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.
This is a free excerpt of 77 words. There are 11,177 words (approx.
37 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our The Rape of the Lock: Critical Essay by Ellen Pollak Access Pass.
