How
does Pope’s employment of the supernatural machinery enhance the elements of
mockery in ‘The Rape of the Lock’?
The first version
of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ was made up of only four cantos,
containing the main incidents of the game of cards, cutting of the lock and
ensuing battle therewith. This humorous piece was meant to bring about a happy
reconciliation between the two families of the Fermors and Petres. This
version, however, was never published and it had not yet taken on the shape of
a mock-epic. It was meant to be read by a selected number of people related or
close with the two families. Pope saw the possibility of expanding it into a
mock-heroic poem. This was done by including into the body of the poem the
supernatural creatures like the sylphs and gnomes who seem to be the guiding
force behind the central action of the poem.
Pope took the name of
Ariel from Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’, and the idea of the
sylphs from a French book, ‘Le Comts do Gabalis’, which gives
an account of the Rosicrucian mythology of spirits. According to this
mythology, the four elements are inhabited by spirits, which are called sylphs
(air), gnomes (earth), nymphs (water), and salamanders (fire). Two of these
kinds-sylphs and gnomes - are introduced by Pope in ‘The Rape of the Lock’.
These Ariel spirits of Rosicrucian mythology were tiny, light beings, which
would exactly suit his mock-heroic poem and these are as artificial as the
society depicted in the poem.
In his address of the poem to
the heroine, Miss Arabella Fermor, Pope tells why there is supernatural
machinery in the poem:
“The Machinery,
Madam, is a Term invented by the Critics, to signify that Part which the
Deities, Angels, or Daemons, are made to act in a poem. . . .”
