Female temptation and devastation through hair in epic poetry
Alex Mellis
Bishop Joseph Hall personified the sin of mankind as a woman with a ‘loose lock erring wantonly over her shoulders’. Spoken between 1641 -56, this image continues in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost , first published in 1667, and highly resembles the character of Eve, the first female and vehicle of the Fall of Man owing to her ultimate transgression. Alexander Pope’s satirical mock -epic poem The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, clings closer to this image with the story of the theft of a lock of hair from the alluring woman Belinda. Throughout this genre of poetry, the trope of an enticing yet destructive woman is prevalent, as established by the Fall of Troy fought over the queen Helen, said to be the most beautiful woman at the time. The hair appears to represent a certain femininity both pursued and feared by men at the time, and loose hair is a rich and frequent, if problematic, symbol of womanly lure and vice.
There are several descriptions of Eve’s hair in Paradise Lost, all appearing to reinforce or foreshadow the disobedience to come while metaphorically or literally veiling her mind and spirit with her beauty.
So spake our general mother, and with eyes
Of conjugal attraction unreprov’d,
And meek surrender, half embracing leaned
On our first father; half her swelling breast
Naked met his under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid.
(iv. 492-496)
Here, the ‘loose tresses’ are highly significant, with the same description as the ‘loose lock’ of Hall’s image. The adjective ‘loose’, here, suggests a certain carelessness, or more likely unbridled disobedience and even chaos central to the character of Eve, who defies the command of God to perform ‘man’s first disobedience’ (i. 1), the ultim ate transgression of eating the apple in the garden of Eden. Furthermore, the adjective also carries a meaning of sexual promiscuity or indiscretion, reinforced by the explicit nature of her ‘swelling breast \ naked’, as well as the pair’s lustful and oste nsibly sinful intercourse after they eat from the tree. Their nakedness, and both sinful and sexual acts, would be somewhat shocking to the seventeenth-century reader and appears to fuel the common characteristic of a sexually excessive woman active in literature previously and thereafter, a character which often leads to a decline or degeneration as seen with the Fall of Man. The hair concealing this act is also important as this loving yet seemingly immoral act is ‘hid’. This appears to continue this idea of feminine destructive and seductive trickery and almost personifies the hair as it appears a part of Eve’s sly presentation. This act of concealment is also very similar to the description from lines 499-500, as ‘Jupiter \ on Juno smiles, when he impreg ns the clouds’, both objects obscuring a nude sexual act and appearing to be agents in the apparent deceit at hand. This idea again appears earlier in the book:
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