Character of Belinda :
The character of Belinda is the heroine of The Rape of the Lock. Pope bases her character on the historical Arabella Fermor, the daughter of an aristocratic Catholic family. Robert, Lord Petre, a family friend, snipped a lock of her hair without permission, thereby causing a rift between their two families. Pope depicts this incident in the poem.
Here we can see how this is contemporary to this time as of not to the view of 18th century. The main focus is given to the virginity of Belinda as a kind of virtue and in the present time we can also compare it with the importance of the same situation in the earlier times. Now a days having freedom is the greatest right but to be in tme customs is the main aspect of our virtue. There is a little or big change in the peoples mind that of how a girl should be in her life or doing things which is of rituals not of personal liberty.
Ariel explains to Belinda through the medium of a dream that as she is a both beautiful and a virgin, it is his task to watch over her and protect her virtue though as the poem unfolds, it’s unclear if Belinda is really as virtuous as she seems. Despite the fact that Belinda is protagonist, she’s actually a bit of a slippery character to come to terms with, and as we are provided with relatively little access to her inner thoughts, and her actions are often governed by supernatural forces.
For instance, it is unclear how much influence Ariel, a sylph is able to exert over her, and there is some suggestion that he actively toys with her morality. He claims it is her virginity which makes her worthy of guarding but sends her a dream of a handsome young man, “A youth more glitt'ring than a birghtining "he was tempting her sexuality. Similarly, at the end of the poem she throws over her own mentality. Her name suggests with its literal meaning of “beautiful”, we can really know about Belinda is that she is attractive.
The poem states that “If to her share some female errors fall, Look on her face, and you'll forget them all”—in other words, she is so beautiful that those around her consider her basically exempt from any moral judgement, allowing Pope to satirize the idea Ariel suggests at the opening of the poem: that beauty and virtue always go hand in hand. Belinda is based on the real-life figure of Arabella Fermor, who also had a lock of her hair cut off by a suitor. This is how it shows the perfect relativity of the contemporary time and with this the truth is that we always find beauty in face but not in the heart and also not accepting the truth which is prevailing around us that really denotes the future and past too.
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