Lock and Key: Hermeneutics, Symbols and Signifying in Pope's The Rape of the Lock

The Rape of the Lock provides a fascinating test case for questions of how poetry can reflect, rehearse, and subject to ingenious critique the radical edges of public conversation about the ‘ethics of exposure’, which remain central to contemporary experience. A clear aim is to explain a number of specific ways in which the poem constructs and takes control over its own specialized territory of formal counterparts to dilemmas of interpretation. The poem is read alongside its contemporary critics and its satirical interpretation in A Key to the Lock, as a text highly sensitive to and reflective of contemporary ethics of privacy and secrecy.