Virgin Idols and Verbal Devices: Pope’s Belinda and the Virgin Mary

Abstract

Everyone knows that when the heroine of Alexander Pope’s mock-epic The Rape of the Lock (1714) exclaims, “Oh hadst thou, Cruel! been content to seize / Hairs less in sight, or any Hairs but these” that she is talking about her virginity (IV. 175–176). Most critics take Belinda’s distress over losing a lock of hair to be indicative of her problematic privileging of reputation over virtue, or sign over referent.¹ The superficial Belinda values the hair on her head—a visible sign of her virginity—more than her pubic hair, which is presumably more connected to real virtue because of its physical proximity to her hymen. Pope’s poem is often read as a critique of its characters’ excessive investment in material objects, but Belinda, in the case of her virginity, is criticized for caring too little. Belinda’s obsessions with visual signs and with her virginity link her to the stereotypically idolatrous and sexually deviant Catholic, a figure whose appearance in anti-Catholic propaganda (already seen in chapter 1) provides an important context for the poem. But Pope’s poem can hardly be charged with anti-Catholicism or with promoting the cause of “real” virginity, and one can hardly make the case that it argues for an ethics founded upon mimesis and a coherent material or semiotic world. On the contrary, the poem satirizes all idolatrous desire for meaning in the material world.

True Poesy, like true Religion, abhors idolatry.

Edward Young, (1759), 57