Poor Humor Will Prevail: Coping with the Cruel Comedy of The Rape of the Lock

Abstract: What does it mean for The Rape of the Lock to make a joke out of a woman's traumatic encounter with assault, and what does it mean for one to laugh at such a joke? The question as to whether The Rape of the Lock mockingly trivializes Belinda's painful experiences is often conflated with another question as to whether the poem portrays Belinda sympathetically or not. The assumption therein is that a sincerely sympathetic representation of trauma would represent it at the scale appropriate to it. But this view neglects how trauma is trauma precisely for having no scale appropriate to it, being extreme beyond scale and disruptive of one's sense of scale. Furthermore, it overlooks one mode of representation in which the tragic is regularly trivialized without it being necessarily unsympathetic: that of dark humor, particularly when exercised as a strategy for enduring trauma. That sympathy for Belinda's trauma is possible not in spite of but because of the humor in The Rape of the Lock , then, is the main contention of this essay. Where its dark humor involves perversions of scale of the tragic and trivial, the poem's structure becomes analogous to how trauma is constituted by similar scalar perversions, how its effects thereafter are to deprive the traumatized mind of any sense of scale, and how the mental fortitude that must be called upon to endure all this must then be itself extreme beyond scale. Drawing on psychological studies and critical theories on trauma, stress, and humor, this essay argues that Pope's jocular confounding of scales of the tragic and the trivial in The Rape of the Lock enacts a strategy of survival and resilience for women forced to endure the stressful and traumatizing extremes of scale inherent to female existence under eighteenth-century patriarchal norms.