SOURCE: “The Rape of the Lock, A Reification of the Myth of Passive Womanhood,” in The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 77-107.

In the following excerpt, Pollak discusses an “enabling” contradiction between the satire on commercial values and the objectification of women in The Rape of the Lock, relating Pope's rhetorical, metaphysical, and paradoxical strategies in the poem to eighteenth-century sexual ideology.

Where then is man in this … picture? Nowhere and everywhere, like the sky, the horizon, an authority which at once determines and limits a condition. … Man is never inside, femininity is pure, free, powerful; but man is everywhere around, he presses on all sides, he makes everything exist; he is in all eternity the creative absence. … [T]he feminine world …, a world without men, but entirely constituted by the gaze of...