Abstract: It’s clear to everyone in our present day that the word “rape” describes a terrible situation that one would dare find a funny topic to laugh about. But back in 1714, when the “Rape of the Lock”, was published by Pope, the word “rape” had a totally different concept. Of course, it was understood as we now know it today, but it could also mean taking anything forcibly. (In our analysis we will discuss how both meanings are active)
Two years before the publishing of the poem, at a very fancy party outside London, young Lord Petre cut off a lock of hair from young lady Belle Fermor’s head, by sneaking up behind her. Of course neither Belle nor her parents approved of this action, especially since they were considering him as a husband for Belle. Instead of a marriage, the two families went into a feud, Capulet, Montague style. After a while things got so bad between the two families that a mutual friend asked Alexander Pope to write a poem about the situation to make it seem funny. Back in the old days, it was popular to write political and social satire that everybody would read.
Pope took the incident and turned it into a satire on both social pretension and vanity. In the end, Pope succeeded in uniting the two families together through his poem. He ridiculed the crisis of a spoiled society girl who lost a piece of hair to a rich boy’s prank. Pope made the situation larger and more interesting and comical by adding supernatural beings, like the Sylphs, and compared it to major Classical epics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock delivers on many levels: social, poetic, political, and aesthetic. All that is to say that the poem is a great Mock Epic!
Keywords: Mock Epic Poetry, Alexander Pope’s.
Title: A Look into Mock Epic Poetry: The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
Author: Sharefa Al- Sarhed
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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