The play’s period setting in the 1650s is very significant. Cromwell’s Protectorate had suppressed pastimes and sports and, to Royalists, the period must have seemed like an indefinite extension of Lent. Joining in the festivities of carnival which were denied them at home, exiled cavaliers whiled away the time until the new order of the once-revolutionary Parliamentarians could be overthrown. Instead of being a wealthy, extravagant elite, the exiles had lost lands and money: they were now displaced and marginalised in foreign parts, and Behn’s play continually stresses their ‘outsider’ status. Willmore is not just a rover—a pirate, one who wanders, an inconstant lover—he is a ‘Tramontana rover’, which, apart from signifying someone uncouth, indicates a foreigner or stranger. In fact, most of the characters are outsiders of one kind or another: Naples is under Spanish rule, Angellica Bianca is introduced as a native of Padua, even the English are divided into the impecunious cosmopolitan cavaliers and the wealthy traveller from the country, whom they befriend but constantly taunt because he never committed himself politically and kept his privileges and estate. Established incomers prey upon more recent arrivals: Lucetta exploits Blunt’s ignorance of Naples and of her ways—though she does worry that her treatment of him may put paid to future dealings with foreigners if word gets around. The protagonists, then, are all away from their home ground and are vulnerable because of this. The usual social hierarchies are inverted. The Spanish, old enemies of the English, are either in power officially (Don Antonio is the viceroy’s son) or unofficially (Philippo takes the spoils Lucetta tricks from Blunt and reminds us of the old quarrel about the Spanish Armada in his reference to ‘old Queen Bess’s’ gold and the ‘quarrel... since eighty-eight.’ The English, who might have been gentlemen at home, are poor, riotous, and often despised abroad.
- The setting of carnival time in Naples in Aphra Behn’s play The Rover allows two sets of characters to explore their sexual desires in a “performative space” that grants them an unusual amount of freedom from external constraint, from public view, and from suffering the consequences of their actions. The term “performative space” refers to the way that characters on and off the stage respond to differing expectations that are associated with place and dress. The Rover explores three performative spaces: the carnival world, the theater, and London society. Carnival time is the epitome of a special performative space. Carnival goers for various reasons take advantage of the anonymity of this masked affair to engage in relationships that would otherwise be denied to them, because of their class or gender. Since the carnival represents the world turned upside down, carnival time in Naples is a time for experimenting with role reversals.
“THE SETTING OF CARNIVAL TIME IN NAPLES IN APHRA BEHN’S PLAY THE ROVER ALLOWS TWO SETS OF CHARACTERS TO EXPLORE THEIR SEXUAL DESIRES IN A ‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’ THAT GRANTS THEM AN UNUSUAL AMOUNT OF FREEDOM FROM EXTERNAL CONSTRAINT, FROM PUBLIC VIEW, AND FROM SUFFERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS.”
In Hard Times both city and citizen are bound by Time. Coketown with its 'interminable serpents of smoke' and its elephant-machines moving 'in a state of melancholy madness' is fettered by Time. It is inhabited by people 'who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.' Many of its effects are apparent. In Coketown, like its machines, 'Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away,… and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than when his father had last taken particular notice of him.' After passing 'Thomas on in the mill,' Time 'passed him on into Bounderby's Bank, made him an inmate of Bounderby's house….' Likewise,'the same great manufacturer… passed Sissy onward in his mill, and worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.'A second force in the novel, more frequently noted and dramatically more powerful than Time, is that which views life as governed by Fact. This force, too, is connected with Time.
In Hard Times to act as one would in (according to) Fact is—of necessity—to bind one's self to the present, to be one of those 'to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.'
Two of the children who offer illustrative contrast are Sissy and Louisa. In Chapter 9 of Book the First, whose title 'Sissy's Progress' connotes movement and change, the narrator suggests that, even though Sissy grows and develops through the years, life at Stone Lodge, going 'monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discouraged human interference,' is not in its essentials changed by Time. Positions shift—Gradgrind, for example, becomes a member of Parliament—but Time in Stone Lodge remains benumbed in the Present, turning seldom backward or forward. What sustains Sissy Jupe is a belief that amounts to religious faith, and a hope that keeps open the curtains of the Future: 'the girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.' Sissy's belief keeps her from running away. Her memories of her father and Merrylegs, though not exclusively happy ones, fortify her affection for him and strengthen her hope. She tells Louisa: 'I keep the nine oils ready for him, and I know he will come back. Every letter that I see in Mr Gradgrind's hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it comes from father, or from Mr Sleary about father.' Although Mr Gradgrind does not approve of such 'fantastic hopes,' the narrator comments that 'it did seem… as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.'
Louisa has no such sustenance. Others look to her future—her father with a well-intentioned but matter-of-fact plan for her marriage, her brother with his own selfish plan for helping his situation with Bounderby. Louisa has little to hope for. She cannot imagine ways of doing for Tom what other girls might do for those they love. 'I can't play to you, or sing to you,' she says, 'I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired.' Such feelings of helplessness are not expressed only to Tom. In talking to her father Louisa says, 'Father, I have often thought that life is very short'; she wishes 'to do the little I can, and the little I am fit for.' If the second statement expresses a hope, it is a short-term, highly limited one, so hesitant a step along that avenue to the future as scarcely to offer any glimpse at all. Indeed, her statement, 'What does it matter!' repeated twice during the conversation, suggests more of despair than hope, of drawing in than moving out.
When she sits before her fire watching the dying sparks, Louisa embodies the situation of the person closed solely within the present, the person without hope. The red sparks 'made me think… how short my life would be,' she tells her mother, 'and how little I could hope to do in it.' Although a personal outburst appears to threaten when she later tells her father that 'when the night comes, Fire bursts out,' her own bursting-out—i.e., the temptation to run away with Harthouse—is severely contained. As a rebellion against her restrictive background, it appears weak because she overcomes it without significant difficulty (although it does bring her and her father to an important point of conciliation and understanding); as a moral victory, it appears weak because Harthouse is too much of a dandy to be a very strong temptation for a woman of her temperament and (presumed) intelligence—whatever kind of husband Bounderby is. But even more, by this time the fires of Louisa's spirit have faded and are not to be stoked by a shabby and illicit romance. When she stood at the door of Stone Lodge earlier as her father listened to Mr Bounderby's offer of marriage to his daughter, Louisa found little to look forward to. References to Time and fire come together:
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without she tried to discover what kind of wool Old Time, that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
Louisa does not look toward the future with hope, but simply speculates, quietly and passively.
- Other parallels also connect Stephen and Louisa. The watchful Mrs. Sparsit first sees Black-pool lurking near the bank, an observation that leads to his unjustly falling under suspicion of theft, and Mrs. Sparsit subsequently, after extensive spying on Louisa, wrongly accuses her of adultery. During the rainstorm, Louisa has fled to her father and avoided misconduct, and we may recall the earlier rainstorm during which Stephen, with Rachael's assistance, escapes from the temptation to commit murder.
- When the distressed Louisa asks Gradgrind to shelter her, the meeting provides an ironic contrast with the prior scene between father and daughter in the same room, at the time that they discussed Bounderby's marriage proposal. These two highly significant interviews between Louisa and her father seem balanced by the two climatic confrontations between Stephen and his employer: during the first meeting Blackpool is told there is no help for his marital problems, and during the second he is dismissed from his job. Although Stephen requests the first meeting, he is summoned to the second, a pattern that is reversed in Louisa's two interviews with her father. For each protagonist—Stephen and Louisa—the second meeting leads to a separation from Bounderby. During Stephen's first interview, Bounderby's callous indication that the law cannot help a poor man seeking divorce leads the weaver to remark several times "'tis a muddle," an assessment that he restates during the second meeting with Bounderby and reiterates when dying. Louisa's first long discussion with her father leads the young woman to a comparable expression of moral confusion, her repeated query, "What does it matter?" a question to which she returns when she afterwards wonders how to respond to Hart-house's overtures. Of course, Blackpool's view of life as a "muddle" gives way to his dying affirmation of faith in a guiding star, while Louisa eventually finds strength and comfort in the love offered by Sissy.
- These two sets of interviews are also connected by a few other features. Stephen's initial meeting with Bounderby takes place during a rainstorm, as does Louisa's second interview with her father. Stephen's temptation to murder occurs on a night soon after the first discussion with his employer, while Louisa's near-seduction directly precedes her second climactic scene with Gradgrind.
- During this second meeting, Gradgrind experiences a conversion, a change that leads him to acknowledge the inadequacy of his prior philosophy. Shaken and sorrowful, he seeks to offer reparation to Louisa, beseeching her, "What can I do, child? Ask me what you will," and then arranging for her to stay in his home and be cared for by Sissy. Similarly, Gradgrind is later the one to whom the dying Stephen turns for reparation: "Sir, yo will clear me an' mak my name good wi' aw men. This I leave to yo."
- The vulnerability of each protagonist—Stephen and Louisa—is increased because of affection for another person. Since Stephen adores Rachael, he promises her not rejoin the union, a promise that results in his being ostracized, while Louisa's love for her brother Tom induces her to marry Bounderby.
- The ending of Hard Times resembles in a general way these sensation novel's endings. Both Louisa and Stephen end badly, arguably Stephen worse than Louisa though her brother Tom's rejection of her compounds her lonely future. Louisa, even though she has not fully acted on her desires—she has not run away with Harthouse—lives unpartnered, a guest at the banquet of Sissy's domestic happiness, doing her father's work, atoning for his sins. Stephen dies painfully by falling down a mine-shaft.
- The gratuitousness of Stephen's death and the underexplained events that lead up to it suggest how difficult it is in the end to integrate the gender and class issues involved in the divorce plot into the conventional father's story which dominates the last pages of Hard Times. In his final words, Stephen seems to lay the blame for his death on the misunderstandings between capital and labor—fathers and children—but actually his death has come about because of his terrible marriage and frustrated relationship with Rachael. The focal point for both this relationship and his death is his promise to Rachael. As many critics have pointed out, this promise is inexplicable, but even more puzzling is why Rachael does not release him from it when she sees what the result of his adhering to it is. And why does Stephen, whose refusal to join his fellow workers is based on this promise to Rachael to avoid trouble with the masters, then insist on justifying his colleagues to Bounderby, thereby essentially provoking his master into dismissing him, thus achieving precisely what Rachael made him promise to avoid? And most importantly, why are these actions followed by such a painful and gratuitous death?
- Stephen's death has been justified as Dickens' recognition that there is no way out of the class war. Nicholas Coles says "Stephen is killed off by the combined forces of both classes… and there is no manner of hope in either of them." However, if we think of Stephen's story as it connects to Louisa's through the marriage and divorce plot, we may see an additional reason for his death. Though overtly Stephen is the only one whose miserable marriage seems to call for divorce, the linking of Louisa and Stephen has opened a crack through which we see that for women much less dramatic situations than Stephen's make marriage a repressive institution. Though intermittently in evidence, this insight has been downplayed through laughter at Mrs. Sparsit and Mrs. Gradgrind and through narrative silence about Louisa. But in order to completely erase this story so the father's story can dominate the closure, the divorce issue must be killed in Stephen, who has been its overt spokesman.
- This is Louisa Gradgrind's secret: she killed Stephen Blackpool, though unlike Lady Audley she did not personally push him down the well. Louisa's action of seeking Stephen out in his home, accompanied by her brother as an escort, has led to the suspicion of Stephen's robbing the bank, his hurried return, and ultimately his death. Further, Louisa also narratively necessitates Stephen's death. Though she is the embodiment of the sensation heroine's story of repression and lack of fulfillment in marriage, Stephen has carried the weight of her story. So even as she cannot remarry, though the healthy Bounderby dies five years after the separation, Stephen cannot live to marry Rachael. The sick Mrs. Blackpool survives, the healthy Stephen dies, thereby removing the last vestige of the divorce plot. The novel ends where it began—with the now-chastened father and sacrificed daughter together again, and for all time.
- The issue of divorce concern Louisa. Most of Louisa's story is unnarrated, but one possible version is suggested, nonetheless, through the systematic analogy drawn between her and Stephen. In the structure of the novel her story alternates and contrasts with Stephen's. Louisa's questions to Sissy about Sissy's parents and their marriage were answered not only by the young girl's description of their compatible and happy marriage but also both by contrast and repetition in the two following chapters in which Stephen tells Bounderby about his own miserable marriage and wish for a divorce and then fantasizes about an ideal marriage with Rachael. More metaphorically, Stephen's subsequent murderous thoughts about his wife are followed by Louisa's capitulation to Bounderby's "criminal" proposal. Another contrast represents the emotions that bring both Louisa and Stephen to the brink of disaster: Louisa's assertion of herself in intimate, dangerous, but under-represented conversations with Harthouse are followed by Stephen's equally dangerous self-assertions to Slackbridge and Bounderby. Louisa has two important scenes with her father; Stephen has two with his "father" Bounderby. Louisa's aborted "fall" from the bottom of Mrs. Sparsit's staircase into "a dark pit" is completed by Stephen's fall into the dark Old Hell Mine shaft. Finally, Louisa's leaving her husband and "dying" to the story is followed by Stephen's actual death.
- Louisa and Stephen are further linked to Tom's betrayal of them both, while Tom's robbery of the bank acts out retribution on Bounderby for him, his sister, and Stephen (and also substitutes for Harthouse's intent to "rob" Bounderby of his wife). However, in a crucial scene in which the three are brought together by Louisa, Tom displaces his guilt and perhaps his sister's, too, onto Stephen. (Certainly both Stephen and Rachael initially think that Louisa is as guilty of using Stephen as Tom is.)
- The most telling connection between Stephen and Louisa is in their equally dreadful if quite different marriages. Stephen and Louisa's responses to their bad marriages are similar: both turn to sympathetic others though they both resist acting on the needs and desires released in them by these others. The four illustrations for the novel reflect this linking of Louisa and Stephen in their responses to their marriages: two are of Harthouse, Louisa's would be lover; a third is of Stephen and Rachael with Stephen's wife, who is reaching out from the bed curtains for the poison. The fourth is of Stephen rescued from the Old Hell Mine Shaft, Rachel's hand in his while he delivers his unlikely speech on class relations. The first three point to Louisa's and Stephen's failed marriages; only the fourth relates to the industrial theme, though as we shall see, that theme is integrated with the marriage question as well.
- But this parallelism between Louisa and Stephen is broken at a crucial point; Stephen's desire to end his marriage is sympathetically treated, but not achieved. On the other hand, Louisa's marital situation, while it is never narrated directly and poses a number of unanswered questions, actually ends in a permanent separation.
Take Mrs. Sparsit, for example. The novel's plot would work as well, in fact better because more consistently, if she had been a social-climbing, money-grubbing husband hunter. Such bad behavior would justify Bounderby's humiliating treatment of her. But in fact, she was manipulated into a marriage with a boy fifteen years her junior by Lady Scadgers, probably because she thought he was a good match. In the event he is a very bad husband: he spent all his money and "when he died, at twenty-four… he did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated after the honeymoon, in affluent circumstances." If Mrs. Sparsit were not so much in Bounderby's camp and so hostile to Louisa, we might notice how badly she has been treated.
More troubling, however, is Mrs. Gradgrind. Though she is generally represented dismissively throughout the novel (the list of characters refers to her as "feeble-minded"), it takes very little to see that she is in a terrible marriage. Her imbecility in fact appears to be a product of her marriage. Gradgrind chose her because "she was most satisfactory as a question of figures" and "she had 'no nonsense' about her." Though she may have been weak-minded to start with, she was presumably not at the time of her marriage an "absolute idiot." When we meet her later in her life with five children, she is close to being one. How did that happen? She herself describes the process by which she has been turned into an idiot as "never hearing the last of it," that is, when she ventures to say anything she is instantly and abruptly put down. So that "the simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and Mr. Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady… so, she once more died away, and nobody minded her." The repeated use of the word "died" in connection with Mrs. Gradgrind's ceasing to talk throughout the novel indicates the brutality of her suppression. When she is literally dying she tells Louisa "'You want to hear of me, my dear? That's something new, I am sure, when anybody wants to hear of me'" and later "'You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any subject, I have never heard the last of it; and consequently, that I have long left off saying anything.'"
- One such gap, though a common one in Victorian fiction, is the configuration of the sexual nature of Louisa's marriage. There has been vigorous critical controversy over this subject. Louisa's physical repugnance for Bounderby (as in the scene where she tells Tom she wouldn't mind if he cut out the place on her cheek where Bounderby kissed her) and the clear sexual desire that motivates him suggests there might be some sexual trouble between them from the start. But when we meet them months after the honeymoon, Louisa and her husband appear to live calmly together, which suggests to me that, however unsatisfactory, there has been conjugal sex.
- Does it matter? We know that no Victorian novel could directly depict the sexual nature of human experience even in marriage. Why should we care whether or not Louisa and Bounderby have had sex? It matters because the uncertainty about Louisa's sexual knowledge is one of a number of puzzling elements about her marriage. Her sexual experience or lack of it certainly would help us understand her feelings for Harthouse, which are rather mystified in the text. Why do her feelings for Harthouse result in her leaving her husband and returning to her father? Further, what does she have in mind in that return, and what does her father intend when he asks Bounderby to permit her to stay in her father's house "on a visit"? Finally, why does Louisa not remarry after Bounderby's death, that is, why does Bounderby die if by that Louisa is not freed to find happiness and fulfillment?
- The father-daughter plot in these two works is archetypal—present in Western culture from the Old Testament Jeptha, Lot, and Dinah to Iphigenia in Aulis to King Lear to Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. There is a conflict in all these stories between social needs and private desires that usually surface—indeed usually generate narrative—at the point of the daughter's marriage. Daughters must move out of the family and make new alliances through marriage to keep the biological, political, and economic health of the community, but the dynamics, particularly the sexual dynamics, within the family itself resist the moving out of the daughter. Sometimes the desire to keep the daughter grows out of the father's romantic attachment to her as she supplants the woman he first loved, who has dwindled into a wife, a fictional pattern seen in Oedipus at Colonus, in King Lear, and in "Rappacini's Daughter" and Hard Times (Louisa is her father's "favorite child" and "the pride of his heart"). The father of Western father-daughter narratives frequently tries to negotiate his desire to keep the daughter by selecting the man she marries (not uncommonly she is given to his relative or friend), thus giving an additional turn to Eve Sedgwick's thesis of homosocial desire. But there is another reason the daughter needs to stay within the family in these narratives. She is also needed to serve, save, redeem, ultimately to sacrifice herself for the father, as does Iphigenia, Cordelia, Florence Dombey, or Louisa Gradgrind. To the degree that the Western narrative of the father-daughter concerns the redemption of the patriarch, the daughter's continued presence in the family is essential. So, as Fred Kaplan in his biography of Dickens states, Louisa's return to her father's house is the means of redeeming him even as the patriarchy in general in that novel is redeemed by sisterhood.
- This benign thesis places the center of interest in Hard Times, as in most Western narrative, in the development of the father's story. But there is another story possible, that of the daughter. From her point of view, the sacrifice that might redeem the father can be fatal, as with Iphigenia or Cordelia. The daughter's story is not frequent in Western narrative, but "Rappacini's Daughter" suggests where we might find it, that is, in the gothic. For though Hawthorne's gothic story is centered on a representation of male abuse of knowledge and power, the daughter's story—the conflict between her desire for her father's love and her desire for self-fulfillment and autonomy—vies for center stage with the father's, particularly at closure, as it does in many gothic novels. In that most ungothic novel, Hard Times, Louisa's story is less visible and more problematic, but it is present intermittently, injected into the narrative not through the gothic but through the 1860s version of the gothic, the sensation novel and its interrogation of the institution of marriage.
The other flaw of that 18th Century’s society was sexuality & materialism that Pope is trying to depict in his poem. It's fairly obvious to us that if you put a bunch of attractive, well-off, and bored young men and women together, sparks are bound to fly in one way or another. They'll get attracted to one another, feel desire for one another, have dreams about one another, maybe even fall in love. That's the trouble with the society Pope depicts in The Rape of the Lock: there's absolutely no way for anyone in it to safely express or act on his or her sexuality, desire, lust, or love. The rules forbid it. And so, instead, sexuality gets warped and twisted into materiality and narcissism: Belinda's love of her own face; the Baron's desire for her locks; Sir Plume's love of his cane and snuffbox. Even when Ariel finds "an Earthly Lover" in Belinda's heart, that fact only serves to put her more in danger of losing her hair to the Baron.
In one angle Pope is showing the lacking of real manhood in 18th century society. Those Greek and Roman guys; Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, and all of their ilk were heroes. They all were Armor-wearing, battle-tested, honorable men. So many of the hip men of the upper classes in Pope's era seemed to have fallen woefully short of that heroic & manly traits. They drank tea. They took snuff. They wore silk and satin. They wore wigs as well. And as for honor—they seemed to care more about gossip, backstabbing, and personal gain than the good of society, or of their country. In the Rape of the Lock, Pope juxtaposes the heroic classical ideal of manhood from the ancient epics, with the reality of the beaus (admirers/lovers) who moved through his own society, that he found the latter sadly lacking.
The Rape of the Lock demonstrates Pope’s anxieties concerning the state of religious piety during the early eighteenth century. Pope was Catholic, and in the poem, he indicates his concern that society has embraced objects of worship (beauty) rather than God. His use of religious imagery reveals this perversion. The rituals he depicts in the first and second cantos equate religion with secular love. During Belinda’s toilette, the poem imbues the Bibles and love letters on her dressing table with equal significance. The Baron’s altar to Love in the second canto echoes this scene. On the altar itself an integral part of Christian worship. Pope symbolizes this equation of religious and erotic love in the cross that Belinda wears. This central symbol of Christianity serves an ornamental, not religious function, adorning Belinda’s “white breast”. The cross remains sufficiently secular that “Jews might kiss” it and “infidels adore” it. Of course, Pope leaves ambiguous the implication that the Jews and infidels are admiring Belinda’s breasts and not the cross. This subversion of established principles of Christian worship critiques the laxity of early eighteenth-century attitudes towards religion and morality.
The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the genre of mock-epic. One of the main themes of The Rape of the Lock is “vanity”(Self-admiration), specifically the vanity of upper-class English society during the early eighteenth century. Belinda, the glamorous society lady, is an exemplar of this. Each day upon rising, she enters the inner sanctum of her boudoir (a private room) where she proceeds to get dressed, taking great pains to ensure that she is as beautiful and as ravishing as any woman could possibly be. The enormous effort she expends during this elaborate ritual proves well worth it, as admiring heads turn in her direction as she embarks upon her stately journey up the Thames toward Hampton Court Palace.
In fact, Belinda moves in a world that is completely lifeless and shallow, where personal appearance is everything. Her reaction to the Baron's theft of a relatively small piece of her hair may seem a trifle excessive, but her implacable wrath is a satirical reflection on just how vain Belinda and the society she inhabits really is.
The theme of vanity spills over into how the esoteric social elite treats religion. The upper classes of early eighteenth-century England clearly pay nothing more than lip-service to prevailing religious beliefs. Faith, like everything else, is something to be shown off, paraded in front of others as a means of securing their approval and admiration. The juxtaposition of faith and vanity is epitomized by Belinda. She keeps a copy of the Bible on her dressing table, which squats uncomfortably next to all her various accoutrements (additional items) of vanity: hairbrushes, powders, and—appropriately enough—vanity cream.
The Baron also has nothing more than a superficial attachment to religious faith. He wakes up at the crack of dawn to pray for the success of his forthcoming plan to steal a lock of Belinda's hair. But it is all just a sham; he is no more religious than Belinda. His prayers are simply a rather cynical attempt to put a pious gloss upon an act of common thievery. Once again, the motivation for action is vanity; the Baron wants to steal some of Belinda's hair so he can boast of its possession, making him an object of admiration among the smart set.
- The rendering of the card game as a battle constitutes an amusing and deft narrative feat. By parodying the battle scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended on such insignificant trials as games and gambling, which often become a mere front for flirtation. The structure of “the three attempts” by which the lock is cut is a convention of heroic challenges, particularly in the romance genre.
- In Canto IV, Umbrio unleashes the bag of “[s]ighs, sobs, and passions” over Belinda increasing her anger and despair. Afterwards, Thalestris, her friend, (In Greek mythology, Thalestris is the name of one of the Amazons, a race of warrior women who excluded men from their society) tries to convince Belinda, holding a long speech, to revenge herself, and so she demands “her beau”, Sir Plume, to challenge in defense the Baron for Belinda’s honor. The Baron refuses to give back the lock of hair, for as Sir Plume’s speech is clumsy and does not compare with any of the way, in which a true knight should act. Pope emphasizes here the fall of chivalrous acts and behavior of the courtly men.
- Belinda’s priorities might be out of whack with today’s society; however, the fact remains that this was the type of lifestyle afforded to her by her status. As a woman, the courtly lifestyle was the best opportunity for a happy life. Of course Belinda would and should be upset by such a "trivial" matter. Her sole means of livelihood and success has been shattered by the "rape of the lock." Like many rape victims and women socialized into society today, Belinda tries to rationalize this incident by blaming herself. She remembers how she was forewarned about her fate, but she chose to ignore reason. She says she should have known better (4.165-166). Here, the woman is not only blaming herself, but professing her own internalized stupidity and implying her inferior status. She cries out from the pain she is experiencing and shouts, "Oh hadst thou, cruel! Been content to seize/ Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!" (4.175-6). The sexual undertones here are not very difficult to see. It appears that Belinda would have preferred to be raped sexually, where she would have suffered only private humiliation, than to have a precious lock of her hair cut off publicly. By this incident, Belinda is defaced not only privately but also publicly. Everyone can plainly see that Belinda has this major defect. It is as though the Scarlet "A" has been branded on her chest. Her "flaw" has become obvious to everyone; hence, the victim is victimized again by society.
- Thaletris-an Amazonian type woman who enjoys fighting. It is interesting that even Thaletris experiences some doubts about whether or not she should help Belinda who "burns with more than mortal ire" (4.93). Thaletris exclaims that she can already see that Belinda’s honor is lost and that she has become instantly defamed and deflowered by this act (4.105-116). To preserve their own social appearances, her friends must desert her or face this same type of degradation. Thaletris must examine whether helping Belinda is worth her while.
- Thaletris tends to hold male characteristics and subscribe to some male-dictated norms, while rejecting males and other male-determined mores; therefore, she is the form of woman that is to be most feared and scorned by men. Thaletris, while not presented as such, represents the truly free female and is an early feminist character. Thatletris’ personality is divided among the other female characters and is used simply to portray the supposed vengeful, spiteful, and wholly illogical character of women. Her feminist standards may be rejected today, as she seems to reject femininity and scorns "feminine" females; however she represents the sole strong female role in the story. Thaletris’ militaristic notions about life and her unbridled sexuality lead her to consider Belinda a "prude" (5.36). She can not accept Belinda as a fellow sister, free to make her own personal choices, but must still reject her on certain grounds.
- Indeed, Pope succeeded to treat the social customs of the age with an assumed epic seriousness. The poem is all about "Lords" and "Belles" of the 18th c. London. We see here the elegance and emptiness; the meanness and vanity; the jealousies, treacheries and intrigues of the then society. Both the sexes of the aristocratic society led voluptuous, materialistic life. Pope has shown himself as the spokes-person of his age.
Subjects of Satire
- Pope is making fun of a certain lifestyle-culture where people have nothing serious in their life. So they make up their time with silly, trivial matters. They only play with silly emotion. They are pre-occupied with flirtation, envy, vulgar jokes, dressing up, mundane pleasure, cheap poetry, card-play, coffee drinking, balls and masquerades.
- Pope uses dignified style of epic to exaggerate those trivialities; hence satirizes the aristocracy of the 18th c. He shuns the silly matters of the society, where lords and ladies quarrel about some nasty things. He directs his satiric weapon against self-love and self-interest of the Augustan society.
Feminine Frivolity
- It is clear that, the Lord and Baron represent male aristocrats and the Belle represents female aristocrats and the Hampton Court is for the meeting place of the 18th c. aristocratic society. Thus, the satire is confined to a certain section of the English society. A wider satire field is introduced with the ridicule of judges and jury who care more for their belly than for judging. So, the poem satirizes not the whole contemporary society of the 18th century.
- Belinda wakes up at noon, dreams of a Beau-lover, keeps lap-dogs, desires to be sought after, wastes time beautifying herself, loves to ride gilded chariots and to dress lavishly for the parties. Ladies of the age, learn early in their life how to roll their eyes and to blush in an intriguing manner. Their hearts are like 'toy-shops'.
- The poets satirical vision does not spare Queen Anne, who "Does sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea" at the Hampton court. It shows that even for the Queen the counseling and drinking tea is the same trivial matter. With Belinda, the follies and frivolities of the whole sex are satirized.
- Belinda wakes up late and her eyes first open on Billet-doux. The poet laughs at the conventional vocabulary of those letters. He ridicules excessive attention to self-decoration and -appearance.
- Belinda is described as commencing her toilette operations with a prayers to the cosmetic powers. At her dressing table is "the various offerings of the world"- Indian diamonds, Arabian perfumes, and African white comb of Ivory. Bible is a dressing table element like pins, puffs, powders and Billet-doux. Her honor is less valuable than 'her new brocade'; her necklace is more precious than her heart. She may forget a prayer, but not a masquerade. Such witty and humorous comparison and details show that, Pope censures the fashionable ladies of the century.
- In Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic story "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844), a brilliant scientist "instruct[s his daughter] deeply in his science, [so] that, as young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor's chair" as her would-be lover Giovanni learns. But the father has done more: in a diabolical experiment he has had his daughter tend poisonous flowers through which she, Beatrice, becomes literally lethal: her kiss, her very breath kills. Though he has also arranged to give her a lover by infecting Giovanni with the poison, Beatrice, knowing that the antidote will be fatal to her, both sacrifices herself for her unworthy lover and rejects her father's gifts by killing herself.
- The parallel between Hawthorne's gothic story and Dickens' most ungothic novel of hard facts is close. Louisa Gradgrind, like Beatrice, is the victim of a terrible fatherly experiment that the fathers justify in the same way: they intend to make their daughters more powerful. The experiments, however, are fatal both to the women and to others. Louisa's equally insufficient lover Harthouse is humiliated by his contact with her and disappears into Egypt, and though the sudden and untimely deaths of her husband and her brother are not her doing directly, they are at least metaphorically the result of their relationship with her. And in the most resonant connection, the innocent and idealized working-class hero, Stephen Blackpool, dies painfully as a result of two brief encounters with her. In a further parallel, Louisa's failure to remarry after Bounderby's death is a kind of death; like Beatrice's suicidal rejection of her father's gifts, Louisa, though she had accepted the husband her father gave her, lives out her life in the shadow of other people's happiness and fulfillment.
appeared in October 1856. It was a comment on the trial, a few months earlier, of a working-class man who was convicted and hanged for murdering his wife. Dickens used the case to attack the divorce laws. He pointed out that there was no escape from a bad marriage except in certain very restricted circumstances and then "only on payment of an enormous sum of money."
