The After-Lives of Vain Women in The Rape of the Lock: Pope’s Sylphs and the “Corpuscular Philosophy” of Robert Boyle’

摘要

Alexander Pope addressed natural philosophy directly in the works of his maturity. While he admired Isaac Newton (if, that is, his famous tribute of 1730 may be taken at face value), his evident awe at the natural world as revealed by the scientists yields, in the Essay on Man, to the Scriblerian declaration that "all our Knowledge is, OURSELVES TO KNOW" (epistle 4, line 398), and his caricatures of the antiquarian, the Egyptologist, the horticultualist and the butterfly collector in the fourth book of the Dunciad (lines 347-458) represent the virtuosi as obsessive, solipsistic, competitive, and unprincipled. One of the titles bestowed by the Goddess Dulness is "F.R.S." (Dunciad 4, line 570) – Fellow of the Royal Society. Pope's youthful attitude was probably less clear-cut (although the Rape of the Lock does contain some incidental mockery of the virtuosi). The subject of this article is not, however, Pope's attitude to science. It is, rather, his poetic exploitation of it in the Rape of the Lock, his early masterpiece. Pope's account of the sylphs (canto 2, lines 55-68) is indebted to the hypotheses of Robert Boyle, the greatest English scientist of the seventeenth century