The Concurrence of Women and Nature in Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock: A Cultural Ecofeminist Reading

Abstract

The oppression of women, as the subordinate second sex, and the exploitation of the environment have been the focus of most ecofeminist studies. In this study, the authors will discuss the patriarchal injustice suppressing women and the environment in an 18th-century literary text, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1719). Through the prism of cultural ecofeminism, this article makes an effort to illustrate the formation and also interrelatedness of two main long-held cultural dichotomies: the sexist-oriented privilege of male over female and the anthropocentric privilege of human over nonhuman in the microcosmic literary scope of the 18th-century English literature. From this regard, the feminist-oriented ecological issues will be discussed according to Val Plumwood’s distinction of cultural ecofeminism. Within this theoretical framework, we try to demonstrate how the elements of a patriarchal system shape all feminine subjectivities. The present article also shows how Nature herself, as an objection to the patriarchal culture, acts as the major supporter of women throughout The Rape of the Lock.

Keywords

• the rape of the lock
• cultural ecofeminism
• women
• nature
• patriarchy
• the 18th-century english literature