“See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll,/ Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul!” (Alexander Pope)
Ideologically conservative and stylistically innovative, Alexander Pope throws his literary darts at the triviality and banality that characterised the fashionable behaviour of the nouveax riches in “The Rape of the Lock”. Pope produces and derides the grandilocuent and flamboyant rhetoric that the mock-heroic mode demands. This use of language, added to his mastery of the satirical style, allows for a harsh criticism against both the bankrupt aristocracy that has married bourgeois money and those bourgeois à la mode whose trendy behaviour is merely the result of a marriage with the ruined gentry of the ancient regime. Thereby, mocking the excessively baroque language of auto-of-plays and time epics, Pope indirectly proclaims the goodness of the Royal Society’s stylistic recommendations; and the stupidity, if not the moral perversion, of the new combination-marriage between the new moneyed and the old ruined classes.
(One of Urano's satellites named after Pope's 'Belinda')
Seen from this angle, Belinda is dealt with as an object, as a consumer good or even a toy, and Pope’s parodic and satirical presentation of the story implies a firm rejection of the game in which a woman is reified. This author, that is to say, may have been a male chauvinist, but in this particular case he sees indecency in what probably the majority of men would have seen only an amusing game. Once again, ideologically perspective and style prove to be bosom friends.
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