Religion and Morality Theme Analysis

Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is perhaps not the most obvious place to turn for an understanding of religious culture in early 18th-century England, but the poem is full of moral questions about religious life and values. By the 18th century when this poem was written, England’s last Catholic monarch had been deposed, and England was once more a Protestant nation. In this time, Protestants bitterly criticized Catholics, believing that Catholics had strayed from the proper worship of God and were therefore morally suspect. Pope himself was from a Catholic family, and throughout the poem it is possible to detect some witty critiques of Protestantism. By depicting the poem’s characters (who are presumably Protestant—even though they are based on real Catholic figures from history, anti-Catholic legislation at the time made it difficult for Catholic families to own land or live in London) as hypocritical and not particularly pious, and then by introducing pagan elements that throw into question the possibility of moral judgment in the first place, Pope parodies the sanctimonious religious rhetoric of his time and suggests that Christianity isn’t the best lens with which to understand the mysteries of human behavior.

An initial jab at Protestant hypocrisy can be found in the Canto I catalogue of the items involved in Belinda’s grooming routine. The list of items on Belinda’s dressing table casually mixes items required for her “toilet” (the process of getting ready to go to court) with those of religious significance—“Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.” Here the Bible, the text of absolute moral authority, is mixed in with trivial items such as makeup and love letters, items associated with Belinda’s own vanity rather than serious moral contemplation. This suggests how little importance is afforded to spiritual questions by ladies like Belinda, a playful indictment of the moral bankruptcy of the vanity of the Protestant upper classes.

Pope also makes a more specifically Catholic joke in this scene, by suggesting that Belinda’s fixation on objects used to beautify herself hypocritically violates Protestant prohibition on worshipping idols. A common Protestant criticism of the Catholic faith was its interest in objects called idols. In the eyes of the Protestants, worshipping idols was morally wrong and detracted from the worship of God, amounting to little better than paganism. Thus, in Canto I, when Pope gives a long list of items needed by Belinda to complete her “toilet” (“This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks, / And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. / The tortoise here and elephant unite, / Transform’d to combs, the speckled and the white. / Here files of pins extend their shining rows, / Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux”), he is essentially mocking the Protestant contempt for idolatry. He suggests that Belinda’s emphasis on her own appearance and the tools she uses to beautify herself has led to a kind of humorous and hypocritical worshipping of false idols of her own. He even goes out of his way to figure Belinda as a pagan “goddess” at her “altar” (i.e., her dressing table), suggesting that the “sacred rites of pride” of preparing for court are fundamentally hypocritical and improperly Christian, since they, too, revolve around object worship and have nothing to do with God. This suggests that Pope ultimately views the Protestant contempt for idolatry as worthy of mockery, since many Protestants live vain and vacuous daily lives, worshipping material objects that have nothing to do with God, and all the while condemning Catholics for their faith.

Finally, Pope complicates matters further by his inclusion of various supernatural beings. One such type of being is the “sylph,” and they appear to exercise control over the actions of mortals. By calling into question whether the mortals’ actions are their own or whether mortals are the puppets of the mysterious sylphs, Pope casts doubt on a bedrock aspect of Christian faith: that people can fairly be judged for their actions. Throughout the poem, Pope makes it clear that the sylphs have a degree of authority over mortals’ actions. For instance, in Canto I Ariel explains that, in matters of courtly flirtations between men and women, “the Sylphs contrive it all,” and likewise, later Umbriel is responsible for the intensity of Belinda’s rage by releasing “the force of female lungs, / Sighs, sobs, and passions, and the War of Tongues” over her. Both of these moments suggest that human beings are not in control of their own actions.

But it’s never clear whether the sylphs are guiding people towards good or bad behavior—in fact, they seem somewhat amoral. For instance, Ariel explains that “Oft, when the world imagine women stray, / The Sylphs through mystic mazes guide their way, / Thro' all the giddy circle they pursue, / And old impertinence expel by new.” Ariel is claiming here that often when society thinks a woman has not followed the rules which typically restrict female behavior around men, the sylphs have been in control, guiding her away from danger. This is particularly vague, but seems to suggest that Ariel believes the role of the sylphs includes guiding women away from one bad behavior, only to slyly lead them into a new bad behavior later on.

Since Pope never quite specifies whether the sylphs are good or bad, or how much influence they have over the mortals, he makes it difficult for the reader to judge the characters’ actions. After all, if the mischievous sylphs are controlling the characters’ actions, then it’s irrelevant to judge the characters’ behavior as being either moral or immoral. This ambiguity prevents the poem from becoming a straightforward morality tale illustrating the folly of vanity; while Pope is certainly mocking the vanity of his era, he’s also using the sylphs to suggest that there can be no absolute moral judgements, since human behavior is mysterious and not necessarily under an individual person’s control. This has profound significance for Pope’s treatment of Christianity, since at the heart of Christianity is the notion that humans are in control of their actions and God will judge people accordingly. Through the ambiguous nature of the sylphs, Pope throws a wrench in the logic of the entire Christian religion, Catholic or Protestant, by suggesting that humans’ actions are mysterious and their motives are opaque—and, because of this, it’s simplistic and absurd to think that anyone could be straightforwardly judged.