The Rape of the Lock Themes

Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” recounts a seemingly trivial episode of 18th-century royal court life. Belinda, a beautiful and charming young woman, spends a day at court where she encounters the Baron, an aristocrat greatly taken with her beauty. The Baron snips off one of the two large curls into which Belinda has styled her hair, and this prompts her to begin a kind of courtly war, demanding the Baron return…

Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” offers a satirical glimpse into 18th-century court life, emphasizing society’s focus on beauty and appearance. Centered around the experience of a beautiful young woman, Belinda, who loses a lock of her hair to the scissors of an infatuated Baron, “The Rape of the Lock” steadily becomes sillier and sillier as it goes along and the characters descend into a kind of pretend battle over the lock…

Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” is perhaps not the most obvious place to turn for an understanding of religious culture in early 18th-century England, but the poem is full of moral questions about religious life and values. By the 18th century when this poem was written, England’s last Catholic monarch had been deposed, and England was once more a Protestant nation. In this time, Protestants bitterly criticized Catholics, believing that Catholics had strayed…