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What is going on in Pope's title?

What is going on in Pope's title? The word "rape" immediately suggests the idea of a violent sexual assault: other titles or literary incidents called to mind might be Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece or the rape of the Sabine women. Yet upon reading the poem we discover that it is a delicate satire of manners in which something far less injurious than rape occurs. Or does it? Are the events of the poem, including the theft of Belinda's curl, to be understood as entirely trivial and inconsequential (hence lending an aspect of farce or burlesque to the proceedings)? Or are they only trivial in a literary context (i.e. as the subject of a poem), by comparison with the epic tradition? Or are they not trivial at all: are they just as significant in a modern context as the events of epic narrative would have been in an ancient one? Is the title's ambiguity typical of the poem as a whole? Should we understand The Rape of the Lock to be written with an absolute scale of values in mind or a relative one?

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