The Personality of Belinda's Baron: Pope's ‘The Rape of the Lock’

Critics' concern with “The Rape of the Lock's” classical sources, epic machinery, revised versions, brilliant technique and charming heroine have left the rash Baron largely unattended. Both the rhetoric and the tone with which Pope portrays the nobleman suggest that his strange actions are a radical departure from the accepted norms of rational society. This essay proposes a psychological explanation of the Baron's unseemly conduct and clarifies his obscure behavior.

Pope himself asks a central question of the poem in the opening lines:

The reason is twofold. It is clear that the Baron is provoked by both the vanity and the beauty of Belinda. He wants to gratify himself and glorify himself, to disarm her and punish her. But Belinda's attractions elicit from the Baron a hitherto repressed abnormality that is suggested by his strangely volatile personality, his passion for saving mementos of love, and his need to display these testimonials to gain attention and prestige. The Baron's perverse behavior suggests hair-fetishism, and he is a hair despoiler.1

Pope recognizes the inherent sexual significance of hair and effectively exploits it in the poem. Since the Baron's fetishism is a substitute for normal sexual fulfillment and “consists in the displacement of erotic feelings from the genitals of the love-object on to some other part of the body,” 2 he focuses