Mouk-Epic and "Novelization": Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock

의사영웅시와 "소설화"-『머리카락 강탈』을 중심으로

The mock-heroic, "the single most characteristic and individual literary form of the neoclassical era," as Brean Hammond puts it, epitomizes the process of the "novelization" of the 18th-century British culture. Bakhtin mentions that when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are "novelized"; Hammond borrows the term "novelization" from Bakhtin and uses it as a "shorthand way of referring to the cultural forces that render epic anachronistic." Indebted to Hammond's apprehension of novelization, this paper reads Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock in the context of novelization, particularly focusing on 'probability,' 'contemporaneity' and 'domesticity,' three important signatures of the novelization of the 18th-century British culture. First, Sylph as a counterpart of god in epic is presented in The Rape of the Lock just as a helpless, fictional and irrelevant thing that hardly affects the empirical world. It indicates how the mock-epic 'mocks' the classical world of 'epic' and stands closer to the world of the novel. Second, Pope's poem displays an accurate picture of the author's contemporary reality, a capital concern of the novel, such as imperialism, consumer society, commodity fetishism, or reification. Lastly, The Rape of the Lock lays out the construction of modern gender ideology, another quintessential interest of the novel, particularly with the fixed female image of a coquette. It efficiently silences and nullifies Belinda, a typical coquette, who stands as a threatening force to the ascendent domestic ideology.