Independence and personal freedom are fundamental values ​​of both entire societies and individual life stories . However, within 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 the reader an insight into the tense atmosphere of a disease-infested London. Through vivid depictions of suffering and the epidemic's effects on the physical body, Defoe demonstrates the ways in which those afflicted were not only robbed of their health, but also of their autonomy. Pope, however, paints a misogynistic portrait of the female body that has been stripped 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Published fifty-seven years after the epidemic, 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 H.F., recounts the disease as it spreads throughout the city. Panicked residents flee the capital, while brave civil servants, servants and poor families remain behind. As the death toll rises, victims are continually transported to “the grave in the churchyard of our Aldgate parish” (Defoe, 21). HF's narrative conveys the sound of pain in the cries of English citizens. Furthermore, through intense imagery, he paints an atmospheric and haunting portrait of seventeenth-century London. Rich in detail and full of vivid descriptions, the physical effects of the plague on the human body are evident. The narrator of the text compares the epidemic to a kind of mass hysteria: “So they were equally mad in running after charlatans, charlatans, and every old practitioner, in search of medicines and remedies; stocking themselves with such a multitude of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called, that they not only spent their money but even poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison of infection; and they prepared their bodies for the plague, instead of preserving them against it. On the other hand it is incredible and difficult to imagine how the house posts and street corners were covered with medical bills and documents of ignorant people” (Defoe, 11). HF offers its audience a vivid and gruesome description of the epidemic's effects on the physical body. By alternating the narrative and eyewitness accounts of the attack, an emotional response is evoked in the reader, as one cannot help but feel affected by the ongoing and pervasive examples of desperation, pain and grief: “The signs come out on them ; after which they rarely lived six hours; for those spots which they called tokens were really spots of gangrene, or flesh mortified into little bumps as wide as a small silver coin, and as hard as a piece of callus or horn; so that, when the disease reached that point, nothing could follow but certain death; yet, as I have said, they knew nothing that they were infected, nor were they out of order, until those deadly marks were upon them” (Defoe, 70). Defoe is able to articulate the harrowing nature of the plague by focusing on the horrific swellings on the bodies of the afflicted. He illustrates their severity, stating that people frantically tried to pop them by stabbing or burning them. The pain was often unbearable and, as a result, people screamed in the streets of London. Others threw themselves into the pits, killed their children, sank into the.