‘Angels in Machines’: Tracing the Proto-Posthuman in Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ Cover Image

‘Angels in Machines’: Tracing the Proto-Posthuman in Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’
‘Angels in Machines’: Tracing the Proto-Posthuman in Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’

Author(s): James Cochran
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti
Keywords: Alexander Pope; ‘The Rape of the Lock’; Donna Haraway; posthumanism; cyborgs; 18th-century British Literature; poetry; transgression' gender binaries; feminist theory

Summary/Abstract: While a number of scholars have begun to consider and analyse the relation between posthumanist thought and the eighteenth century, few have attempted to read the work of Alexander Pope through a posthumanist lens. This article calls attention to this critical gap and examines a variety of posthuman sites and figures in ‘The Rape of the Lock’. Using posthumanist, cyborg, and monster theories, it looks at ways in which this poem negotiates and challenges the traditional binaries of male and female, human and animal, human and object. The article does not attempt to locate the contemporary cyborg in the eighteenth-century, but recognizes the value of using the notion of the cyborg and other posthumanist paradigms to re-approach and reread eighteenth-century texts. Such a reading provides a framework from which to analyse the transgressive elements of Pope’s text and draws attention to the ways in which this poem disrupts the very dichotomies that it seems to put forward.

  • Issue Year: VI/2016
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 48-59
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: English