The Mystery of Women. We are not always what we seem to be...or are we?

In Rape of the Lock, I kept on finding these weird connections between Belinda and good ol' Anne Boleyn. Both of their situations were strangely similar (well of course in Anne's case it was her sex appeal that held power over all the men and not her hair, which too was rumoured to be quite lustrous.) Anyway, right now all of my ideas are in kind of a jumble in my head and I dont want to ramble so Im going to seperate them and try to work them out as I go.

Right away, from line two I made the first connection. Pope writes, " What mighty contests rise from trivial things." This made me think of a discussion we had in class about all of the trivialities in the English Court. Most of their ideas about society and how women in particular should look and behave came from the highly esteemed french court. Anne Boleyn came back from exile to the french court practically brand new. She was cunning, smart, quick-witted and beguiling. She was no great beauty, but in her adoption of all these french qualities, she became beautiful in the eyes of the whole english court.But most of all, the quality that stood out just as much as Belinda's hair, was Anne's sex appeal. Which, as we all know, in the end moved Henry the eighth to overthrow a church for her. The description of Belinda in Canto 11, lines 7-18, is very similiar to the vision people had about Anne Boleyn, maybe not the same qualitites, but it was this vision, this idea and not exactly the women herself. Belinda seemed to have all of these great attributes, but was it just because of her hair? What was she really like on the inside? Did the people only see goodness in her because of her looks? The expectation of how women were supposed to be and act never really reflects whats on the inside. Anne was the epitomy of how a women was supposed to be, heck she almost achieved everything she wanted to, but she couldnt because she went to far. She was not as strong on the inside as she appeared to be on the outside. Inside, Anne was just a scared child really, who had an inflated ego because of the expectations that society put on her. Belinda, on the inside, I almost feel was sort of simple, a little bit bland, innocent. Yeah, she was nice and all, she had the right idea, but there was a nothingness there for me, a big blank. Yet the people could not get pass this, they could not see anything past her hair and everything that came with it, the beauty, the grace, the goodness. So, what came of it, this hair, what did it drive men to do? Battle, of course.

To be honest, I did not get a lot from this story, but what I did get I tried to put into words. I had this strong sense of being versus seeming from Belinda so I took that and ran with it.

I commented on Kaylees!