The Merrie Monarch

Mock-Epic style within Pope’s prose

           Since I consider extremely interesting the way in which Pope developed his masterwork “The Rape of the Lock”, I have decided, this time, to talk about the mock-epic style in Pope’s prose.

 Mock-epic style, also called mock-heroic or heroi-comic, constitutes a form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary societies and ways of behavior. Pope was one of those moderns. The Rape of the Lock is perhaps, the most prominent example in the English language of the mock-epic gender. In this case, Pope’s intention was not to mock the style, but to mock his society, exposing its pettiness and emphasizing the ridiculousness of a society in which values had lost all proportion, and the trivial was at the same level as the gravity and solemnity, that ought to be understood as important issues.

Consciously, Pope imitated the epic opening in his lines, which may be called the invocation in the approved epic manners. His tone did gather declamatory epic ring as he commands the goddess: “Say what strange motive…?” ….. At a certain moment we began to notice that Pope is not mocking the epic form, on the contrary, he was laughing at his subject. Once we realized that we are reading a mock-epic story, it acquired a different light on the apparent solemnity and dignity of Pope’s propositions and invocation.

This extraordinary writer was also mindful of the fact that a mock-epic story should have a moral just as an epic did. Clarissa’s speech in "The Rape of the Lock” opened out the moral of the poem about the fashionable society. The speech could be taken as an attempt to redefine for contemporary women a concept of honor, which applied to male epic heroes. In the world of belles, honor became courage to face decay with humour and duty, to use the power of beauty well. In this way, The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, the pieces are wrought together with an ingenuity and magnificence that makes the poem surprising and delightful. Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and hazardous but with a high level of common sense and moral implications. That is why, it has become one of the most famous English-language poems of all times .