884 Pope, Alexander
example, Belinda, the poem’s protagonist, dresses
herself in a scene likened to Achilles’ putting on of
armor and weaponry before battle).
Many of the poem’s themes are interconnected.
The proliferation of commodified objects suggests
the violence of imperialism, and a great deal of the
violence within the text is dramatized through the
gender relations in the poem. The vices of the age,
at least according to Pope—the vanity of women,
the effeminacy of modern gentlemen, the idleness
and superficiality of the fashionable elite—are all
satirized through the techniques of mock epic.
Hilary Englert
commodIFIcatIon/commercIaLIzatIon
in The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was written
during a period in English history marked by a series
of trade wars and by rapid mercantile expansion. By
the early 18th century, England had emerged as the
dominant commercial power in Europe, London
was the center of world commerce, and the East
India and South Sea trading companies comprised
England’s biggest business. While the poem is set in
and around London, its central concerns extend far
beyond the domestic to England’s growing trading
empire and its implications for English fashionable
society.
The famed toilet scene in canto 1, in which
Belinda is readying herself at her dressing table,
features an array of oddly animated luxury goods
transported from India, the Middle East, the West
Indies, Asia, and Africa into the home and onto
the body of a young English lady of fashion. These
commercial wares offer themselves up as eager sac-
rifices to the holy “Rites of Pride” performed by the
beautiful Belinda at her dressing table, or “Altar’s
side” (1.28, 27). It is in the name of Belinda’s adorn-
ment that “India’s glowing Gems” submit them-
selves, that “All Arabia breathes from yonder box,”
and that “The Tortoise . . . and Elephant unite, /
Transform’d to Combs” (1.133–136). “Unnumber’d
Treasures ope at once” and “the various Off ’rings of
the World” simply “appear” as though reporting for
duty (1.129, 130). Personified objects from around
the world attach themselves to the female icon
whose “heav’nly Image” (1.125) the reader sees in
the process of its making. Even as the trappings of
commodity culture are mystified in the depictions of
Belinda as naturally the “Fairest of Mortals,” whose
dressing ritual merely “repairs,” “awakens,” and “calls
forth” her essential charms, Belinda’s “awful beauty”
is revealed in the scene as both artificially con-
structed and conditioned by mercantile capitalism
(1.27, 141, 142, 139). Exotic apparel, fashionable
ornaments and accessories, foreign perfumes, and
cosmetics manufacture Belinda, while the processes
of their manufacture and acquisition remain hidden.
As the scene unfolds, this fair “Belle” emerges as
both idol and toiling priestess, imperial “Goddess”
of the Commodity (1.8, 32) and pious worshiper
of the commodities from which her identity, power,
and culture are inseparable.
The toilet scene sustains a tension between rep-
resentations of global commodities as “Off ’rings”
and their figuration as “Spoil” (1. 130, 132). Belinda’s
wares are cast alternately as the legitimate (even
enthusiastic) profits of world trade on the one
hand and the plunder of colonial exploitation on
the other. Belinda is “deck’d with all that Land and
Sea afford” (5.11, emphasis added), suggesting that
the nations of the world have given readily of their
resources, have bestowed themselves comfortably
upon Belinda and her like. And yet, if this is so,
why are the goods on the dressing table kept in a
locked “Casket” (1.33), implicitly connecting them
with death, and Belinda’s beautification rituals with
funeral rites?
In the context of the poem’s mock-epic design,
it is formally ridiculous—that is, part of the satirical
project—that the items populating Belinda’s dress-
ing table should be so closely identified with British
mercantile expansion. The mock epic appears to
trivialize the politics of empire by miniaturizing the
globe as cosmetic clutter. On the other hand, the
poem’s preoccupation with figures of conquest and
colonialism seems to suggest that the link is more
than a joke. Belinda’s beauty, her identity, and her
desirability can only be understood as a function of
her adornment in foreign commodities. Her toilet
explicitly suggests the process by which distant lands
were mined for resources by British trading compa-
nies, just as it implicates both Belinda and the social