Alexander Pope’s The Rape of Lock is a work of literature that does an excellent job of exercising the genre known as mock-epic. Pope opens up with a very comical preface in his letter to Mrs. Arabella Fermer; in which he blatantly insults the female gender but in a way humorous enough for it to be somewhat non-offensive. I think the mock-epic is an overlooked genre that doesn’t receive the credit it most certainly deserves.
Pope’s work manages to employ the magnificent orchestra of language, mirroring the very genre it mocks, and is able to do it about a subject completely non-magnificent. While the fate of poor Belinda’s lock may seem trivial, its significance to the characters in the novel is something the average reader can actually relate to.
At the onset of this tale told in epic verse, the character Belinda is warned by a supernatural creature that something dreadful is going to happen, and that she should ‘beware of Man!’. Most would predict a terrible family tragedy, or perhaps Belinda getting raped; however Pope brilliantly diminutizes the warning. When reading this I likened the foreboding advice given to Belinda by her guardian Ariel, to the warning God have Adam & Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost (in reference to eating the forbidden fruit).