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

This article examines Alexander Pope's *The Rape of the Lock* (1712–17) through the lens of trauma theory and dark humor, focusing on how the poem's mock-epic structure and scalar distortions engage with the gendered trauma experienced by its heroine, Belinda. It argues that Pope's comedic exaggerations of emotional responses and trivial events reflect the overwhelming and distorted sense of scale imposed on women by eighteenth-century patriarchal norms, where everyday trivialities become sources of profound stress and trauma. Rather than simply mocking female hysteria or trivializing trauma, the poem's dark humor is interpreted as a coping mechanism that makes trauma's extremity more bearable, fostering resilience and creating a community of shared experience among women subjected to similar pressures. The essay further suggests that this humor, by compressing and reconfiguring trauma's scale, enables both individual endurance and collective solidarity, challenging prevailing assumptions that humor and sympathy are incompatible in representations of female trauma.