Critical Analysis of "The Rape of the Lock" By Alexander Pope

The Rape of the Lock is a funny situation of the prides and laziness of 18th-century high society. Creating his poem on a real incident among families of his acquaintance, Pope planned his verses to cool hot tempers and to encourage his friends to laugh at their own stupidity.

The poem is perhaps the most exceptional example in the English language of the genre of mock-epic. Until now the epic had been considered one of the most serious of literary forms as it had been applied in the classical period to the mighty subject matter of love and war and as it is got in the details of the Christian faith by Milton. The strategy of Pope’s mock-epic is not to mock the form itself but to mock his society, which is its very failure to rise to epic standards, showing its triviality by casting it against the dignity of the traditional epic subjects and the courage and strength of epic heroes: Pope’s mock-heroic treatment in The Rape of the Lock highlights the ridiculousness of a society in which values have lost all proportion, and the small things are handled with the seriousness that are seen as truly important issues. The society in this poem is one that fails to differentiate between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks the men by showing them as worthless of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic look like the epic in that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but the fact that the approach must be satirical rather than serious.

Pope’s use of the mock-epic genre is complicated and complete. The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the current scene raises up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, and the pieces are shaped together with a cleverness and expertise that makes the poem surprising and wonderful. Pope’s transformations are numerous, outstanding, and loaded with moral implications. The great battles of epic become occasion of gambling and flirtatious value. The great Greek and Roman gods are converted into a relatively undifferentiated army of basically weak fairies. Cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry substitute for armor and weapons, and the rituals of religious sacrifice are shifted to the dressing room and the altar of love.

The verse form of The Rape of the Lock is the heroic couplet; Pope still reigns as the uncontested master of the form. The heroic couplet consists of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines (lines of ten syllables each, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables). Pope’s couplets do not fall into strict iambs, however, flowering instead with a rich rhythmic variation that keeps the highly regular meter from becoming heavy or boring. Pope distributes his sentences, with their resolutely parallel grammar, across the lines and half-lines of the poem in a way that enhances the careful quality of his ideas. Moreover, the inherent balance of the couplet form is amazingly well suited to a subject matter that draws on comparisons and contrasts: the form invites configurations in which two ideas or situations are balanced, measured, or compared against one another. It is thus perfect for the evaluative, moralizing ground of the poem, particularly in the hands of this brilliant poet.