Modern Language Studies

Pope, Virgil, and Belinda's Star-Spangled Lock

Author(s): M. E. Grenander
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp. 26-31
Published by: Modern Language Studies
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3194619
Accessed: 12-09-2018 15:24 UTC

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 Pope, Virgil, and Belinda's Star-Spangled Lock
A.E. Grenander

A remarkable tour de force in Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lo

rests on a recognition of precise Virgilian echoes in the stellification pass
that have not heretofore been identified. Pope is making a subtle cl
not only for Belinda's immortality, but for his own-a claim far mo
literal than the pretty notion that she will be remembered because
lock of hair shines in the heavens, although paradoxically based on t
conceit. In The Rape of the Lock, Pope sets up a neat equation: just
Dido is still remembered because Virgil made her immortal in the Aenei
so Belinda will be remembered because he will make her inmmortal in his
own epic. The "proof" that Dido is inmmortal because of Virgil's poem
demonstrated in The Rape of the Lock by specific echoes of the Aen
in the account of Belinda's curl ascending to the heavens, there to
become deified. The "proof" that Belinda will be inmmortal because
Pope's poem is demonstrated by the fact that it is indeed being read
other words, the modern reader is doing for Pope what Pope had d
for Virgil.
In his Devil's Dictionary,' the American satirist Ambrose Bierce
has an entry on "Berenice's Hair," which he defines as "A constellation
(Coma Berenices) named in honor of one who sacrificed her hair to save
her husband." He then concocts the following verses:

Her locks an ancient lady gave

Her loving husband's life to save;
And Inen - they honored so the dame -
Upon soime stars bestowed her naine.

But to our modern Inarried fair,

Who'd give their lords to save their hair,
No stellar recognition's given.
There are not stars enough in heaven.

The reader of these misogynistic lines, however, is apt to think

not only of Catullus, but of Pope's pro-feminist mutation of the story.
Geoffrey Tillotson, in his Introduction to The Rape of the Lock, comments
on the climactic incident immortalizing Belinda's lock of hair among the
stars. "The solution," he says, "needed to be one resembling as closely as
possible the denouemient of some actual epic poem." He then points out
Pope's debt to Ovid and Catullus; in his adaptation from them, according
to Tillotson, Pope "is still in touch with epic. Ovid's poem borders on the
epic, and similar metamnorphoses are also found in pure epic."2
As Tillotson suggests, Pope certainly refers specifically to Catul-
lus' "Coma Berenices" (V, 129); undoubtedly, also, he had in mind such

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other mythical asterisims as those of Romulus (V, 125-26) and Callisto.
But it would be remarkable indeed if so learned and polished an artist as
Pope were to dangle Belinda's stellification only on such slender threads
as these. Although they were operative sources - as was possibly also
Chaucer's The Hotuse of Fame (11. 585 ff.) -Pope did not lapse from
the tradition of "pure epic" at the high point of his miock-heroic poem.
Rather, he was here parodying particular passages in the Aelicid, xwhose
"patina," according to Marjorie D)onker, "is the glow of civilization at
one of its proudest and ilost self-conscious mllioenits. \irgil balances
and integrates the literary past until his sources are rationalized into a
pattern that implies the power and harmony of the Augustan success
story. 3
It is well-known that The Rape of the Lock, product of another
Augustan age, has many Virgilian echoes. William Frost, is his classic
article, states that Pope took pains to echo Dryden's translation of the
Aceeid at a niumber of points in his parody-epic. However, the specific
references that lie behind the cliiiax, in which Belinda's lock achieves
immnortality by inounting to the skies, have not been identified. I believe
this lacuna has been due to the fact that the echoes, obvious if the reader
looks at the Latin original of the Aeneid, are frequently obscured by
translations which blur the distinction between the Virgilian conceit of
immnortality among the stars and the Christian conmmonllace that one
goes to heaven when he dies. Although there is, of course, a difference
between being raised to the sphere of the stars and actual stellification,
the passages in the Aeneid on which the archetypal transmnogrification
of Belinda's hair rests involve three related beliefs, all of which are
relevant to The Rape of The Lock: first, that the gods dwelled among
the stars; second, that often the stars themselves were gods; and third,
that a miortal could be translated to heaven, as a star or aInong the stars,
and was thereby deified.
The deification of Belinda, hinted at throughout The Rape of the
Lock, underscores the connection between these beliefs and the climactic
scene of Pope's poen. She is a divine Idol, as the eighteenth-century
coquette typically was; and, during the compllicated ritual of applying
her inake-up, she worships her own imlage, reflected in the mirror over
her vanity table, as if she were a divinity. This is all in the tradition of
Milton, Addison, and Steele, as pointed out by Hugo M. Reichard.5
Consequently Belinda is, like Aeneas, a being so favored by the gods
that she - or at least her lock of hair - might well flash lup through the
heavens, achieving a star-spangled immiortality.
The relevant passages fromi the Aeneid are cited below. I have
included both the Latin lines and one or more translations which preserve
the literal meaning of the original.

1. (I, 92-94:) The terrified Aeneas prays for relief from the frightful
storm Aeolus has raised:

extempnlo Aeneae soluuntur frigore IneImbra;

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 ingelit et dupllicis tendens ad sidera palmlas
talia noce refert ....

"Instantly Aeneas felt his limbs give way in a chill of terror, and gr
Stretching both hands, palm-upward, to the stars, he cried alou

2. (I, 250-52:) Venus points out to Jupiter that he had promised to

his descendent Aeneas a god by translating him to heaven while
still alive:

nos, tua progenies, caeli (tuiibhus adnuis arcemil,

Inaiibus (infandiin!) amiissis, uniis ob iraii
prodilnur at(ltle Italis longe disitingiiilur oris.

"Yet we, your own children, having your ow n permission to clim

very citadel of Heaven, are, all through the anger of One, mlost mons
betrayed; our ships are lost, and we are parted far fromi Italy's
(Knight, p. 35). "But, we, descended froiii your sacred line,/Entit
your heav'n and rites divine,/Are banish'd earth; and, for the wrath o
Renmov'd fronl Latiumn and the promis'd throne" (Dryden, I, 340-43
allusion to Aeneas here tends to be obscured by the explicit mien
The Rape of the Lock (V, 124-26) of Romulus' later translation to
in this fashion: "So Rome's great Founder to the Heav'ns withdr
Proculus alone confess'd in view."

3. (I, 259-60:) Jupiter tells the tearful Venus Aeneas will be deified:

sublilmemqullle feres ad sidera

caeli magnanimumn Aenean.

"And you shall exalt to the stars of Heaven your son Aeneas, the great of
heart" (Knight, p. 35). "And, ripe for heav'n,/when fate Aeneas calls,/Then
shalt thou bear him up, sublime, to mle" (Dryden, I, 353-54).

4. (I, 286-87:) Jupiter foretells the birth of Augustus Caesar:

nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar,

imnperiuln Oceano, fainain (qui terminet astris.

"And then shall be born, of proud descent from Troy, one Caesar, to
bound his lordship by Ocean's outer stream and his fame by the starry
sky" (Knight, p. 36). "Then Caesar froim the Julian stock shall rise,/
Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies/Alone shall bound"
(Dryden, I, 390-92).

5. (III, 158:) The Trojan gods appear to troubled Aeneas in a dream,

saying "uenturos tollemus in astra nepotes." "We shall exalt your grand-
sons to the stars" (Knight, p. 79).

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6. (IV, 321-23:) The weeping Dido reproaches Aeneas, pointing out that
for him she has sacrificed the womanly honor which had been her hope
of immortality. The parallel to The Rape of the Lock is here very striking.

te propter eundem
exstinctus pudor et, qua sola sidera adibam,
fama prior.

"It was because of you that I let my honour die, the fair fame which used
to be mine, and my only hope of immortality" (Knight, p. 107). "Because
of/You Imy honor is dead and imy earlier famne,/By which alone I was
rising to heaven."7 "It is on your account that Imy honor is quenched, and
my prior falme, by which alone I was mounting the stars" (my translation).
Here I believe the modern student miight take note of Theodor Haecker's
judgmient that "every Roman reading the story of Aeneas and Dido must
have thought of Caesar and Cleopatra, where the mian won and the
womnan lost; but so must he also have reimembered Antony and Cleopatra,
where the womian won and the mian lost."8 Considered in this context,
the situation between Belinda and the Baron reverberates with
Vigilian echoes.

7. (VI, 129-31:) In the Sibyl's famous "facilis descensus Averno"

occurs this sentence describing those who can return from hel

pauci, quios ae(quus aiiiauit

Iuppliter aut ardens euexit ad aethera uirtus,
dis geniti potuere.

"Few, born of the gods,/Whom Jove, who is just, has loved o

excellent virtue/Has raised to the heavens, have done it" (Lind
"To few great Jupiter imparts this grace,/And those of shinin
and heav'nly race" (Dryden, VI, 196-97).

8. (XII, 793-95:) Finally, as Juno watches Aeneas' terrible batt

Turnus, Jupiter reminds her of the hero's destiny:

quae iam finis erit, coniunx? quid denique restat?

indigetem Aenean scis ipsa et scire fateris
deberi caelo fatisque ad sidera tolli

"My wife, how shall it end now? What more is there you can
you know, and admit the knowledge, that Aeneas is called of h
a national hero, and fate is exalting him to the stars."9

Pope's debt to "pure epic," specifically the Aeneid, vibrat

the overtones of these eight passages. Although our enjoyment of
depends in part on a simple recognition of parodies, the
Wasserman (p. 443) pointed out that they actively invite us "to
within poetic reason," our "own invention by contemplating the re

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of the entire allusive context and its received interpretation." Hence we
must take into account a more complex echo of Virgilian sources than
mere parallels in imagery.
The notion that upon deification one became a star was, in
ancient times, a viable myth; in The Rape of the Lock it has become a
pretty conceit. But through his allusions to the stellification passages in
the Aeneid, Pope is inviting us to do for him what he has done for Virgil,
hinting broadly at what Spenser and Shakespeare in their sonnets10 had
stated directly: his heroine is immortal, not because her lock shines in the
heavens, but because he has written about her. This claim is logically
irrefutable, unlike the myth which clothes it, because it carries within
itself its own proof. Should the poem be forgotten, the assertion cannot
even be made. But so long as we continue to read The Rape of the Lock,
we are demonstrating the validity of Pope's claim. Just as his references
to the Aeneid proved that its godlike heroes and heroines still existed in
his time, so our reading of The Rape of the Lock proves that Belinda has
such immortality as great art can grant to humans for its duration:

Then cease, bright Nymph! to mourn thy ravish'd Hair

Which adds new Glory to the shining Sphere!
Not all the tresses that fair Head can boast
Shall draw such Envy as the Lock you lost.
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 mid'st the Stars inscribe Belinda's Name!

The harmonics of Virgil's stellification passages, by reminding us of

Dido and her fellows, reinforce the suggestion that, like her, Belinda is
one of the heavenly race because a great poet has chosen to make her so.

Institute for Humanistic Studies,

SUNY, Albany

NOTES

1. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York & Washin

Publishing Co., 1911), VII, 37.
2. Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed.
Tillotson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 116; see als
I should like to thank my colleague Lois V. Williams, Professor of
State University of New York at Albany, for discussing this arti
3. "The Waste Land and the Aeneid," PMLA, 89 (January, 1974)
4. "The Rape of the Lock and Pope's Homer," Modern Language Q
(1947), 342-54; reprinted in Maynard Mack, ed., Essential Arti
Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964

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 pp. 266-83. See also Rebecca P. Parkin, "Mythopoeic Activity in the Rape of
the Lock," ELH, 21 (March, 1954), 30-38; and Earl R. W\asserman, "The
Liimits of Allusion in The Rape of the Lock," Journal of E nlish and Germanlic
Philoloigy, 65 (July, 1966), 425-44.
5. "The Love Affair in Pope's Rape of the Lock," P,ILA, 69 (September,
1954), 887-902; see especially pp. 889-90, 893-95. Note, also, Auibrey W\illiaimis,
"The 'Fall' of China and The Rape of the Lock," PQ, 61 (1962), 420.
6. Virgil: The Aeneid, trans. W.R. Jackson Knight (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1958), p. 30.
7. Virgil: The Aeneid, trans. L.R. Lind (Bloomiington: Indiana University
Press, 1963), p. 72
8. Virgil: Father of the West, trans. A.\W. W\heen (New York: Sheed and W\ard,
1934), p. 39; cited by Donker, p. 167
9. The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. C. I)ay Lewis (Garden City, New York:
I)oubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 314.
10. See, for example, Sonnet 75 froim Spenser's Ainoretti - "One day I wrote
her naIne upon the strand"; and, out of several Shakespearean sonnets one
might cite, Nos. 18, 55, and 107. A similar claimi is Ilade explicitly by the
modern French poet Francis Ponge in "Pour un lIalherbe": "Since you are
reading Ime, dear reader, therefore I aml, since you are reading us (myl book
and I), dear reader, therefore we are (You, it and I)" (trans. Serge Gavronsky).
See Serge Gavronsky, "Francis Ponge: W\hen the Poet Speaks to the Sun,"
Proceedings of HELIOS: Fronm MAlth to Solar Encergf, compiled by M.E.
Grenander (Albany, New York: The Institute for Ilutianistic Studies, 1978),
I, 204.

INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE
The International Association for Philosophy and Literatur
Fifth Annual Meeting, May 8-10, 1980. For further information writ
Robert C. Carroll, Department of Languages, University of M
Orono, Maine 04469.

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