Female temptation and devastation through hair in epic poetry
She as a veil down to the slender waist
Her unadornèd golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils,
(iv. 304-307)
The hair is once again used as a façade, a ‘veil’, cementing the common trope of female beauty being deceptive and dangerous. Bishop Hall’s description emphasizes this, also featuring ‘a painted hide shadowed with a fan not more painted’ and ‘painted cloth and skin’, displaying the anxiety around female presentation and cosmetics, and the attributed dishonesty. Additionally, Eve’s hair being ‘dishevelled’ and ‘unadornèd’ not only rei nforces her characterization as somewhat unruly and rebellious before the Fall; it also suggests a certain uncontrolled madness seen in classical mythology, often in dreadful mourning or Dionysian cult celebration. Lastly, as the ‘vine curled her tendrils’ , Eve more closely resembles the leafy garden the pair are in, but the image connotes an ominous creeping or even strangulation. Alexander Pope’smock -heroic poem The Rape of the Lock was published 45 years after Milton’s own epic and focuses on the theft of a lock of a beautiful girl’s hair by the noble Baron. However, unlike preceding epic writers such as Milton, Virgil or Homer, Pope satirizes the genre by presenting this trivial theft in the grand scale of other epic poems. This begins with the title, a s although ‘rape’ here means to snatch or carry off, the violent sexual connotations of the word heighten the gravity of the poem as well as criticize eighteenth-centurymaterialismand self-obsession. The object of the verb is almost juxtaposed and emphasizes this criticism, as, rather than the kidnapping of a woman or queen such as Helen of Troy, it is referring to a lock of hair. The stakes are thereby comically lowered to a personal andmaterial level. With descriptions of the hair itself, the trope of allure and deception is again present. The ‘curls’ are ‘well conspir’d to de ck . . . the smooth ivory neck’ (ii. 21 -22). Once again, the female character is described metonymically reduced to her hair, which itself appears to have more agency and cunning than the person attached. Nor are any of these descriptions in any way positive or endearing, with ‘conspir’d’ inciting suspicion into the reader by suggesting the ‘curls’ are working together as an antagonist in the poem. This idea is taken further, even presenting the hair as a beautiful, tempting trap designed to ensnare the unaware man:
Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains,
And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains.
With hairy sprindges we the Birds betray,
Slight lines of Hair surprise the Finny Prey,
Fair Tresses Man’s Imperial Race insnare,
And Beauty draws us with a single Hair.
(ii. 23-28)
Pope presents Belinda’s hair here as an obvious trap into which countless men will gladly and naively fall. The two sexes are here distinctly distanced and separate, as womankind is objectified and reduced to the single superficial quality of ‘Beauty’, and is contrasted with ‘Man’s Imperial Race’, the curiously powerless victim in this exchange. Appealing womanly qualities are applied to the traps and snares in
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