Excerpt From: The Miltonic Paradise and the Scene of Post-Transgression in The
Rape of The Lock
When “Earth [feels] the wound, and nature from her seat/ Sighing through all her
works gave signs of woe,/ That all [is] lost” (Paradise Lost, IX.782-784), there seems to
be no way that Paradise can be rebuilt on earth—perhaps even no way that Milton’s
lexicon for Paradise can be reoriented, for his representation of Eden depends heavily on
his awareness of the Fall. The original transgression should be the last one, as everything
on earth hereafter is unremittingly imperfect. Less than a century after Milton’s paradise
passes, Alexander Pope tries to alter its gloomy fate by rebuilding paradise into a comic
version of eighteenth century London. This new paradise, nonetheless, picks up where
Milton’s left off, with artifice and fallacy as Pope’s creative basis for The Rape of the
Lock. In this sense, Pope’s urban paradise can rightfully be called the scene of posttransgression. In this paper, I will explore that scene as one that knows its own failure;
any construction of paradise, as Pope is all too aware, is marred by a sense of irreversible
loss. This acknowledgment at the heart of The Rape of the Lock affects the poem’s sense
of embodiment and its poetic structure. The poem’s imagery persists in being ethereal
and insubstantial, and this pronounced feature reflects Pope’s exploration of what it
means to be fallen. For Pope, the post-trangressive scene is defined by the loss of an
organic whole and, despite the poem’s attempts to replicate paradise, this loss dooms any
representation of it to the realm of flimsy shadow. Similarly, Pope’s structural choices for
his poem are tellingly anti-Miltonic and demonstrate Pope’s commentary on the fallen
world in their ironic commitment to literary perfection as the vehicle through which
imperfections emerge.
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In the most obvious ways, The Rape of The Lock is both temporally and socially
post-trangressive; the salons of modern upper-class London are a far cry from Eden and,
as cities are always equated with a myriad of vices, there is no better place than London
to illustrate the striking aftermath of the Miltonic fall. But the complexities of Pope’s
paradise spring from its very origins. There is no real fall from this paradise—it’s a
paradise populated with the already fallen, built up from the ruins of their fallible
convictions. We must see Pope’s setting as paradise regardless of the inherent paradox;
we cannot ignore the machinery, language and epic proportions that he engages to make
the urban scene of post-trangression an echo of the Milton paradise. Pope, like Milton,
invokes a pre-Canonical vista of mythical figures as players in his parable—Sylphs,
Gnomes, and ancient Greek gods are nestled into the world of belles and beaus. In
dissolving this tangible city setting to a gossamer faerie world, Pope turns it into
“th’Etherial Plain” (II. 1) in which anything is possible:
Fairest of Mortals, thou distinguish’d Care
Of thousand bright Inhabitants of Air!
If e’er one Vision touched thy infant Thought,
Of all the Nurse and all the Priest have taught,
Of airy Elves by Moonlight Shadows seen…
Hear and believe! Thy own Importance know,
Nor bound thy narrow Views to Things below…
Think what an Equipage thou hast in Air
And view with scorn Two pages and a Chair.
(I. 28-46)
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The tactile, timely world is rendered magical by being dematerialized. As the passage
suggests, the completely palpable things in this world are objects of scorn. Milton’s
paradise, on the other hand, is fraught with sensual descriptions of the animals and fruit
trees that fill the Garden. It is intriguing that Milton’s temporally and spatially ambiguous
setting is more voluptuous or at least accessible than Pope’s specific corporeal one. Pope
reverses the values of Milton’s Eden by melting away its opacity and undoing the Edenic
sense of embodiment.
In addition to negating the tangibility of Milton’s paradise, Pope ironically
contorts Milton’s language for paradise and exposes the buried imperfections of his
setting. For example, Pope belies the imperfections of fallen language by structuring his
verse with rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter. This is the very structure that Milton
refuses, “rhyme being no necessary adjunct… but the invention of a barbarous age, to set
off wretched matter…” (Paradise Lost, “The Verse”). The perfection imposed by poetic
conventions can only be contrived by the imperfect, according to Milton, by those that
speak the fallen language of “a barbarous age.” Insofar as rhyme is essentially artificial,
Pope’s literary “perfection” of the fallen scene is connected to a structure that articulates
that perfection by its falsity. His structural choices for The Rape of The Lock are a
paradigm of over-perfection; in translating and imposing order onto the fallen world, the
poet achieves a kind of perfection that never existed in nature. Pope’s structural choices,
then, draw attention to the difference between manufacturing paradise and paradise itself.
The rhyme scheme not only facilitates empty over-perfection, but it also provides
opportunities for absurdity, where two incongruous things—one of the order of divine
perfection and one of mundane triviality—are equated with one another:
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This Day, black Omens threat the brightest Fair…
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Prayers or miss a Masquerade…
(II. 100-108)
The poetic strategy, known as zeugma, that equates “Honour” with “Brocade” in this
moment also works to align the vocabularies of earth and paradise to comic effect.
Pope’s interest here is not unlike Strindberg’s in Dream Play, where the fallen know
paradise through its absence and are dissatisfied with the present state of the world
because of this knowledge. In this modern drama, the daughter of God falls to the earth to
see why people are so unhappy and she reveals the secret to a Poet she meets:
Daughter: This is the world as it really is before it got turned around.
Poet: Turned around?
Daughter: When the copy was made.
Poet: The copy. Of course! I’ve always felt that this was just a false copy.
And when I began to see what the original must have been like, I became
dissatisfied with everything. (scene 9)
The “false copy” is an effort to resurrect Eden, only to achieve a cheap duplicate. But we
are never made to feel that this bad copy is an accident of the poet’s own fallen state,
neither in Strindberg nor in Pope. Rather, the notion of the copy is the poet’s purposeful
and even wise recognition of the nature of being fallen. Thus, Pope’s paradise can be
seen as a voluntarily “bad copy” of Milton’s, both in its airiness and its artificial
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rhetorical structures. The Miltonic paradise has been replaced with a “bad copy” in which
impure earthly icons penetrate and compromise their spiritual counterparts.
Similarly, in describing Clarissa’s “toilet,” Pope puns on the word “cosmic” to
unite it with its less than holy resonance in “Cosmetic Pow’rs” that enact the “Sacred
Rites of Pride” (I. 122-128). Belinda’s moment of vanity, as she gazes at her “heav’nly
Image in the Glass,” recalls Eve’s narcissistic examination of her reflection in the waters
of paradise. In Pope’s version of genesis, once again, it is the defects of the Miltonic
paradise that are emphasized—the gossamer shimmers of vanity rather than the tangible
objects of divine perfection. Indeed, the figure of “Air” returns in the second canto of
Pope’s poem to articulate the problem of the false copy in terms of the dissolution
inherent in post-transgressive modes of representation:
Then [Phoebus] prostrate falls, and begs with ardent Eyes
Soon to obtain, and long posess the Prize:
The Pow’rs gave Ear, and granted half his Pray’r,
The rest, the Winds dispers’d in empty air.
(II. 43-46)
This allusion to the sinister Baron in The Rape of the Lock recall’s Satan’s vain
imaginings in Paradise Lost, in which he “aspired beyond thus high” from his base point
in Pandemonium. The emptiness of Satan’s wishes is reflected in Pope’s “empty air.”
Here, paradise is built out of the perspective of the fallen and is inevitably tainted by that
nature. This is the disposition of the false copy: just as Phoebus aspires to soaring heights
and is only granted parts of his wish, some of the fallen may be resurrected but parts of
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the paradise equation are missing—or they cannot be fulfilled. The innate longing for
paradise thus becomes an empty longing that the empty air washes over.