Recitation: Things about the Underworld
In his Rape of the Lock, Pope imagines the eighteenth-century equivalent of the underworld of ancient epic: the Cave of Spleen, where human beings have become objects.
Your Mission:
To create an underworld of our own day, modeled on Pope’s Cave of Spleen, where humans have morphed into objects.
Preparation:
- Reread Pope’s description of the Cave of Spleen. What objects does he put there?
- Find eighteenth-century images of those objects (either their representation in eighteenth-century art or images of the objects in a museum or other collection) and create a montage of those images. If you’d like, you can draw them–in the manner of Beardsley below!
- Explain in a sentence or two why you suppose Pope might have chosen those particular objects? What impression do they give of the world that the Baron and Belinda inhabit?
- Now imagine what a twenty-first-century Cave of Spleen would look like. Write a few lines describing it, in the style of Pope, and create montage of pictures, or a Beardsley-esque drawing.
Recitation:
- Share your work and
- Comment on your colleagues’ twenty-first-century Spleens, explaining what each seems to suggest about twenty-first-century culture.
Report:
- Submit your commentary on and montage of Pope’s Cave of Spleen
- Submit your own Cave of Spleen and characterize the Caves Spleen created by your colleagues. Was there a lot of overlap among them? If so, how?
