Feminism and "The Rape of the Lock"

an Opera-Oratorio after the poem by Alexander Pope

     

In which Belinda’s lock of hair, stolen by the Baron, becomes an icon of the free will and self-determination of women.



Pope's mock-heroic treatment of the tiny but symbolic crime of the baron has endless possibilities of interpretation and application to today's relations between the sexes and the conventions of courtship, the boundaries of social behavior, and the supression or advancement of women.


In the poem, as each micro-object references and implies the incarnation of its extreme expression, a director must ensure that the micro-crime of the baron is referenced properly to the extreme end of its spectrum.


    Virginia Woolf


  “Yesterday in the train I read The Rape of the Lock, which seems to me ‘supreme’-almost superhuman in its beauty & brilliancy-you really can't believe that such things are written down."