In class, we have been continuing to study satire by looking at an example of high burlesque, The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. High burlesque is taking a trivial event and expressing it in an extremely serious manner.
The short story The Rape of the Lock is about a girl named Belinda who tries to stab a man who cut off her favorite lock of hair. Pope uses a horatian satire filled with high burlesque to show society’s inability to determine important things from those things that are pointless or next to it. There are four instances of high burlesque I found to be the most apparent: the title, the climax, the side-by-side comparisons, and (possibly) the rhyme scheme. To start off, the title gave me the thought that this would be a dark story; but as I started to read, I found the situation that he describes laughable. The Rape of the Lock sounds as if it would be a tragic event, not a mere loss of a bit of hair, and it is in that way in which Pope satirizes those who are overly dramatic about silly things. The second way Pope uses high burlesque was actually my favorite part of the story, the climax, when the “screams of horror [that] rend the affrighted skies” came from Berlinda right after the lock of hair has been cut off (Pope 182). Immediately afterwards, she attempts to kill the man who committed this supposedly terrible sin, using a “deadly bodkin” and yelling, “Meet thy fate!”(Pope 256 and 255, respectively). Another clever technique was the use of side-by-side comparison, such as “stain her honor, or her new brocade.”(Pope 93). Honor is much more important than a new brocade, but they are compared as if equal in importance. The last thing that I noticed in Pope’s story is the constant use of heroic couplets. Because a heroic couplet usually describes the message bearing or important part of a sonnet, I assume that he is again mocking society for thinking everything thing is important. Either that, or he simply favored that rhyme scheme.
Regardless of whether the rhyme pattern is or is not a satirical technique, Pope is an expert in the use high burlesque to get his point across, which has been see through his use of the title, climax, and side-by-side comparisons in The Rape of the Lock.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I also thought Pope's choice of utilizing the mock-epic style helped to better satirize the situation. True, high burlesque is usually included in that, but it also includes such things as the descriptions of warfare, supernatural forces, and other common characteristics of the epics. Take, for example, the rites at the alter (14-50). The altar is merely Belinda’s dressing table, the rite is Belinda’s preparation for the upcoming day, and she is honoring herself and her own beauty. It helps the reader to better “understand” her bitter reaction to the loss of her lock. In my opinion it shows high burlesque partly because one would not think that she would be praising her own beauty at an altar and because beauty is really not “all that;” it can fade and die, or is easily cut off by a nearby admirer.
Pope had a great way of leading the reader into this story- as Chris said, the title makes you think it might be a grave and dark story. But Pope changes it up and instead makes it an elaborate tale about the 'battles' of the aristocrats. Without high burlesque, this story could not have the same effect at all. The reader needs to be able to understand the level of seriousness that the aristocrats had about something as trivial as a lock of hair. When this situation is made into an 'epic', people can realize how silly they are being and how lame it really is to start a huge feud over something as small as a lock of hair.
Post a Comment