock of hair is transformed into a constellation. The point he seems to be making is that, in a way, not all hair does grow gray, as the enduring fame of the literary description of Berenice’s lock has given her beauty a kind of immortality. Thus, when he mentions that, through the power of the “Muse” (a goddess of poetry), Belinda’s name shall be metaphorically written (“inscribe[d]”) in the stars, he is in effect suggesting that literary fame, rather than moral worth, is the true means to escaping the effects of aging and the fading of youth.

Overall, Pope does seem to suggest that a day-to-day obsession with beauty is fundamentally an absurd and hopeless pursuit. However, he complicates this clear-cut moral by suggesting that ultimately beauty can have a certain kind of power in that it can inspire art, such as poetry, and as such can be part of something which truly is able to transcend time. Thus, Pope seems to be saying that vanity itself is folly, but that to appreciate great art, one should be careful not to underestimate the role of beauty in inspiring great works.