Alexander Pope's Epic Rape of the Lock

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Alexander Pope’s epic Rape of the Lock, is essentially a lampoon of traditional epic literature. It is teeming with comparisons between the main character Belinda’s actions, and Homer’s Achilles, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Greek mythology in general. Her character’s image is painted as vain and unconcerned with consequential matters, unlike that of Achilles’ character from Homer’s Iliad; however he was full of wrath and pride resembling that of Belinda’s traits. But, that is where most corresponding attributes end; the scales in which both play out as an epic are far from akin. Although her overall character seems to only be concerned with her charms, Pope consistently describes her in an almost hero like manner, and her quest has become to retrieve her most precious lock that she has lost. Throughout the poem her most trivial actions are glorified and exaggerated with comparisons to Greek heroes and wars, such as Achilles and the Trojan War, when in reality she is simply a vain woman who has lost a lock of her hair due to it’s unblemished beauty, and her quest for the seized lock is a matter that is completely frivolous and has no benefit in pursuing. Essentially that is what Pope is saying, that the high class woman of his time are petty, impractical, and vapid; he parodies Belinda’s actions with comparisons to the epic to drive that concept further.
In the first Canto of The Rape of the Lock, Ariel, her guardian Sylph, speaks to her in a dream, warning her of what is to come, while at the same time echoing Virgil’s Aeneid when the hero Aeneas is visiting the underworlds Elysian Fields:
Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are ...

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...e nature of events transpiring, she does not exalt herself; the maiden is compared to a hero, but can never be truly recognized as one.

Works Cited

Greenblatt, et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: N.W.
Norton & Company. 2013. Print.
Cohen, Ralph. “The Reversal of Gender in "The Rape of the Lock." South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 37. No. 4 (Nov. 1972): Pages. 54-60. Web. 21 March 2014
Frost, William. The Rape of the Lock and Pope’s Homer. Modern Language Quarterly. Vol. 8. No. 3 (Sep47): Pages. 342-354. Web. 21 March 2014
Schaefer, Tatjana. “Sir Plume in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A Parody of Homer’s Ulysses.” A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews. Vol. 25. No. 2 (2012): Pages. 91–95. Web. 21 March 2014

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