“Postmodernism, Absurd and the Theme of Menace; Stricken Identity in Harold Pinter’s Drama”

HAROLD PINTER:

 Although Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco are two of the most famous absurdist playwrights, Harold Pinter is now the leading English language playwright in the genre. In his plays, Pinter never finds it necessary to explain why things occur or who anyone is, the existence within the play itself is justification enough. In general, lack of explanation is what characterizes Pinter's work, and the interruption of outside forces upon a stable environment. What seems to set him apart though is that unlike Beckett and Ionesco, Pinter's world within the drama seems to be at least somewhat realistic. Pinter started out in the theatre world as an actor, he attended both the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, then found a professional acting career under the stage name David Baron. He remained an actor until he mentioned and idea he had for a play to a friend at Bristol University. His friend became interested in the idea and requested a script within a week. Pinter laughed at the idea, but within the week presented his friend with the script for The Room, which was then performed in May 1957. Pinter's career as a playwright continued on with such works as The Dumbwaiter in 1957, and Mountain Language in 1988. Pinter was still going strong in English theatre where he continued to write, direct and act.

 Harold Pinter's plays have been highly appreciated for his distinctive dramatic style, and his delicate concern for the revelation of human predicament in his theatre. To be in congruence with the characteristics of time and place more specifically postmodernism, his plays are embedded with feelings of uneasiness, restlessness, evasiveness,  disintegration, instability and domination as manifested both in his language and themes. The question of existence that the individual is often doomed to an inner turmoil culminating in his loss of his sense of self has been the dominating theme in his plays. He is known as a great proponent of the Theatre of the Absurd and is famous for his idiosyncratic theatre the comedy of menace. The commonality of his dramatic expression and absurdist has been the delineation of human existence as purposelessness, nothingness, hovering sense of lack of meaning, and the miserable challenge of one's identity. To illustrate such harrowing conditions, an atmosphere of mystery runs through the drama of Harold Pinter. Although the characters are involved in natural conversations, the way they behave resembles dream figures than people with whom one can easily identify, at least on superficial levels. On the stage, the surfaces of their lives are realistically envisaged, but the modes underlying the surface are as ambiguous as the motives of the characters, their pauses, and their absurd speech. Pinter's own statement in a sense is a revelation of his dramatic world. "If you press me for a definition, I'd say what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I'm doing is not realism". He has a tendency to take refuge in the mixture of the real and the surreal, striking the audience obscurity and blurred vision of reality. These perennial clashes, in a part, form the foundation of Pinter's artistic identity which is offshoot of the postmodernism conditions. In this post-modern society which to modernists had come to the point of savagery, chaos, absolute entropy and disorder, people who have lost all their hope and belief in a metaphysical, trans-historical, absolute basis for their existence, whose dream of a philosophy for this existence’s justification has smashed, they try to legitimate their existence. People get involved either in an endless game like that of Beckett's Endgame or fall in the reverie of the game of waiting like that of Waiting for Godot . Harold Pinter in more than 30 plays including masterworks like "The Birthday party", "The Caretaker", "The Homecoming" and "Betrayal", has "captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence". Pinter himself highlights the point and asserts, "In our present-day, everything is uncertain, there is no fixed point, we are surrounded by the unknown … There is a kind of horror about and I think that this horror and absurdity, go together". The question of existence that the individual is often doomed to an inner turmoil culminating in his loss of his sense of self has been the dominating theme in his plays. He, too, has tried to capture this theme in his theatre of absurd as this theatre "strives to express its sense of senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought" and his idiosyncratic theatre, the comedy of menace which are both styles on the line of reflecting the conditions of postmodernism calling for these kinds of theatre.

 THE BIRTHDAY PARTY: Existentialist / Post Modernist writing

The Birthday Party is an example of the existential drama in which the Character’s security is undermined. There is an absurd attempt to escape from one’s own limitations, one’s past, and past failures, but they are always there to captivate the individual. There is no exit, and the main point is that the individuals are not able to perceive their limitations: it is the lack of self-perception that causes the tragedy. If Stanley could have perceived his position, his abilities and weaknesses; he would have escaped the final destruction. But this is only one layer of the play’s meaning. Exploring deeper in the play, the metaphysical anguish of man’s existence is clearly revealed.

Pinter, very cunningly, looks at a particular side of existence, and as an absurdist writer and through his humor suggests that Stanley’s victimization is caused at the result of his only crime that was his birth; thus, living itself becomes the great sin that man commits.

Pinter, therefore, shows “how frivolous life is”, and the only exit, observed in his early plays, is the door which opens to destruction. As Walter Ker says, Harold Pinter:

“The Birthday Party is a ‘blind’ encounter between parties who are acting purely because they exist; they have not reached a stage of ‘essence’, which in Pinter’s world is achievable ironically in complete victimization.

The Birthday Party: Absurd, Terror, Menace

While for Beckett, absurdity is a metaphysical predicament, Eugene Ionesco visualizes absurdity in concrete terms.  For these dramatists, much of the absurdity in human existence emerges from our failures in language, communication, motivation, judgment and human relationships.

Harold Pinter presents the same Theatre of the Absurd one finds in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco. Pinter, however, presents his plays in a deceptively realistic idioms and convention and goes to unmask the absurdity of the human situation and the conventional theatre.  The Birthday Party has a credible dramatic situation, but not a credible plot structure, characters or any logical, progressive and linear action. In Pinter’s theatre, the persistent presence of a closed room, with a few persons huddled together inside, in a sort of “non-communicative conversation”, is significant. The dramatic image of his play is based on a basic human situation: individual’s search for security in a world which is full of anxiety, terror, false friendship and a lack of understanding between people “We live on the verge of disaster”

The absurd character, in order to reveal the precariousness of man’s existential security, is built up by three distinct elements: mystery, menace and humor.  Pinter successfully creates a drama of human relations at the level of language.

The plot of the play hinges on Stanley who isolates himself from the world by putting up in a seaside boarding house, owned by Meg and Petey.  The couple protects Stanley and tries to make him comfortable.  But the peaceful atmosphere is disturbed by unexpected guests, McCann and Goldberg, the agents of unknown forces who have come to claim Stanley.

Pinter presents personal breakdown, disillusionment and decay through the linguistic terror unleashed by McCann and Goldberg.  Pinter’s play is the absurd story of language.  In fact, it is only language that significantly happens in the play, with the characters, plot narrative and stage action hiding behind the language. Language significantly evolves the absurdity in the characters, emotions, relationships and situation. Stanley is tormented not so much by McCann and Goldberg, but by the language used by them.   For Pinter, language positively creates a stasis in a communication. Uttering leads characters into pauses and silences, and any verbal assertiveness causes communicative disjunction. The dialogue between Petey and Meg are more an attempt at evasion than communication.

 According to Ganz , “The most distinctive elements in Pinter’s dramatic technique are the ambiguity that surrounds events, the mysterious behaves of characters, the near Omni presence of menace, and the silences and other verbal characteristics.”

For instance, Pinter uses repetition as a mode to create laughter and also to ease the tension of the scene and divert the audience’s response slightly from the action. In the first Act, Meg repeatedly asks a question to create laughter

Meg – Is that you, Petey?

Petey- is that you

Petey?

Petey – what?

Meg –Is that you?

Petey – Yes it’s me.

Absurd ideas and fanciful imagination indicate the feeling of hollowness in Meg and Petey’s married life and also in Stanley’s life gripped by uncertainties and insecurities. This peaceful atmosphere is disturbed by the unexpected entry of McCann and Goldberg who come to perform a “job”.  They not only disturb Stanley but arouse his fear for unknown reasons. And this tension passes on to Meg as Stanley starts behaving peculiarly. Pinter is more preoccupied with our fears, our anxieties that reflect throughout the play.    Meg’s fear of losing Stanley, “You wouldn’t have to go away if you get a job”, reveals her sense of insecurity.  The arrival of the two men at the boarding house reflects Stanley’s fear of losing the security, which he was getting from Meg.  Again, Stanley’s fear becomes an inevitable cause for absurd imagination.  He says:

“They’re coming today.”

Meg: Who?

Stanley:  They’re coming in a van.

Meg: who? They’ll carry a wheel barrow in a van.

Stan: They’re looking for someone.

Meg: No they’re not.

Pinter’s dialogues are so created that the ambiguity is maintained and yet they unnerve the audience and open several avenues for interpretations.  In this context, Hobe says: “Pinter has consistently relied upon language device for his effects rather than ritualistic visual devices characteristic of the theatre of Absurd”.

Pinter uses silence and pauses as mediums of communication.  He says that the characters convey a lot by being silent or giving a pause during their conversation, both the actors and the spectators are left wondering as to what would follow.   Terror is intensified further with the arrival of two agents who start interrogation and cross-examination.  They accuse him of unknown guilt and sins. Stanley remains speechless and only makes the inarticulate gurgling sounds. His silence only denotes the gradual fading of memory, the disintegration of the human personality. In the process of cross-examination words become weapons. Stanley is virtually brain-washed through a flood of incomprehensible questions. In Pinter’s drama, implied meaning with an undertone of ambiguity is quite manifest. He has attained this unique dynamism by a clever manipulation of the exchange pattern of the dialogue.  He stresses on four different aspects of language: rhythm, tempo, intensity and tension.  These aspects are manifest in the brief exchanges amongst characters and their subtle moves are also precisely illustrated through lingual variation.  In Pinter, the structure of the dialogue plays a vital role in creating a tense dramatic atmosphere of menace, and the absurd changes, from one to another, which is a major linguistic element in The Birthday Party. Pinter arranges his words meticulously, and he listens to them through silence. Pinter as an absurdist knows that life never shapes itself. He wants the existential adjustment to come first, and hence, the characters and situation are minutely observed. Dialogue is shaped on bad syntax, tedious repetitions and excruciating contradictions. Through dialogue he presents the inadequacy of the words we use. He hints at the unspoken and latent. He creates an absurd atmosphere by means of the theatrically useful nature of words pertaining to correct rhythm. Illusions, past recollections and childhood memories also become a medium for the characters to relieve their mounting tensions and serve for them as an escape from the present world of brutality. Meg easily enters into her world of happy memories and illusion the next day after the Birthday Party. She is not aware of the harsh reality that Stanley had to undergo harassment, and that he was carried away by force by McCann and Goldberg.  With an unconscious irony, she recollects the happy moments and insists….

“I was the belle of the ball.”

Petey: Were you?

Meg: oh Yes, They all said I was

 Petey:, I bet you were, too.

Meg – oh!. It’s true, I was.

 I know I was.

The Birthday Party evokes a mood of terror and mystery by creating a distorted world. Martin Esslin rightly remarks: “It speaks plainly of the individual’s pathetic search for security of secret dreads and anxieties of the terrorism of our world.”

 Conclusion

To illustrate the characteristics and conditions of postmodernism in his drama, Pinter has delicately deployed the theatre of absurd and his idiosyncratic theatre of comedy of menace so that he could put forward solutions for the dominating existential problems of man entrapped in his era.

As a whole, Harold Pinter’s plays reveal our state of solitude, nothingness, meaninglessness and isolation. In Pinter’s world, language has lost its semantic power and significance.  The characters in The Birthday Party are neither capable of using the language; language for them is like movement, the irrationality, aggressiveness and violence. Language, like an absurd hero, brings to the audience the absurdity of human situation. Pinter succeeds in creating an allegorical drama of epic proportions: Man versus his birth and existence, or Man versus language .But, though Man is foredoomed to failure in any epical battle between himself and nature, fails heroically. Absurdity engulfs everything and everyone, even language and life itself.

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LOVE SONG OF J.ALFRED PRUFROCK : Representation of MODERN MAN

THE LOVE SONG OF J.ALFRED PRUFROC

Often called the first Modernist poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in the prestigious American journal Poetry in June 1915.

About the Poem: The poem centers on the feelings and thoughts of the eponymous speaker (the somewhat neurotic Prufrock) as he walks through the streets of London route to meet a woman for tea. He is considering a question (perhaps, broadly, the meaning of life, or, more narrowly, a proposal of marriage). Far more than just the “love song” of a romantic, agonized young man, the poem explores the Modernist alienation of the individual in society.

 Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888 – 1965

Born into a prosperous Midwestern family, Eliot attended Harvard and then went on to study at Oxford. Although born an American, Eliot married an Englishwoman, gave up his American citizenship, and lived most of his life in London.

Eliot made his living as a teacher, a banker, and an influential literary critic. He popularized the modernist style of thinking and writing. In fiction, modernism was represented by the stark realism of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, but in poetry this new sensibility was quite different. The Imagists, including Eliot’s close friend and fellow poet, Ezra Pound, believed in the motto, “No ideas but in things,” in other words, the image is most important, the meaning secondary. Modernists embraced free verse (no regular rhyme scheme or meter) and freedom of thought (often their writing questioned accepted ideas and social norms). This anti-traditional and anti-romantic trend began before World War I; however the unprecedented loss of humanity during the war accelerated the popularization of modernism. The war caused many people to reexamine their previous beliefs in religion and the innate goods of humankind, and one radical branch of modernism, known as Dada, claimed that the only legitimate emotion left was disgust.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," An Overview

The entire poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an interior monologue based on the traditional dramatic monologue, a solo speech that often puts into words the speaker’s inner turmoil, as in Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Prufrock often alludes to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but admits, “I am not Prince Hamlet.” He has no such grand illusions. His thoughts and feelings tend to be humble and full of self-doubt. He worries not about “outrageous fortune,” as Hamlet does, but about growing old and being rejected by a woman.

Critically Analyzing the poem:
Contrary to what the title implies, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot, is anything but a love song. It is instead quite the opposite. Although the poem is open to several interpretations, after careful reading of the poem, the several underlying themes can be expressed by one central idea. In the poem, the narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, portrays his disappointment with the society he lives in. By interpreting aspects of imagery, speaker and intended audience, one can easily assess Prufrock's views of life. His interpretation of everyday life can be described as a vacant, bleak, and repetitive.
Early on in the poem, Eliot creates a scene that does not seem very inviting. Prufrock describes his surrounding on an evening out with phrases that insinuate melancholy and depression. In line 6, Prufrock describes the night as "restless" and says that the streets are "tedious arguments of insidious intent". From this the reader can infer a certain discontentment that Prufrock has with his surroundings. He refers to his, and his companions', destination as “one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells". Even though these descriptions leave the reader only approximately 10 lines into the poem, we already have a feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction from Prufrock about his life.
As the poem continues, the reader is bombarded with even more imagery that conveys Prufrock's discontentment with his surroundings. Prufrock talks of the "yellow fog" that "rubs its back upon the window-panes" and the "yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes". He also mentions the "soot that falls from chimneys". Later on in the poem, Prufrock refers to smoke again while describing the streets he is walking on. All this imagery leaves the reader feeling that the place Prufrock is at is dark and hazy and not at all welcoming.
Among the feelings that Prufrock expresses in this poem, no feeling comes across more clearly than his feeling of restlessness and wasted time. We get the feeling that Prufrock, who is aging, would do things differently if given another chance. In lines 49-54, Prufrock asserts his overall boredom with life. He says he has "known them all already, known them all-have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons". From this we can infer that Prufrock seems to feel as if his life is over and he has no more to offer. He makes statements similar to this throughout the poem. He proclaims to have known "the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase" and the "arms that are bracleted and white and bare". We get more of a sense of Prufrock's disillusionment of life with his many references to time. In lines 24-34, he claims there is time to "meet faces", "murder and create", have a "hundred indecisions" and a "hundred visions and revisions".

It is not as though Prufrock is doing this in a hopeful manner, though. Instead we get the impression that he is reflecting on time as if it is plentiful only if you take advantage of it and perhaps he feels he did not
Another aspect of this poem that is important is the interpretation of it is the speaker and the audience. Although the audience is never clearly identified, several assumptions can be made. It seems as though Prufrock is simply reflecting on life to himself. He makes several statements that would allow a reader to arrive at this conclusion. Throughout the poem, he asks several rhetorical questions of himself. In line 62, he asks "and how should I presume?". He asks himself the same question again in line 68 and then follows with another "and how should I begin?". These questions lead the reader to believe that the poem represents Prufrock's inner-thoughts about life. This is important to consider because if the audience was anyone but Prufrock himself, the poem would more than likely take a very different course.
Once you get past the initial misconceptions about the poem due to its misleading title, you can easily see that this is a poem about what happens if you do not make the most of your life. Prufrock is a character that we all can learn something from. Through an interpretation of this poem, one can assume that even though a person's life may seem to be normal and in fact successful, sometimes that person may have a totally different view of their own life. From the poem we can conclude that Prufrock's life was like many others during the time it was written. It talks of parties, drinking, and lovely ladies. This did not, however, bring his happiness. As he aged, Prufrock was left very disenchanted with his life. In the end, he discusses how he will behave in his old age and finally describes death as what can be interpreted as drowning in the sea.

“The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot is about a man who is searching for something to break him for the dull life that he has been leading. In the beginning, the speaker invites us to go with Prufrock and come into his world with the statement “Let us go then, you and I.” Throughout the poem, the reader is following the speaker throughout an evening searching for the acceptance of a woman. Because of his lack of self-assurance, he fails to find the meaning and acceptance of his love.
Prufrock is a timid man. He is extremely conscious of what others think of him and this has a great effect of his actions. He has problems with speaking what he feels and this is demonstrated when he “prepare(s) a face to meet the faces that (he) meet(s).” He also extremely self-conscious with his appearance and thinks that people talk about what he looks like and what he wears. Other’s opinion of Prufrock bothers him so much so that he does not want to “disturb the universe” by making an entrance into it.
Finally, the last part of the poem, Prufrock show’s his final despair in life. He can not bring himself to tell the woman that he is in love with how he really feels. However, if he ever did decide to tell her, it would come out as a mess. He finds himself with no real role in life. He is no “Prince Hamlet, nor was he meant to be,” but rather an “attendant lord,” or sometimes “the Fool.” He hears the mermaids singing, but he thinks: “I do not think they will sing to me.”
In the end, Prufrock feels left out of society, and can not find his own place in the universe. As an old man on the beach, looking out into the ocean, he questions if he did the right thing. But he missed everything, all because he was scared. He realizes that he has been living in an imaginary world. When this reality hits him, he drowns soul and all.
This poem has always been a favorite of mine because the theme of can apply to the world as a whole. Each of us can sometime find ourselves searching for where we belong in the universe,but are afraid to act on our own desires because of the possible outcomes. In the end, we have to make our move, and not fear rejection so much so that we pass up an opportunity of a lifetime.

Conclusion:
The speaker of this ironic monologue is a modern man who, like many of his kind, feels isolated and incapable of decisive action. Irony is apparent from the title, for this is not a conventional love song. Prufrock would like to speak of love to a woman, but he does not have the nerve.
The poem opens with a quoted passage from Dante’s INFERNO,

                “If I thought that my reply would be to one who would

               return to the world, this flame would stay without further

              movement; but since none has ever returned alive from depth,

            if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy.”,

 Meaning that Prufrock speaks only because he knows no one will pay attention to him and he won’t be heard. Purfrock repeats certain phrases to clue the reader in that they are part of the story. “You and I” in the first line, suggest that you must be with him to understand his story

RAPE OF THE LOCK: Gender Dialectic $ Refication of myth of passive womanhood !!!

The Interplay of the Gender Dialectic:

“Dialectic”: According to the oxford dictionary the word Dialectic stands for the meaning;

 “The way in which two aspects of a situation affect each other.”

The poem Rape of the Lock discusses the relationship between men and women and how they affect each other. Pope examines the oppressed position of women infringement on a woman's personal space, her person and pride by an aggressive male (the Baron) are certainly problems not to be taken lightly.

In today's society these things translate to sexual harassment. Pope also raises the issue of conflicting love, the opposition between spiritual and secular love. The poem portrays men and women as more concerned with social status, material values and physical beauty than the development of the spirit or of the character, Pope suggests former is the morally wrong part and criticises(through satire) his character for the vanity and lack of morality. The significance of a woman’s outward beauty (especially Belinda's) has direct consequence for her role in the society. The place of a woman is shaped by social and economic forces. Women are routinely sub-ordinate in the “public” sphere, partly because of their confinement to role associated with being wives. 

Belinda is an unmarried upper class woman, maintaining her position in high society will depend on marriage; though not one necessarily of her choosing, her marriage will not ultimately depend on her intelligence or her personality, as women were not valued as objects of individuality but as beautiful objects to possess.

                        “The adventurous Baron the bright locks admired,

                        He saw, he wished, and to the prize aspired”

Therefore Belinda’s strength is her physical appearance as he compares a hero’s donning of armour to Belinda’s being made up w a her dressing table; here files of pins extend their shining rows, puffs, powders, patches, Bible, billets doux .

                   

                           “Now awful beauty puts on all its- arms”

We see a women ready to go into battle of the sexes whom the Baron ( her opponent) already regards as a threat specifically, her beauty is a threat in that it empowers Belinda and means he may have to compete with other men for her affection. The idea of a women holding power of any sort over a man attacks the male ego. He is resolved to win, or by fraud betray;

         “For when success a lover’s toil attend, few ask if fraud or force attained his ends”

The Baron will either have the lock or destroy the any power she possesses with it. The war Pope illustrates between men and women continues with the playing of the card game. Instead of fighting on the traditional battlefield Belinda plays cards against the Baron.

The playing of the game and the use of the word conquest could also represent the idea that Belinda is fighting for survival in her survival in her societal circle. She could view the playing of the game as a battle to win suitors, knights. Regardless Belinda wins the card game and offends the Baron’s pride. Out to take the revenge, to reclaim his dignity and steal hers, the Baron cuts Belinda’s prized locks of hair.

The baron has taken Belinda’s hair as if he has taken her power away. He cuts from her a symbol of her beauty, stealing what she regards as her honour. This disempowerment is not unlike an actual rape. Belinda values her lock of hair as her source of honour; hence the baron takes away her virtue.

Belinda is approached by older women of the court, who has lost her own beauty and advises Belinda to rely on inner grace;

                   “Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul”

While the comment strikes a stinging chord with Belinda, the court does not find merit in the idea that women’s inner values are important.

“Clarissa” the dame, sounds a title feminist for her time. The idea that the women’s beauty existed in the character was not yet a popular notion, still Belinda is belittled by Carissa, and she attacks Belinda’s sense of worth as a woman by not accepting the Baron’s trick with more grace.

If the Baron’s ego hadn’t been inflated enough by claiming Belinda’s lock, Carissa only conforms the Baron’s and Belinda’s misguided values by attacking Belinda’s inner beauty, in essence, her value system (morals) as well. Belinda has been insulted twice in the course of action.

Pope writes of a world whose value system is confused.

Clarissa almost takes the role of the pope when she admonishes Belinda’s favour but on claiming her honour, the prized lock of hair. This is rather twisted goal.

The civilised thing to do would to have honourably courted Belinda. Instead the Baron is only interested in the fame which the claiming of the lock will bring.

It is a long sought after prize indicating the Baron’s mind has been on the frivolous and cruel prank of clipping Belinda’s hair. Morally the Baron should have been thinking of more spiritual, less flighty things, yet in worshipping the lock, the Baron makes it a spiritual thing, which goes against the ideals of Christianity.

If there was any doubt Belinda is a materialistic creature, it is confirmed when the sylph read her thoughts and discovers the close recesses of the virgins thought. In Belinda’s mind is distinctly dwells material and secular matters, not those spiritual and holy. The sylph suggests that her virginal, beautiful appearance is only an image she portrays, not a truth. Indeed Belinda is linked to a painted ship,

                         “If not literally called a painted vessel”

The Rape of Belinda’s honour is sanctioned because women are valued only as objects of beauty.

In the same turn, Belinda, the Baron and the society they represent are obsessed with material thing such as the lock and self worship.

We find that the women are just the commodity or objects of use in the hands of male. Who become their best admirer and user. They look at its outer beauty but have no dignity for them in their eyes. That’s the scenario the male, the female and the society.

PASSIVE WOMENHOOD AND THE REIFICATION OF MYTH:

A satire on the superficial values of fashionable society in the reign of Queen Anne, Pope's

“Rape of the Lock” criticizes the sterility and social vanity of a world in which appearances have actually become substitutes for things themselves, where virtue has been reduced to reputation and men themselves to sword knots

 The world of Hampton Court is imaged by Pope as a world of empty forms where people are dehumanized exteriors while, in the underground Cave of Spleen objects are alive: teapots live, goose pies talk. Yet there are limits to Pope's satire on the irrational materialism of bourgeois values that objectify human beings by giving primacy to surface over substance.

 For even as Pope attacks drawing-room society for its sterile fetishism, in which women is made to function as the sign not of her own subjectivity but of a male desire of which she is the object. Pope’s satire on a culture that objectifies individuals is itself a pretext for his own objectification of the female as the poem opens Belinda is presented as the very antithesis of social being. She is rather the embodiment of self narcissism. The dominant image of narcissism is off course, our vision of the heroine worshipping her own image in the mirror as she performs the rites of the pride. The epic machinery of the poem further elaborates this idea, the sylph providing Pope yet another way of representing the autoerotic love of the coquette. As the spirits of dead coquette – as in effect, projection of Belinda’s self-involvement as an involvement as an involvement with beings other than herself, with beings whose sex is conventionally, infinitely transformable.

Thus, early in poem, Belinda’s self love is identified with her desire for power and specifically, with her desire for the sort of the power she might obtain by avoiding the wedlock and its subjection of the female. Her lock becomes the metaphor for the pleasure she withholds from men in order to secure this type of power. As a product of her art, it is a part of the armour by which she makes herself invulnerable to men. But as woman's only armour is the art by which she ornaments herself, Belinda's invulnerability as Pope portrays it contains the very seeds of i.e. indeed is an invitation to its own destruction. And, as we soon discover, Belinda is not invulnerable to men at all. Her power, on the contrary, is severely limited. Even her guardian sylphs are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Although Ariel knows enough to foretell some dread event in Belinda's ruling star, he cannot actually forestall the maiden's fate which is, ultimately, to have her chastity appropriated by a man. Despite their supernatural protectors, women are finally vulnerable to men; their natural vulnerability is built into the very super nature, or metaphysics, of Pope's poetic universe. It is this idea, this message that woman ultimately belongs to man and that, as such, she is not just a part but also an expression of him, Pope's poem repeatedly reaffirms by persistently collapsing Belinda's subjectivity into her status as an object, and specifically as an object of male desire and ownership. Manifestly, Belinda is at the centre of Pope's fictional universe, as she is as the belle of the ball at the centre of Hampton Court society where all eyes are fixed on her alone . Dramatically speaking, the Baron seems to play a relatively insignificant role. As a presence in the poem he almost seems a kind of shadow of Belinda; he doesn’t even have a proper name. Ideologically, however, it is Belinda who is situated on the margins of this text. For her visibility in the poem not only signals her nonexistence as a subject, but finally points to the latent, and more powerful, masculine presence of which she has been figured as the sign.

Female rivalry as rhetorical strategy:

Although the central adversary relationship of the poem seems to be between Belinda and the Baron really want the same thing and ultimately stand not as rivals but as accomplices in its attainment. The conflict is instead between Belinda and Clarissa. Their rivalry is one of the central sustaining tensions of the poem. As equal but conflicting forces, these two females engage in a kind of horizontal hostility which—far from representing an anti-male solidarity among women, as Earl Wasserman's view of the poem suggests it does—actually clears the ground on which woman's conquest by man is to be ritually enacted

The metaphysics of femininity:

Pope seems to be positing a one-to-one correspondence between specific female types and their supernatural counterparts and, up to a point, the shape of his drama appears to confirm this structure of relationships. The sylph who derive from coquettes protect virgins in a continual efforts to perpetuate their kind while the gnomes, through the medium of their human embodiment in prudes, ever seek to tempt or otherwise damage female purity.

Pope’s female types are distinguished from one another not according to the kinds of elements present in their constitutions, but according to their relative degree. Belinda ultimately demonstrates a full range of nyphean, salamandrine and gnomic qualities.

Pope’s paradox of female power:

In the mythic economy of the Rape female power is always self-consuming. In the linear progression of the poem, Belinda as an image of strength and wholeness gives way to Belinda as an image of impotent disarray; but in Pope's symbolic system, these two contradictory images are not so much one another's negations as they are complementary and mutually sustaining aspects of Pope's objectification of the female. Through such an objectification, Pope uses his heroine to reflect and reaffirm the passive sexual and economic role of women in mercantile society. At the root of the myth of female power in Pope is the premise that female sexuality is responsible for the exercise of desire in both men and women. For, indeed, at the dramatic center of the Rape, where the Baron performs the action of a desiring subject—

                 “The’ Adventurous Baron the bright Locks admired

                   He saw, he wished, and to the Prize aspired”

Belinda is defined as both the object and the source of that desire:

                   

                     “This Nymph, to the Destruction of Mankind, Nourished two Locks,

                       Which graceful, hung behind. In equal Curls, and well conspired to deck

                       With shining Ringlets, the smooth Ivory Neck.

                       Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains,

                      And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains.

                      Fair Tresses Man's Imperial Race insane,

                     And Beauty draws us with a single Hair.”

In the absence of any concept of female autonomy, Belinda's self-involvement and apparent indifference to the Baron are an automatic challenge to assault, her “ravishing” beauty a passive-aggressive inducement to revenge.

Though the agency of the drama is located in the Baron, its motivation is situated in her. Belinda's status as a prime motivating force in the Rape is established in a variety of ways. In her glory she is likened to the sun, the bright centre of attention around whom “Fair Nymphs, and well-dressed Youths” gather as mere satellites to envy and admire and over whom, saint-like, she impartially extends the benevolence of her smiles. She is a priestess at whose altar “The various Offerings of the World “unite, a Goddess who’s “awful Beauty” assumes a grace beyond the reach of art. In her “mighty Rage” toward “Little Men” she is compared to Juno herself, the very Queen of Heaven who drove Aeneas through so many toils and perils.

She is fickle and self-centred in herself adoration; she performs the “Rites of pride” and this toy-shop belle ultimately shrinks under the invocation of Divinity.

CONCLUSION:

Belinda’s narcissism, while satirized according to propriety as unfeminine and subversive, is also glorified as keeping commerce in motion.

Belinda as coquette occupies as basic and indispensible a place in the providential order.

Of all the work regarded by the modern critical establishment as classics of English poetry, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” is perhaps the most liberal in its use of that synecdoche principle by which a part is made to stand for the whole. In it women- whom it defines as mere appendage to man, her world a mere corner to his, represents the whole world in what amounts to a large scale repetition of that more basic equation by which Belinda’s lock, the symbol of her chastity becomes a proxy to Belinda herself, where the fall of the china jar is given the same weight as the loss of lady’s honour.

In fact throughout the “Rape of the Lock” Pope is engaging in extended play on notion, already conventional in his day but to which his work gave new force, that women’s entire value is tied up with her identity as a piece of property transferable among men.

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