Mock-Heroic Narrative Poem: The Rape of the Lock

Overview
Alexander Pope’s 1712 The Rape of the Lock is a brisk two‑canto mock‑heroic that transforms a minor high‑society affront into an epic‑scaled narrative. Written at the request of John Caryll to soothe a quarrel between two Catholic families after Lord Petre secretly cut a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor, the poem magnifies a salon scandal with the grand manner of Homer and Virgil. Its title uses “rape” in the older sense of seizure, and its wit depends on the comic disproportion between elevated epic style and the trifling cause that sets the action in motion.

Plot
Belinda, the reigning belle of her circle, glitters amid London fashion and the rituals of polite sociability. The Baron, smitten and emboldened by idle gallantry, resolves to possess a token of her beauty. At a glittering gathering on the river and at court, conversation, flirtation, and display set the stage for his exploit. Watching an unguarded moment, he stealthily draws his scissors and snips one of Belinda’s shining curls. The theft, at once intimate and public, explodes the fragile equilibrium of the party. Shocked, Belinda moves from incredulity to outrage; her companions take sides; witty barbs, fans, and snuff become weapons in a miniature battle that parodies the clash of heroes.

Amid the fuss, Belinda demands the return of the purloined lock as a matter of honor. The Baron preens over his trophy, enjoying the attention it brings, but in the ensuing commotion the curl vanishes. Its loss compounds the affront: not only has a boundary been crossed, the proof of injury has slipped beyond recovery. Without the consolations of restitution or apology, the quarrel threatens to harden into lasting resentment. The poet’s voice interposes a saving urbanity, urging both sides to recognize the absurdity at the heart of the conflict and to disarm anger with laughter.

Themes and Style
Pope adapts the high apparatus of epic poetry, invocation, elevated diction, heroic comparisons, to a world of card tables, tea, cosmetics, and courtly banter. The joke is double-edged: trivial things generate mighty contests, and the grand tradition is resilient enough to bear, and illuminate, the foibles of modern life. The poem anatomizes vanity and the codes of honor governing beaux and belles, where reputation, ornament, and the theater of manners carry as much weight as courage or virtue in older epics. Belinda’s outrage is not dismissed; rather, it is rendered comically legible as the product of a culture that fetishizes surfaces and ceremonies while masking desire and competition beneath polish.

The 1712 version is notable for its restraint and speed. It omits the elaborate supernatural “machinery” that later came to define the poem, no airy sylphs ministering to Belinda, no cavern of Spleen, no moralizing speech to steady the denouement. Instead, the action flows cleanly from flirtation to seizure to quarrel, with the missing lock as a neat emblem of irreparable slight and social performance outstripping substance.

Context and Significance
Pope later expanded the poem to five cantos (1714), adding Rosicrucian spirits, the game of ombre, and a starry apotheosis for the lost curl; he refined the ending again in 1717. Yet the 1712 nucleus already displays his technical brilliance: couplets of crystalline poise, pointed antithesis, and metaphors that gild and prick their subjects at once. As a social corrective crafted to reconcile real people, the poem demonstrates how satire can mend as well as mock, turning a petty offense into enduring art while revealing the comic heroism of everyday vanity.