Woman like spirits - Pope's Ideas in "The Rape of the Lock"

"For when the Fair [women] in all their pride expire / To their first Elements the Souls retire...." (Pope 1:57-8).

In this quote from "The Rape of the Lock" Alexander Pope suggests, that when women die they experience an afterlife in which they are transformed in to one of four types of spirits.  The spirit they transform into is determined by the personality of the woman in life.

The fiery ones "in Flame / Mount up, and take a Salamander's name" (59-60).

The women of "Soft yielding minds to Water glide away" (61).  These become Nymphs.

The women who are graver, as he calls them, "prudes", sink down "to a Gnome" (63).

And the "light Coquettes" become Sylphs who fly and play in the air (65-66).

What is Pope implying with these connections between women's dispositions and these four spirit types?  What will help in understanding this is an understanding of what each type of spirit mentioned in the poem represents in mythological terms.

Salamanders were believed to be creatures resistant to fire.  According to Bulfinch Mythology a salamander's skin was fire resistant. In fact traders from China once sold "salamander wool" clothing, which as it turns out was made using asbestos fibers. So whereas Pope seems to refer to Salamanders as creatures that were of fire, the Greek mythology seems to suggest that they were merely resistant to this element. But in later stories it seems that these animals are attributed with the ability to breathe fire, and sometimes were very similar to what we might call dragons. This fits more with what little Pope tells us about those spirits. Salamanders are also mentioned by 16th century alchemist Paracelsus who attributes them to the Roman fire god, Vulcan. One can imagine the fiery Thalestris, who brings the battle to the men so readily in Canto V, becoming a salamander when her life is through.

(for more see http://www.greekmythology.com/Books/Bulfinch/B_Chapter_36/b_chapter_36.html )

Nymphs were used to describe many sorts of spirits in ancient Greek mythology. These semi-divine beings had various stories. In the Trojan Cycle (of which the Iliad is a part) Paris was said to have first loved a mountain nymph and Achilles mother, Thetis, was a sea nymph, or Nereid who is described in the Iliad as being fairly powerful, even to the point of having saved Zeus' life at one time.

The way Pope describes nymphs in  "The Rape of the Lock" appears to be the a sea or river nymph (Naiads). Pope's nymphs appear to be easy going types who (no pun intended) "go with the flow." Yet, in mythology these spirits could have a wide variety of personalities, some were loving, some capricious, some pranksters, some even antagonistic to mankind entirely.  So it's difficult to see from where he derives his rather narrow connection with "soft yielding minds," water, and nymphs except that Paracelsus mentions them in his writing referring to them as "undines" which are a form of water spirit in oriental cultures as well.  Moreover, Pope calls Belinda a nymph through much of the poem, though she is attended by sylphs.  So what is going on here? Is he implying that Belinda is a woman of soft mind? Or is there a difference between the spirit nymphs and human woman nymph?

Gnomes are not mentioned in Greek mythology, at least not as such. They appear to be of a more modern origin, probably Celtic or Germanic. Gnomes are little people who live underground, often they appear to guard mines, and gold. In some ways they are like Leprechauns and perhaps stem from that origin as well. The Enyclopaedia Britannica online also discusses a 16th century connection between gnomes and alchemy (thanks once again to Paracelsus--starting to see a connection here?) which seems to be where Pope draws their personality from. They mix magical potions and use reagents which also can be tied to alchemy.  We can envision Clarissa as being the type of personality Pope would say was destined to be come a gnome.

(see http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236317/gnome)

Sylphs are air spirits according to Pope, and are the spirit he spends the most time depicting.  In Greek mythology sylphs were also flying/air spirits and the muses may well have been considered sylphs.   The alchemist Paracelsus (see the information concerning Gnomes for more about him) said that sylphs were air-people.  They have most often been associated with angels, and are often said to be invisible. So here again Pope draws upon the famous (infamous) alchemist for his mythological backdrop. Paracelsus' spiritual creatures fit Pope's sylphs, though in most myths they are always portrayed as female, unlike the male Ariel in "The Rape of the Lock" which might be Pope's nod to Shakespeare.

Pope mysteriously ties sylphs to feminine innocence and chastity, though where he draws this from is not clear, aside from a vague connection between the heaven's and "goodness" (versus the underground and Hell/bad stuff).

By now the true probable source of Pope's four elemental spirits is apparent.  Pope must have read Paracelsus essays at one time, and decided to draw upon his ideas about elemental spirits for "The Rape of the Lock." Does this diminish the poem's "heroic epic" ties? Certainly it connects the poem with a broader base of history, that of the pseudo-science of alchemy which was widely practiced in England for a time. So while it does seem to make the poem less anchored in the classical heroic epic tradition, knowing that his spirits are drawn not from those myths but from a more contemporary source (Paracelsus having written about these spirits about 150 years before Pope appropriates them for his poem), Pope might have been making a more important statement.  Alchemy was doomed to decline and virtual extinction by The Enlightenment and the introduction of the modern scientific method.  Alchemy was steeped in magical trappings and in a sense mixed scientific notions with magical superstition.  The realism and practicality of Enlightenment thinking left no room for such nonsense as alchemy.  The fact that all of the underlying protection, rejection and mischief that occurs in "The Rape of the Lock" is attributed to these elemental spirits whose creation was primarily in the mind of a practitioner of magical-science (the very term is contradictory, the two words cancel each other out, leaving nothing) suggests what Pope is up to is very subtle indeed.  By drawing as he does upon these dubious spirits, Pope cleverly critiques British High
Society and the women of that society.  He suggests that all of their "airs," beauty and charms are merely concoctions. That what protects their vanity and innocence is falsely based, just like the precepts of alchemy.

Does this reading indicate that Pope's poem deserves the scorn and criticism that feminist readers give it? I'll leave that for you to decide. As a side note, Paracelsus, who professed to be Catholic, was forced to recant of many of his ideas or face severe punishment. His ideas about spirits ("demons" the Church called them) were not acceptable to the Church leadership.  Perhaps this is another reason for Pope to draw upon his ideas, another subtle jab at the upper class society and women, what do you think?

For a little more about Paracelsus check out this link:
http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/p/paracelsus'_natural_spirits.html