“Whatever is, is right”: Celebrating Colonialism in The Rape of the Lock

This paper explores The Rape of the Lock as an ideological artefact that both reflects and reinforces the mercantile imperialism of the 18th century. By positing Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem within the context of the wider socio-economic and imperialist trends of the Enlightenment, the paper highlights the role of literature in shaping public discourse on trade, morality, consumption, and empire. The poem’s extravagant catalogue of imported commodities, ranging from Arabian perfumes to Indian jewels, foregrounds the superficial, consumerist culture that accompanied Britain’s imperial expansion. The Rape of the Lock simultaneously engages in satirizing the trivialities of patrician life and normalizing the material conditions of Britain’s developing commercial empire. The talismanic objects on Belinda’s dressing table represent the commodification of both material wealth and human relations. By using Edward Said’s theory of ‘contrapuntal reading,’ the study seeks to unravel the unacknowledged labour and exploitation underpinning these luxuries. Furthermore, Pope’s ambivalent position is examined, wherein he both criticizes and implicitly endorses the amoral ethics of an emergent capitalist society. This contradiction and duality in Pope extend to the woman question as well, since he metaphorically aligns the objectification of women with the imperialist logic of conquest and possession. By focusing on the uncomfortable nexus between gender, empire, and imperialism, a critical revisiting of Pope’s poem allows for a more complex and nuanced understanding of the ideological currents that fashioned the eighteenth century. The interplay of satire and jubilation, criticism and complicity, marks it as a text deeply entangled in the economic and political turmoil of its time. Ultimately, the paper argues that The Rape of the Lock embodies the contradictions of its age — celebrating commercial expansion while masking the structures of oppression that sustained it, thereby offering a complex lens through which to examine the intersections of literature, economics, and empire in the long 18th century.