ˊ BlBrЂ   -Critical Trends in Pope's The Rape of the Lock At the age of 24, Alexander Pope published a poem which he later protested "was intended only to divert a few young ladies." Pope's stated purpose is overtly disingenuous, but even his remarkable ego may have been startled by the staying power of this early "diversion." Since its first publication in 1712, The Rape of the Lock has never strayed far from the central questions which confront each generation of critics. Within its glittering imagery and fanciful turns of phrase, the Rape challenges the stability of perception. Critical studies of the Rape, as a result, have a penchant for not only reflecting assumptions about the ends and means of literature, but for exposing the fragile foundations on which those assumptions rest. The criticism of the Rape tends to unearth not only "meaning" in the poem, but "meaning" in itself. I do not profess that criticism of the Rape is a ray of divine light truly illuminating the nature of critical inquiry. What I do profess is that the Rape is a problematic work for critics, lending itself to a broad range of critical interpretations while undermining the interpretive power of any one mode. The successes and failures of critical approaches to the Rape suggest future trends towards more inclusive critical theories. In the remainder of this essay, I propose to explore where criticism of the Rape has brought us, and where we may go from here. Emerging from the nineteenth century, Pope's reputation as a "mere" satirist"the wicked wasp of Twickenham"was reversed with the rise of the New Critics. General studies such as Geoffrey Tillotson's On the Poetry of Pope and R.K. Root's The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (both published in 1938) pointed to the web of images and ideas in Pope's work that represented something more than satire. Cleanth Brooks' "The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor" in The Well Wrought Urn was the decisive blow in the New Critical crusade to affirm Pope's "complexity." Brooks argued for a "both/and" reading of the Rape which could encompass Pope's rhetorical ambiguities, allowing the poem to be read as both satire and praise. The implications of this reading are of course problematic when viewed from a normative standpoint: if the Rape can "mean" all things, can it ultimately "mean" anything? Many contemporary critics instinctively rebel against the notion that Pope can rhetorically disentangle himself from the normative assumptions of his age, but any inquiry into Pope's intent must first contend with Brooks because the paradoxes, the contradictions, are there. Even contemporary critics, conscious as they are of the limits of New Critical aestheticism, continue to recycle the notion that the Rape is essentially a poem of ambiguity: see, for example, Leopold Damrosch, The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope; C.N. Manlove, "Change in The Rape of the Lock;" Charles Martindale, "Sense and Sensibility: The Child and the Man in The Rape of the Lock." The notion of paradox has also found a more unlikely expression in critical studies of Pope's sources. Here, the most influential work is Reuben Brower's Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. Brower traces the complex allusive strategies which Pope inherits from Dryden. Pope's "wit" in the Rape, Brower argues, comes from the "beautiful diminution" of the surface world and the allusive worlds of his sourcesHomer, Virgil, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, et alby the absurdity of events and the familiarity of Pope's poetic voice. Brower's reading of the Rape amounts to another permutation of "both/and": Pope's allusions both heroically elevate and satirically deflate Belinda and her circle. The question Brower finally raisesa question which most critics, in their inclination to generate articles by playing hideandgoseek with allusions, have thus far been reluctant to addressis a question of the sanctity of sources for Pope. Wolfgang Rudat poses this question in "Pope's 'Mutual Commerce'": given Pope's apparent affinity for the beau monde he ridicules, is it possible that he has an equal ambivalence toward those times and authors from which he draws his sources? An interesting question, but where will it lead us? Probably to one or two intertextual readings of the Rape and Pope's translation of the Iliad; more probably still to a score of Notes & Queries articles which scratch out Pope's attitudethrough letters or marginalia or whatevertowards a more obscure source. This, in fact, is the central problem of both source studies and Brooks' "both/and" formulation: it prods critics into the already exhausted occupation of pulling the wings off butterflies. Certainly recognizing allusions, tensions, or minor historical and cultural references which have gone unnoticed can serve to enrich our understanding of the Rape. But such studies do not deserve their current primacy as the bulk of critical inquiry. Surely there is something more to be learned than "___ is a reference to ___," "the Rape is informed by the opposition of ___ and ___," or "___ echoes ___." I would contend that future criticism of the Rape rests in the larger questions of (1) the meaning of a literary work, and (2) the manner in which that meaning is affirmed, qualified, or changed by the author. First, by focusing on the meaning of the workor, perhaps more correctly, the ends served by the workI am of course suggesting that the Rape, the formalist darling, must brave the whims of theoretical discourse. Theory is not a bad thing, although you would not readily perceive this if you limited yourself to theoretical readings of the Rape. Ellen Pollak's The Poetics of Sexual Myth and Laura Brown's Alexander Pope, the most notable theoretical studies of Pope, are more notable still for the disappointment produced in the reader. Both scholars admit from the outset that Pope is nearly impossible to pin downagain the inescapable legacy of Brooksand then proceed to ignore their own good advice by tying Pope to the monological cultural or economic imperative of which he is the conscious but helpless pawn. Reading Pollak and Brown, we may question the extent to which theorists can effectively contextualize a poet who so frequently "undercuts" himself, as Carol Pohli does in "The Point Where Sense and Dulness Meet." Contextualizing the Rape only becomes difficult, though, when the context is as rigid as Pollak's or Brown's. The key to capturing what Pope is up to rhetorically in the Rape is not to see him as a product of one ideology, but as a free agent attempting to stake out a position within cultural debatesthe debate between prudish middleclass housewives and frivolous upperclass coquettes, for example. The critical theory advanced by Steven Mailloux in Rhetorical Power may be useful to such an assessment of ends, but it is by no means the only framework possible. Nor are "contexts" excluded to cultural mores or history. Pope was also involved in "debates" over aesthetic principles, or, more specifically, the proper qualities of the mockheroic poem. The type of interdisciplinary approach Lawrence Lipking calls for in "'Quick Poetic Eyes': Another Look at Literary Pictorialism" could also expand the aesthetic debate to encompass neglected nonliterary arts. As a glance at the annotated bibliography accompanying this essay shows, some critics are addressing these subjects. But the overwhelming emphasis seems to be in defining where Pope happens to fall within a certain context, ignoring why or how he arrived at that position. The answer is not only a matter of influences or historical trends; it is a matter of Pope's active search for a comfortable place within those influences and historical trends. Which brings me to my second proposed area of inquiry: the manner in which Pope creates or attempts to create his own context. For the Rape, the method is undoubtedly linked to the concept of refinement. In his exceptional study Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, David Morris traces revisions to the Rape in terms of refinement, a largely additive process in which reflections on published versions of his poems led to "more thoughtful" later versions. Outside of Morris, scholars have been surprisingly silent on the significance of Pope's revisions to the Rape. To what extent do the additions alter the previous meaning? How does Pope's rhetorical strategy or poetic voice change between editions? Here, Damrosch's Bakhtinian argument (in "Pope's Epics: What Happened to Narrative?") that Pope is more closely aligned with the novelistic world of "becoming" than with the epic world of the "absolute past" provides one theoretical basis for discussing the poetic voices in the Rape. My aim in supporting this critical reorientation in our approach to The Rape of the Lock is not to question the validity of "traditional" critical methods. On the contrary, Brooks and Brower have advanced strong traditional arguments which remain relevant, and much exciting work on the Rapeparticularly Morris' studyis the product of traditional methods of scholarship. What I am suggesting is that the continued predominance of traditionalism in the study of the Rape has encouraged insignificant and redundant scholarship which we could do without. We could do without the jargonladen value judgments of the Pollaks and Browns as well. The best immediate course for the study of Pope and the Rape is thus a critical framework which can understand Pope's position within his culture while acknowledging his struggles to represent and transcend the cultural moment.   Annotated Bibliography Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock Given the wealth of information on the Rape, the following bibliography is selective, with particular emphasis on critical trends since 1983. Other annotated bibliographies, found at the end of this list, may direct further reading.   ˔Editions Tillotson, Geoffrey, ed. The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale UP. London: Methuen, 1962. Vol. 2 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope. Gen. ed. John Butt. 11 vols. 193869. [The standard edition of the Rape, with an excellent introduction by Tillotson.] Miscellaneous poems and translations by several hands. 1st ed. London: B. Lintott, 1712. [Contains the twocanto version of the Rape.] The rape of the lock. An heroicomical poem. In five canto's. Written by Mr. Pope. London: Bernard Lintott, 1714. [The 1712 version is expanded into the familiar five cantos.] The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope. Ed. William Warburton. 9 vols. London: 1751. [Incorporates changes authorized and probably authorized by Pope, most notably the addition (from the 1717 edition of the Works) of Clarissa's speech in Canto V.] A key to the lock. Or, a treatise proving, beyond all contradiction, the dangerous tendency of a late poem, entituled, The rape of the lock, to government and religion. By Esdras Barnivelt, apoth. 1st ed. London: J. Roberts, 1715. [Pope's prose satire on critics of the Rape. Mockingly advances political meanings for the Game of Ombre in Canto III.] Biography Johnson, Samuel. "Pope," Lives of the English Poets. Ed. George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905. Vol. 3. [An inaccurate biography but an important critical assessment of Pope's poetry, inevitably quoted and debated in critical studies of Pope.] Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1985. [The standard biography of Pope. Chapter 12 in particular discusses Pope's complex relationships with women and the various layers of meaning in the Rape.] Ruffhead, Owen. The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq. Compiled from Original Manuscripts; with a Critical Essay on His Writings and Genius. London: 1769. [Details are second hand from Pope's correspondent Ralph Allen, and often inaccurate, but provides a useful vision of Pope from the perspective of his contemporary admirers.] Sherburn, George. The Early Career of Alexander Pope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1934. [The best study before Mack. Traces Pope's literary career through 1727.] , ed. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956. [The invaluable standard collection of Pope's correspondence.] Spence, Joseph. Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men. Ed. J.M. Osborn. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. [Remains interesting and relevant to Pope scholars.] Criticism EighteenthCentury Dennis, John. Remarks on Mr. Pope's Rape of the Lock. In several letters to a friend. With a preface. Occasion'd by the late treatise on the Profund, and the Dunciad. The Critical Works of John Dennis. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943. Vol. 2. 322352. [Dennis' enmity to Pope is obvious and pervasive, but his critique of Pope's apparent contradictions continue to demand attention.] Johnson, Samuel. "Pope," Lives of the English Poets. [See above.] Structure Brooks, Cleanth. "The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor," The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structures of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1947. 7495. [The influential New Critical reading of the Rape which advances the "both/and" approach to Pope's "complexity of tone."] Bruckmann, Patricia. "Virgins Visited by Angel Powers: The Rape of the Lock, Platonic Love, Sylphs and Some Mysticks," The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, eds. Cambridge : Cambridge UP, 1988. 320. [Interprets Pope's sylphs as a Platonic alternative to Belinda's eros.] Damrosch, Leopold. The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. [Contends that the alienation and uncertainty produced by Pope's "attempts to encompass an increasingly recalcitrant external world" marks him as an early modern poet. These qualities are evidenced in the Rape, where "the world of desire is seen from the outside by a poet who recognizes its duplicities even as he longs for its rewards." Unlike Pope's world, Damrosch's approach is less than imaginative.] . "Pope's Epics: What Happened to Narrative?" The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29.2 (1988): 189207. [Discusses narrative strategies in the Rape and The Dunciad, with regard to Pope's translation of the Iliad. Argues that "Pope possesses real narrative power, if narrative can be seen within lines and couplets and not just in an Aristotelian sequence of episodes." Ties Pope to Bakhtinian theory by positioning his poetry between the epic world of the "absolute past" and the novelistic world of "becoming."] Fowler, Alastair. "The Paradoxical Machinery of The Rape of the Lock," Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary. Colin Nicholson, ed. Aberdeen : Aberdeen UP, 1988. 151170. [A good analysis of Pope's poetic machinery and its ends psychological, moral, and political. Refutes John Dennis. Significant digressions also counter Laura Brown and feminist readings of Pope.] Loftis, John E. "Speech in The Rape of the Lock," Neophilologus 67.1 (1983): 149159. [Weakly asserts that the Rape deals with "perversions of the relationship between man and God through faulty speech," and that such perversions characterize Belinda's world as irredeemably "rotten and corrupt."] Manlove, C. N. "Change in The Rape of the Lock." Durham University Journal 76.1 (1983): 4350. [A somewhat unfocused essay in which Manlove attempts to define change characterized by movement and metamorphosisas the "essential character" of the poem. A few novel insights, but fails to clearly distinguish this "idiom of change" from previous statements of Pope's ambiguity.] . "Parts and Wholes: Pope and Poetic Structure," Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary. Colin Nicholson, ed. Aberdeen : Aberdeen UP, 1988. 139150. [Defines Pope's poems as evolving from an "eighteenthcentury" to a "pre Romantic" structural principle. Incorporates the "change" reading above into a more general overview of Pope's work.] Martindale, Charles. "Sense and Sensibility: The Child and the Man in The Rape of the Lock." The Modern Language Review 78.2 (1983): 273284. [Argues that the Rape contains two sensibilities: the vision of the "man of sense" and the vision of the child. The opposing pulls of these visions make the Rape a "poem of disjunction" rather than a unified whole. A counter to the "adulation of Pope" which Martindale contendshas obscured the "striking inequalities in the standard of [his] writing."] Morris, David B. Alexander Pope, the Genius of Sense. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. [An exceptional study of Pope. Revisions of the Rape are placed in the context of eighteenthcentury ideals of "refinement"a largely additive process in which Pope's reflections on the events and images of his "light hearted" first poem produced a "more thoughtful" second version.] Pohli, Carol. "The Point Where Sense and Dulness Meet." Eighteenth Century Studies 19.2 (1985): 20634. [While not specifically discussing the Rape, Pohli offers an important qualification to the misogynistic assumptions central to most feminist discussions of the work. Acknowledging that Pope's writing conventionally abuses women, Pohli emphasizes the ways Pope "neutralizes" and "undercut[s]" his own sexist stereotypes. Relates these contradictions to Pope's "larger" epistemological concerns.] Contexts Carnall, Geoffrey. "Belinda's Bibles," Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary. Colin Nicholson, ed. Aberdeen : Aberdeen UP, 1988. 130138. [A sketch of religious revivalism in Pope's time, prompted by the question: were Belinda's "Bibles" (I.138) ornamental bijou Bibles or larger volumes used as scrap paper for curling hair? Notes and Queries rejected Carnall's thesis in 1962, hence this inflated version.] ErskineHill, Howard. "The Satirical Game at Cards in Pope and Wordsworth." Yearbook of English Studies 14 (1984): 183 195. [Places Belinda's Game of Ombre within a context of contemporary political satires which use playing cards allegorically. ErskineHill offers "an hypothesis of the most provisional kind only" that Belinda's game is a commentary on the Revolution of 1688.] Erwin, Timothy. "Alexander Pope and the Disappearance of the Beautiful." EighteenthCentury Life 16.3 (1992): 46 64. [An obscurely written article in which Erwin contends that Pope's affinity for the Carracci school of painting shaped an "aesthetic of resistance to iconoclasm grounded in a linear theory of painting." Has more to say about the frontispiece of the 1714 edition of the Rape than about the poem itself. Demonstrates the problems of communication between scholars of visual art and literature, particularly when the medium shares Erwin's predeliction for jargon.] Lipking, Lawrence. "Quick Poetic Eyes: Another Look at Literary Pictorialism," Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson. Richard Wendorf, ed. Minneapolis : U of Minnesota P, 1983. 325. [Asserts that modern readers are unresponsive to the manipulation of visual conventions in poetryan act of central aesthetic importance to eighteenthcentury poets. While only touching briefly on a broad range of poems, Lipking suggests that "the theme of The Rape of the Lock" may be "how to see, and its conclusion is that no one makes finer pictures than a poet."] Sources Brower, Reuben Arthur. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. London: Oxford UP, 1959. [An important study of the complex allusive strategies Pope inherited from Dryden. Contends that the "essence of Pope's wit" in the Rape "lies in . . . beautiful diminution""the appeal of the surface and the appeal of a better world of noble manners and actions" contrasted with the outward absurdity of events and a familiar poetic voice, bordering on the burlesque. Neatly summarizes the influences of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden in the Rape.] Corse, Taylor. "Force and Fraud in The Rape of the Lock." Philological Quarterly 66.3 (1987): 355365. [Explains the significance, in ethical and literary tradition, of the Baron's meditation on Force and Fraud (II. 2934). Argues that Pope "invokes the past"the condemnation of Fraud over Force in Cicero, Dante, and Milton"in order to indict the present"the Baron's Machiavellian approach, synthesizing Force and Fraud without "any sense of ethical discernment" toward "Ends."] Ferguson, Rebecca. The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1986. [A lengthy analysis of Homer's influence on Pope, particularly through the Iliad, which "most nearly resembles" the Rape in its "working out of a central passion."] Rudat, Wolfgang E. H. "Pope's 'Mutual Commerce': Allusive Manipulation in January and May and The Rape of the Lock." Durham University Journal 77.1 (1984): 1924. [Rudat "inventively contemplates the relevances of possible allusive contexts" among Pope's poems and Virgil's Aeneid. Takes more license than can finally be justified to argue that Pope "imports meanings from" and "infiltrates 'meanings' into" his sources, but an intriguing thesis.] Scarboro, Donna. "'Thy Own Importance Know': The Influence of Le Comte de Gabalis on The Rape of the Lock." Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 14 (1985): 231241. [Traces a tenuous influence between Villars' Comte and Pope through the Rape's Rosicrucian machinery.] Weinbrot, Howard D. "The Rape of the Lock and the Contexts of Warfare," The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 2148. [Points to the war imagery of the Rape and its sources in Homer.] Feminist and Marxist Brown, Laura. Alexander Pope. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. [A Marxist reading of Pope. Argues unconvincingly that the "formal dichotomy" of classical allusion and contemporary mores in the Rape allows Pope to celebrate the glories of "mercantile imperialism" while mocking the objectified society of "commodity fetishism" represented by Belinda and her circle.] Payne, Deborah C. "Pope and the War Against Coquettes: Or, Feminism and The Rape of the Lock ReconsideredYet Again." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32.1 (1991): 324. [Places the Rape within a "cultural campaign" of "gender fragmentation" carried out by the "bourgeois print industry of ladies' magazines and advice manuals"including Steele's The Ladies Library (1714). Defends Pollak's book, arguing that Pope's "stylistic pyrotechnics" hide his "complicity with patriarchal ideology." An interesting cultural context victimized by theoretical dogmatism.] Pollak, Ellen. "The Rape of the Lock: A Reification of the Myth of Passive Womanhood," The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. [The best feminist reading of the Rape, but ultimately disappointing. After admitting that "the blurring of boundaries between categories of women in the Rape makes easy, schematic exegesis difficult, if not impossible," Pollak ignores her own good advice, reducing Pope's "paradoxes" to the "unified intent" of extolling "passive womanhood."] Genre Broich, Ulrich. The EighteenthCentury MockHeroic Poem. Trans. David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. [Traces the development of the mockheroic poem in three phases, placing the Rape in the playful or "gallant" second phase, as distinguished from the more satiric first and third phases. Describes the influences of Boileau's Le Lutrin on Pope's Rape.] Edwards, Michael. "A Meaning for MockHeroic." Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985): 4863. [Attempts to define mock heroic as "the celebration of a changing reality and of writing, and also the satire of a deficient reality" through a comparison of the Rape and Le Lutrin] Intertextual Studies Bell, Robert H. "Metamorphoses of 'Heroic Enterprise' in Dryden and Pope." Massachusetts Studies in English 9.1 (1983):22 35. [Compares both poets' epic translations to their mock heroic poems. Concludes that Pope is better as both translator and poet. While the spirit of the epic remained an ideal to Dryden, Bell argues, Pope could enoble contemporary events and language with the grandeur of "heroic enterprise." An interesting thesis which cannot be adequately resolved in a thirteenpage article.] Versluys, Kristiaan. "The Rape of the Lock and The Waste Land: Versions of the MockHeroic," Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the Year 88. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen, eds. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990. 12540. [Compares the two poems as examples of mockheroic poetry. Versluys prefers Pope's "joiedevivre and healthy mundaneness" to Eliot's "inveterate cultural pessimism" and "theodicy."] See also 'Sources.' Other Norris, Christopher. "Pope among the Formalists: Textual Politics and The Rape of the Lock," PostStructuralist Readings of English Poetry. Richard Machlin and Christopher Norris, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 13461. [A poststructuralist attack on the ideological foundations of New Critical discourse, using Cleanth Brooks' reading of the Rape (see above) as a case study.] Tigges, Wim. "Translating The Rape of the Lock: The Battle, the Strategy and the Tactics," Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the Year 88. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D'haen, eds. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990. 14160. [A sustained lament on the problems facing a Dutch translator of the Rape.] Bibliographies of Criticism Kowalk, Wolfgang. Alexander Pope: An Annotated Bibliography of TwentiethCentury Criticism 19001979. Frankfurt: Peter D. Lang, 1981. [The most inclusive bibliography, both updating and expanding Tobin and Lopez (below). Few useful annotations.] Lopez, Cecilia L. Alexander Pope: An Annotated Bibliography, 19451967. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1970. [The best notes of the annotated bibliographies.] Tobin, James Edward. Alexander Pope: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1944. New York: Cosmopolitan Science & Art Service, 1945. [Notes are minimal when present.]