The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment
of the vanities and idleness of 18th-century
high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families
of his acquaintance, Pope intended his verses to cool hot tempers
and to encourage his friends to laugh at their own folly.
The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the
English language of the genre of mock-epic. The epic had long been
considered one of the most serious of literary forms; it had been
applied, in the classical period, to the lofty subject matter of
love and war, and, more recently, by Milton, to the intricacies
of the Christian faith. The strategy of Pope’s mock-epic is not
to mock the form itself, but to mock his society in its very failure
to rise to epic standards, exposing its pettiness by casting it
against the grandeur of the traditional epic subjects and the bravery
and fortitude of epic heroes: Pope’s mock-heroic treatment in The
Rape of the Lock underscores the ridiculousness of a society
in which values have lost all proportion, and the trivial is handled
with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be accorded to truly
important issues. The society on display in this poem is one that
fails to distinguish between things that matter and things that
do not. The poem mocks the men it portrays by showing them as unworthy
of a form that suited a more heroic culture. Thus the mock-epic
resembles the epic in that its central concerns are serious and
often moral, but the fact that the approach must now be satirical
rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen.
Pope’s use of the mock-epic genre is intricate and exhaustive. The
Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the
contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or
the classical world view, and the pieces are wrought together with
a cleverness and expertise that makes the poem surprising and delightful.
Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and loaded with moral
implications. The great battles of epic become bouts of gambling
and flirtatious tiffs. The great, if capricious, Greek and Roman
gods are converted into a relatively undifferentiated army of basically
ineffectual sprites. Cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry substitute
for armor and weapons, and the rituals of religious sacrifice are
transplanted 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 tedious. Pope
distributes his sentences, with their resolutely parallel grammar,
across the lines and half-lines of the poem in a way that enhances
the judicious quality of his ideas. Moreover, the inherent balance
of the couplet form is strikingly well suited to a subject matter
that draws on comparisons and contrasts: the form invites configurations
in which two ideas or circumstances are balanced, measured, or compared
against one another. It is thus perfect for the evaluative, moralizing
premise of the poem, particularly in the hands of this brilliant
poet.
