Alexander Pope was considered by many of his time and age to be one of the very few male writers who attempted and succeeded at taking the feminine point of view in his writing. As a poet, Pope's success came from works that appeared to be steeped in the feminine plight and struggle of his time. His primary poetic form, the Mock-Epic, is exemplified in "The Rape of the Lock". In this poem, woman functions not out of her own subjective view of her self and her role, but out of the male desire of which she is the sole object. While Pope, to men, appeared to be exceptionally aware of the feminine, to women he seems to have missed the mark. What is clear, according to the perspective of Judith Drake, from her work, "An Essay in Defense if the Female Sex", is that Pope succeeds in undermining the integrity and rationality of the feminine mind. Instead of being a feminist champion, Pope is seen as a voice of phallic authority, using his writing to demean and lessen women in order to justify their second-class status in society. It is the purpose of this paper to examine "The Rape of the Lock" through the filter of Judith Drake's own essay and to demonstrate that Pope, indeed, is no feminist and has no real understanding of the feminine experience.
