Lamb, Jonathan (b. 1945)

"The Rape of the Lock as Still Life"

Lewisburg, PA

Bucknell University Press

2007

"If Belinda's mind is like a whirligig of fashion or a camera obscura, where moving images are cast upon a blank surface umediated by a reflective or critical presence, then Pope supplies the ekphrasis suitable for such machinery."

In Pope's poem empty things with painted surfaces are constantly juxtaposed with the heroine of Pope's poem, and not in any satirical way, for the beauty of the surface makes satire irrelevant. Look on her face and you'll forget her faults, he promises. So enveloping are the superficies of things it becomes pointless to distinguish between things, humans, and spirits except in the degree to which these surfaces are more or less pleasurable to look at. Pope calls Belinda his muse, painting her as part of the machinery, just as the machinery painted her as an exquisite empty vessel, or as she painted herself purer blushes out of breathing boxes and self-opening caskets. Such overpainting doesn't thicken the pigment; it sets up a potentially infinite series of reflections of paint and the act of painting in which very little difference is to be detected. From these reflections the natural and the human elements--at least those that would have been recognized as such by Dennis, Shaftesbury, and Etherege--have been expelled, as they are from the reflections sent from the shining surfaces of pewter and silver in the paintings of Jan Lievens and Jan van der Welde. If Belinda's mind is like a whirligig of fashion or a camera obscura, where moving images are cast upon a blank surface umediated by a reflective or critical presence, then Pope supplies the ekphrasis suitable for such machinery. His absorbed descriptions of things beautifully made to speak solely of their remarkable effects, as Homer does in his ekphrasis of Achilles' shield, or Philostratus in the descriptions of still lifes he gives in his Imagines.
(pp. 56-7)

Machine::Whirligig Optics::Camera Obscura

Reading

Lamb, Jonathan. "The Rape of the Lock as Still Life." The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Ed., Mark Blackwell, Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007.

10/18/2010