This article analyzes the scene in Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" where the character Umbriel descends to the Cave of the Goddess of Spleen. The goddess grants Umbriel a bag containing female "lungs, sighs, sobs, and passions" to provoke the character Belinda into action after her hair is cut. The bag's contents represent the metaphorical "venting of the spleen" from low spirits into anger. When Umbriel empties the bag over Belinda, it cures her melancholy and inspires her to epic battle, parodying descriptions of underworld journeys in classical epics through physiological satire of 18th century ideas about spleen.

1. Spleen and Wind in "The Rape of the Lock"
Author(s): Rodney Delasanta
Source: College Literature, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 69-70
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111494
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2. NOTES & DISCUSSION
SPLEEN AND WIND IN THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
Rodney Delasanta
Umbriel's descent to the Cave of the Goddess of Spleen in Book IV of
Pope's Rape of the Lock has always been hailed as a brilliant parody of the
epic voyage to the underworld, such as Aeneas's famous descent in Aeneid
VI via the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. And so it is. But although the
goddess's Aeolian response to Umbriel's plea for help in revivifying the
violated and disconsolate Belinda has also been applauded as still another
clever parody of epic narrative?this time the Aeolus episode from Odyssey
X?the scene has never made as much sense dramatically as it has
parodically. One recalls that the Goddess of Spleen answers Umbriel's re
quest to "touch Belinda with chagrin" by granting him "a wondrous
bag . . . like that where once Uylsses held the winds" (IV, 77-82), a bag in
which is collected the force of "female lungs, sighs, sobs, and passions, and
the war of tongues" (IV, 83-84). Upon his return from the Cave of Spleen,
Umbriel rends this Aeolian bag over the heads of the doleful Belinda and
Thalestris and thus provokes them to epic battle against the offending
Baron. It takes no special explicative talent to interpret the Cave of Spleen,
with its drooping goddess and assorted vapors, as a mock-epic device dram
atizing Belinda's sullen psychosomatic condition resulting from her ton
sorial rape. But except for an obvious correlation between the unloosed
wind and Belinda's newly provoked rage, one remains unconvinced about
the literal meaning of the Aeolian bag fetched with such ceremony from the
Goddess of Spleen and rent so efficaciously over the heads of the aggrieved
women. Why should splenetic wind, howsoever Virgilian and Homeric its
origins, lead defeated maidens to heroic action?
Until that journey to the underworld and the subsequent rending of the
bag, Belinda's reaction to the rape of her lock had been one of traumatic
paralysis. "Pensive" and "oppressed" by "anxious cares," suppressing
"secret passions ... of rage, resentment, and despair" (IV, 1-9), she is pic
tured at the moment of Umbriel's return from the Cave as sunk Dido-like in
Thalestris' arms with "her eyes dejected and her hair unbound" (IV, 90).
She is, in short, a victim of the spleen in one of its eighteenth-century mani
festations, which the OED describes as "excessive dejection or depression
of spirits, gloominess and irritability, moroseness and melancholia." (In
Gulliver's Travels IV, vii, Swift ascribes these splenetic symptoms, appro
69
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3. 70 COLLEGE LITERATURE
priately, to "the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich" and prescribes hard work
as a cure.) Umbriel's mission to the Goddess of Spleen, then, is to find a
cure for Belinda's weepy melancholia from the divine patroness of spleen
herself. But why the prescription of wind?
It is only with the couplet at IV, 91-92 that the reader is offered a clue:
Full o'er their heads the swelling bag he rent,
And all the Furies issued at the vent, (italics added)
Complementary to the idea of splentic disorder as melancholia, the
eighteenth century understood it also as a sudden and explosive release of
violent feelings. There were two main types of spleen, according to Eleanor
M. Sickles, "stemming from the double meaning of the word as either
captious anger or low spirits."1 In a metaphor which the OED finds in use
as early as 1641 and which by our own time has become a cliche, those "low
spirits" may be fanned into "captious anger" by the process of venting the
spleen: of wind-ing, or airing, or ventilating the noisome organ. (Need it be
said that the Latin word for wind is ventus and that Pope is thus exploiting
an epic pun with his allusion to the Aeolian bag?) What the Goddess of
Spleen had granted Umbriel, then, in the gift of wind to Belinda was not
merely some vague inspiration to epic battle but, more fitting to her own
splenetic divinity, the literal means by which Belinda's own spleen might be
vented from a state of melancholic inertia to one of heroic temper.
What Pope has done in Book IV of the Rape of the Lock, dazzlingly well
it would seem, is to dramatize by Umbriel's descent, by the goddess's gift of
wind, and by the rending of the bag the literal terms of the metaphorical
venting of the spleen, and thus satirized by brilliant mock-epic
physiography a physiological condition well known to "the lazy, the lux
urious, and the rich" of his time. Appropriate to this mock-epic intention,
he has reversed the epic strategy announced in Paradise Lost VI, 310, where
Milton sought to "set forth/Great things by small" and succeeded in setting
forth small things?a maiden's snipped lock and vented spleen?by great.
NOTE
1 The Gloomy Egoist (Octagon: New York, 1969), p. 21.
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