The strongest defence of Pope came from Byron. If there were a general wreck of English literature, he wrote to his publisher, the English would rush to save
Shakespeare and Milton, but the rest of the world would save Pope's work first,
because Pope was 'the moral poet of all civilisation'. Byron insisted that what others called Pope's artificiality was in truth his ‘faultlessness’. The underlying claim in Byron's defence of Pope is that the moral authority of the verse is implicit in, bound up with, its efficiency.
The Rape of the Lock is written using the heroic couplet, for which Pope is widely recognised to have mastered and made his own. The heroic couplet consists of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The natural balance of the couplet encourages comparisons and contrasts. The form provides a means for two ideas or situations to be compared or contrasted against one another. It is therefore perfect for the evaluative, moralising foundation of the poem, but does not attack the subject matter too viciously. This also complements the mock-epic style in which the poem is written, by building up something in one line to have it swiftly put down in the next. This approach to satire is expressed in the ‘toilet scene’, near the end of canto 1. Here Pope comments on the misplaced priorities of modern society through the description of Belinda's dressing table, at which she prepares herself for ‘battle’:
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.
(Rape of the Lock, I, ll.137-8)
The scene of Belinda's ‘Toilet’ is a succession of powerful images that Pope conjures through a vocabulary that is religious, mercantile, and military in turn, encompassing much of the spectrum of English worldly concerns (1.121-48). ‘Belinda as a consumer was recognizably the final point in a vast commercial expansion which stirred the imagination of Englishmen to dwell on thoughts of greatness and magnitude’ At the same time her table is an symbol of invasion by foreign goods, it can be seen to represent the flow of money sent out of the country to pay for them all.
This is also an example of Pope's use of the heroic couplet to comment on what he considers to be faults in society. Having the tortoise and elephant ‘unite’ creates a pleasant atmosphere of harmony, most notably, though, in the animal kingdom as opposed to the human world. However, this image of harmony is quickly destroyed in the next line where Pope tells us that this union is at the expense of human consumerism, as the elephant and tortoise have been transformed to combs. We then are shown what can be found on Belinda's dressing table. The order of items as described in the verse is the most significant feature here. By including the bible amongst the other more trivial items suggests that religion has become secondary to more frivolous issues, this case being cosmetics and romance. By having Belinda 'arm herself' at the dressing table is typical of the mock-epic approach, which pokes mild ridicule at society, and the situation in general. It can be argued that the cutting, or 'raping', of someone's hair is by no means a trivial matter. This may indeed be the case, but Pope has used the mock-epic style to trivialise it by blowing the whole situation out of proportion by presenting it in an epic fashion. This is made apparent at the very beginning of the poem, with Pope asking, ‘What mighty contests rise from trivial things?’ (Canto I, l.2.) It very much appears as if Pope is attempting to reason with his audience rather than attack their morals or beliefs. Typical features of an epic are seen throughout the poem. The appearance of the sylphs and other supernatural entities, for example, liken the situation to a struggle between the natural and supernatural. The depiction of Belinda as a pure and virtuous figure as opposed to the mysterious and somewhat nefarious baron also suggests a battle between good and evil, which is also common in classical epics. This style allows Pope to steer clear from his own personal opinions, which is extremely important in maintaining the atmosphere of impartiality required to lower the seriousness and harshness of the poem.
It is in the use of rhyme that Pope shows himself most resourceful, for example, the rhyme in Canto IV of The Rape of the Lock, where Pope uses rhyme with supreme inventiveness:
But anxious Cares the pensive Nymph opprest,
And secret Passions labour'd in her Breast.
Not youthful Kings in Battel seiz'd alive,
Not scornful Virgins who their Charms survive,
Not ardent Lovers robb'd of all their Bliss,
Not ancient Ladies when refus'd a Kiss,
Not Tyrants fierce that unrelenting die,
Not Cynthia when her Manteau's pinn'd awry,
E'er felt such Rage, Resentment and Despair,
As Thou, sad Virgin! for thy ravish'd Hair.
(The Rape of the Lock, Canto IV, ll.1-10)
The first four couplets here employ rational rhymes, it is no surprise to find alive rhymed with survive, or bliss with kiss. The wit lies in the way the naturalness of the rhymes is undermined by the imbalance between the first and second lines of each couplet, setting up parallels which themselves go ‘awry’, between kings who didn't want to be captured and virgins who did, or between lovers who wish to give and ladies who demand to be given a kiss. The word ‘awry’, carefully placed as the sense of imbalance mounts to a climax, allows Pope to close the paragraph with the more unusual rhyme, of despair/hair, that governs the whole poem.
What all these devices, the use of lists, rhyme, and puns have in common is that they depend for their effect on the reader's recognising them, and identifying and correcting the element of moral blindness they are intended to mimic. It is necessary that however subtle it might be, Pope's art should not be concealed. Its aim seems to be to invite the reader to replicate its clarity, and to weigh that against the external disorder. Pope's verse offers two sources of interest, the reasonableness of its form, and the unreason of the world it represents. Typically, the sharper the tension between these two, the more satisfying the verse.
Pope affirms in several of his poems that his concern for man and virtue is disinterested. He says of himself in ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ (ll. 342-43), ‘That not for Fame, but Virtue's better end,/ He stood the furious foe, the timid Friend. . . .’ This is expanded upon in ‘Imitations of Horace, II.i’:
Hear this, and tremble! you, who 'scape the Laws.
Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave
Shall walk the World, in credit, to his grave.
To virtue only and her friends, a friend
The World beside may murmur, or commend.
Envy must own, I live among the Great,
No Pimp of Pleasure, and no Spy of State,
With Eyes that pry not, Tongue that ne'er repeats,
Fond to spread Friendships, but to cover Heats,
To help who want, to forward who excel;
This, all who know me, know; who love me, tell. . . .
(ll. 118-22, 133-38)
Without regard to where he finds it, Pope feels compelled to combat vice and work for the establishment of Truth and Virtue, out of concern for himself and for man in general. It appears that Pope feels that those in superior moral positions have a duty to be standard bearers for the race and to resist every immoral act which would lead man farther away from a principled life. The satirist claims not selfishly attack anyone who disagrees with him, rather he undertakes to oppose immorality because it is immoral, without consideration of whose improper acts it is or against whom it was perpetrated.
The essential purpose of mock-epic, as the name implies, is to point up the contrast between the true epic values celebrated by Homer and Virgil, and the false codes followed by contemporary society. Here Pope uses the epic tradition to accuse his society of being unable to distinguish between appearance and reality. That the theft of a lock of hair can be confused with the violation of the heroine's body is only the most obvious sign of a larger confusion between the name and reality of honour, brought to its comic climax in Belinda's cry: ‘Oh hadst thou, Cruel! been content to seize / Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!’ Such lines could only be spoken in a world which cannot distinguish, as Pope can, between the real world and the arena of fashionable play, which is revealed as merely a mock-world, where in the final battle all that happens is that Beaus and Witlings die in metaphor and song.
Clarissa and the Baron are seen to act as allies; it is Clarissa who provides the scissors in Canto III. Each, like the satirist, draws attention to the way what are presented as ends, the charm of Belinda's toilette, the merit of good humour, are in fact employed as means of sexual pursuit. But what the poem also suggests is that the deception and self-deception this involves are not only allowable, but also indispensable. This seems at odds with the idea of satirical writing as a form of attack. The truths betrayed by Clarissa and the Baron, about human sexual motivation, are of course known to the satirist, and the reader is expected to understand them. Yet to reveal these truths is impolite. The poem at once reveals and declines to press home its understanding.
Accordingly, the conclusion is not a refrain to honesty and right conduct,
but a graceful fiction, with Pope's account of the apotheosis of the lock. The final
couplets play with wonderful subtlety on the uses of rhyme:
For, after all the Murders of your Eye,
When, after Millions slain, your self shall die;
When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,
And all those tresses shall be laid in Dust;
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,
And 'midst the Stars inscribe Belinda's Name!
(Canto V, ll.145-50)
Pope moves from flattery to realism, from mock-deaths to real death; no rhyme could be more certain, than that of must and Dust. Measured against that inevitability, the rhyme of Fame and Name seems to hollow out the substance of both words, reminding the reader that ‘identity and reputation both last for just a moment’. But these rhymes also include the poet, who too must die, and who too must hope that his name will survive through the fame of the poem.
Exaggeration is one of the most commonly used techniques in satire, since the depiction of an extreme or blatantly vicious case is one of the best ways to get the target to recognize or admit that a vice exists at all. The satirist brings his description of a wrong to its logical extreme, or at least exaggerates by overemphasis in order to make the unseeing see. To say simply that men are evil would not get the point across so the satirist exaggerates
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century, protesting it was only an heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments; the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition could produce.
The Brobdingnagian King's estimate of humankind seems to be slightly inflated also: ‘I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth’. By such overstatement, the reader is to understand that he has probably allowed too many failings in himself or other men to go by unnoticed.
Changing the perspective of a condition or event by isolation or by stressing some aspects and deemphasizing others is also used in satire. Gulliver's description of cannons and their decimating power (II.7) and his description of warfare (IV.5) are instances of distortion by isolation. When the machinations of war are removed from political and economic causes, the resultant mechanical bloodshed is horrifying indeed. Gulliver's description of ‘dying groans, limbs flying in the air, smoke, noise, confusion,’ is cold and unemotional. The message of the heartlessness of war wagers, who see battles as political expedients and men in mechanical terms, becomes shockingly clear when not diluted by political concerns.
Furthermore, innuendo is a valuable tool for the satirist because it allows him to implicate a target by a completely indirect attack. This is especially useful when the target is dangerous, for it is often possible to deny the insinuation. Pope's ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ for example:
I was not born for Courts or great Affairs,
I pay my Debts, believe, and say my pray'rs,
Can sleep without a Poem in my head,
Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead.
(ll. 267-70)
If called to account, Pope could always claim that the last three lines only seem to be connected to the first line by an unhappy poetic mistake. The first line does not end in a colon, so any connection or criticism must be in the mind of the reader.
Zeugma has satiric worth because of its structural equating of things of greatly differing value. It is effective the third and fifth lines in ‘Rape of the Lock: Canto II’:
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 Pray'rs, or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball;
Or whether Heav'n has doom'd that Shock must fall.
(ll. 105-10)
The purpose of Pope's zeugma here is to show that ‘modern’ girls think losing one's honour and soiling one's dress are disasters of exactly equal importance, conveyed cleverly, the message is powerful.
One of Swift's significant strategies is to present the narrator Gulliver (or ‘gullible’) as a plain-speaking man who tells a straightforward story. Towards this goal, he adopts an old satirical device, the imaginary voyage, the text being the travelogue of Gulliver's adventures. While the narrative energy of the travelogue comes from the unfamiliar and exotic nature of the traveler's reality his or her encounter with the ‘other’, the satirical travelogue must maintain a subtext that is familiar to the reader in order to accomplish its intended critique. As a result, despite the long list of bizarre names and the encounters with people and places way beyond the scope of the ordinary, there remains nevertheless something uncannily familiar for the reader in the social spaces and cultures that Gulliver encounters.
In the lead-up to each of the voyages, Gulliver's narration is dry and routine, without a hint of the extraordinary events to follow. For these events to be believable, the narrator must seem reliable throughout. Gulliver's insistence on his own honesty is supported by Richard Sympson's assertion that it had become a proverb in Redriff, where he lived, to say a thing was ‘as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoke it’ (xxxvii). An extension of this initial strategy is to take ‘any argument to its logical conclusion and on beyond it - so that the argument topples over the edge into the absurd, and thus is outrageous, and unfair, and funny’
Swift's style is marked by a simplicity of prose that conceals an intent to satirize the social and political realities his readers take for granted. When it first appeared, Gulliver's Travels was widely read: children read it for the story and politicians read it for its treatment of current affairs. To this day, the audience for it remains as varied. Children can read the novel for the marvels contained within and adults for the depths of its speculations.
All of these techniques used in satire have one element in common: each provides a way to say two or more things at one time, and to compare, equate, or contrast those things, usually with heavy irony. The application of the ironic method of satire uses those techniques which most easily allow the presentation of irony: the several techniques also provide variety, concision, and an opportunity for employing wit and humor. The essential meaning of a satire is seldom if ever consistent with a literal interpretation, yet the literal interpretation is extremely important for what it says about the essential meaning, and about the target or audience which can be reached only in an indirect way.
Bibliography
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Bloom, Harold, Alexander Pope's The rape of the lock. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Broich, Ulrich, The eighteenth-century mock-heroic poem. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Erskine-Hall, Howard, and Anne Smith, eds. The Art of Alexander Pope. New York: Barnes, 1979.
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Landa, Louis A. ‘Pope's Belinda, the General Empire of the World, and the Wondrous Worm.’ Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands. Ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980.
Nicholson, Andrew, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
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www.lion.chadwyck.co.uk from KnowledgeNotes™ Student Guides. Shute, Sarah (Gen. Ed.).
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Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels. London : Penguin, 1987.
Swift, Jonathan, Major works / Jonathan Swift ; edited with an introduction and notes by Angus Ross and David Woolley. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003.
Swift, Jonathan, A tale of a tub and other satires. London: Dent, 1978.
Pope, Alexander, Alexander Pope : selected letters / edited by Howard Erskine-Hill. Oxford: OUP, 2000. p.57
Pope, Alexander, Alexander Pope : selected poetry / edited with an introduction by Pat Rogers. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996. (Satire II.i, l.4).
Rennes, Jacob Johan Van, Bowles, Byron and the Pope-controversy. New York: Haskell House, 1966.
Nicholson, Andrew, ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. pp.150-151.
Landa, Louis A. ‘Pope's Belinda, the General Empire of the World, and the Wondrous Worm.’ Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands. Ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1980. pp.177-200
Broich, Ulrich, The eighteenth-century mock-heroic poem. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.
Bloom, Harold, Alexander Pope's The rape of the lock. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Erskine-Hall, Howard, and Anne Smith, eds. The Art of Alexander Pope. New York: Barnes, 1979
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver's Travels. London : Penguin, 1987.
Baldick, Chris, The concise Oxford dictionary of literary terms. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1991.
Glendenning, V, Jonathan Swift. London: Random House, 1989. p. 40.
