“Hairs less in sight”: Meteors, Sneezes, and the Problem of Meaning in The Rape of the Lock

No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuseThe costly sweetness of Arabian dews,Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind,That fly disorder’d with the wanton wind.

-Alexander Pope, Sappho to Phaon (83–6)¹

This essay proffers a solution to one of the great mysteries of eighteenth-century British literature: what happens to Belinda’s lock of hair in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, The Rape of the Lock? Or, rather, this essay considers why the loss of Belinda’s hair is not more of a mystery to modern readers. The simple answer is that because we tend to take Pope’s word that the lock, in the trivial world of Belinda and the Baron, is simply lost in the scuffle that occupies much of canto five, its later ascension to the heavens as a “sudden Star” provides us with all we need to know as far as its ultimate location is concerned. In other words, while the meaning or significance of the lock in this “stellified” condition has been the subject of much critical investigation, readers appear to have agreed that the location of the lock at the end of the poem is beyond dispute. In this essay, though, I would like to interrogate the givenness of the lock’s final location, beginning with the observation that the supernatural and epic finale to Pope’s poem, the lock’s transformation into meteor or star, does not fit with the meticulously contrapuntal balancing of high and low that otherwise governs the poem’s figures, spaces, actions, and characters. So instead of reading the lock’s transformation as the only answer to the question of location, I would like to suggest that the “sudden Star,” much like the battle that is also a game of cards or the Cave of Spleen that figures Belinda’s pique, is only one part of the total scenario that Pope wishes to render.

Accordingly, I will not be looking to the heavens to investigate what the stellified lock might mean or allegorize, but to the ground in an attempt to “find” the grossly material lock for which the stellified lock, I will argue, serves as epic figure. For if, as Cynthia Wall has put it, the “dominant tension[s] in the poem” are between the “visible and the hidden, the fragment and the whole, what is contained and what escapes,” then the hypervisible, fully integrated, and climactic astro-lock that terminates the poem in its high register of signification might have a hidden, fragmentary, elusive, and, in some senses, anti-climactic counter-figure residing in the poem’s low, realistic register.² By recombining and rereading a variety of lines from the poem, I seek to show that in addition to offering his readers the ascendant lock, Pope cryptically sketches such a counter-figure. Specifically, when Belinda makes the offending Baron sneeze by thrusting a pinch of snuff at him, the lock, I argue, is to be understood as having been mistakenly substituted by the Baron himself for a handkerchief, causing it to disintegrate and disperse when he frantically and absentmindedly sneezes into it. This condition of dispersal thus renders the real lock’s discovery not simply difficult, but theoretically impossible (as “hairs” it no longer exists as a “lock,” or that which the party seeks to find).

Scattering hints to this effect throughout the poem, Pope in fact seeks to recreate this very experience of searching and discovery for his reader. The stellified lock that dazzles readers’ eyes mimics at the level of the reading experience the attitude of the party within the poem, who, caught up in the dramatic intensity of the moment, forget that the lock is only a meaningful, legible modality for the less meaningful, elusive hairs that tentatively and only temporarily compose it. Pope’s subtlety in all of this suggests that he was less interested in asserting poetic power than in interacting with his readers. In providing them with an opportunity to put to use their own “quick Poetic Eyes”—eyes...