SOURCE: "Feminist Hermeneutics and Reader Response: The Role of Gender in Reading The Rape of the Lock" in New Orleans Review, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 43-50.

In the essay below, Meyers offers a feminist rereading of The Rape of the Lock.

The Rape of the Lock has been read traditionally as a mock-heroic attack on the artificial society in which Alexander Pope lived—a society poised precariously on the edge of chaos. When the "hero" "rapes" the lock of the egotistical Belinda, he figuratively exposes—castrates—an already emasculated ("effeminate") social group. Belinda is the butt of the joke—her lock (representative of her virginity) is her most important possession; she is "lost" without it. Her lack of a lock is "funny." Readers trained in western culture consistently have interpreted The Rape of the Lock from this phallogocentric perspective. Reader-response theorists have lent credence to such readings by...