Independence and personal freedom are fundamental values ​​both in entire societies and in individual life stories. However, in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, contrasting physical representations of the body reign in which characters are stripped of their autonomy. Defoe's text offers his reader a glimpse into the tense atmosphere of disease-ridden London. Through vivid depictions of the epidemic's suffering and effects on the physical body, Defoe shows how those affected were deprived not only of their health, but also of their autonomy. Pope, on the other hand, paints a misogynistic portrait of the female body that was deprived of its independence due to the constraints of 17th-century gender ideologies. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"?Get the original essayPublished fifty-seven years after the outbreak, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year chronicles the events of the Great Plague of London in 1665. The text's watchful narrator, known only as HF, chronicles the disease as it spreads through the city. Panicked residents flee the capital, while brave officials, civil servants and poor families stay behind. As the death toll rises, victims are continually transported to “the graveyard pit of our parish of Aldgate” (Defoe, 21). HF's account conveys the sound of grief in the cries of English citizens. Additionally, through intense imagery, it paints a haunting atmospheric portrait of 17th-century London. Rich in detail and many vivid descriptions, the physical effects of the plague on the human body are evident. The narrator of the text compares the epidemic to a sort of collective hysteria: “So they were just as crazy to run after the charlatans and the acrobats, and all the old practicing women, to obtain medicines and remedies; accumulating with such a multitude of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called, that they not only spent their money, but even poisoned themselves in advance, for fear of the poison of infection; and prepared their bodies for the plague, instead of protecting them against it. On the other hand, it is incredible and difficult to imagine how house posts and street corners were covered with doctors' bills and papers from ignorant individuals” (Defoe, 11). HF offers its audience a vivid and gruesome depiction. effects of the epidemic on the physical body. By alternating between narrative accounts and eyewitness accounts of the attack, an emotional response is evoked in the reader, as one cannot help but feel affected by the continuing and omnipresent examples of despair, pain, and sorrow: “The chips are falling on them; after which they rarely lived six hours; for these spots which they called chips were in reality spots of gangrene, or mortified flesh in small spots as large as a small silver penny and hard as a piece of callus or horn; so that when the disease reached this length, there was nothing but certain death; and yet, as I have said, they were unaware that they were infected, and were not at all in disorder, until these deadly marks were upon them” (Defoe, 70). Defoe is able to express the heartbreaking nature of the plague. focusing on the horrible swellings in the bodies of the afflicted. He illustrates their severity by saying that people were frantically trying to.