In the Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope displays how people are too obesessed with physical beauty, when we should be focused on inner beauty. In Canto I, we see some of her materialism,"Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux. Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms." When a lock of her hair is stolen, Belinda is fixed on getting it back because it is a part of who she is and a symbol of her outer beauty. Although it was only hair, the meaning behind it turns into a war perhaps between surface and depth or genuinity and imitation. Was she to pretend to be someone that people expected her to be just to fit in? Or was she to just be herself without caring what others thought?

This war wasn't merely about the hair, but about power and honor and what could become of the world because of one person's actions.