Q.Discuss The Rape of the Lock as a Mock Heroic Poem
Ans:The form or mould in which the satire, The Rape of the Lock, has been cast is the 'mock-heroic' or 'mock-epic'. It is satirical in tone and spirit but in form it is an epic, conforming to all the conventional features of the true-epic. But modern satire can have an epical framework only by a burlesque or a travesty of a true epic i.e., by imitating the epic in a lighter vein and making an inexhaustible source of fun. There are three types of literary mockery - burlesque, parody, mock-heroic. "Burlesque mocks and deflates a given literary form whatever that may be by degrading it; thus Dido is made to speak like a fishwife. Parody mocks it by imitating very closely its formal properties and applying them to incongruous or unlikely subject-matter. Mock-heroic is a special form of parody, parody of an epic. The fishwife or some equally unlikely character is made to speak like Dido. These methods are by no means mutually exclusive and can exist side by side in the same poem as they do in The Rape of the Lock" (Trott).
Now parody and burlesque were nothing new in the eithteenth century. They were the characteristic products of the age of reason. As Prof. Cazamian has pointed out : "The classical age is the golden age of parody. As often happens in this epoch, the aspiration after a big subject, not being sustained by a strong creative mood stops half way at the compromise of a mock-heroic intention. The rational attitude of the writer tends to make him critical and of a modern turn of mind, while on the other hand, his doctrinal principles force upon him the imitation of the ancient models, the gravity of an aesthetic cult; this forced respect, this obsession of the past, imply a constraint and the spirit of the time finds a subterfuge in imitating antiquity in a vein of mockery. In other words, the mock-heroic is the product of the classical ideal, the imitation of the classical writers, wedded to the modern spirit of criticism of the contemporary social life and values." It is not only the epic, but almost recognised literary forms-tragay, pastoral, memoirs, travels etc, that were represented in a ludicrous light by being applied to a subject-matter which was unworthy of them. "To take some of the more salient examples, Fielding's Tragedy of Tom Thumb and Gay's Beggar's Opera were burlesques of dramatic forms. Gay's Shepherd's Week was a sort of mock pastoral....Gulliver is a burlesque of the methods of writers of Travels (Rylands)."
The calssical epics had enjoyed an immense vogue and prestige in the period from 1520-1700. These were regarded as the highest achievements of human wit and every poet worth the name was ambitious of writing epics. Dryden in his preface to the translation of Virgil writes: "A heroic poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform. The design of it is to form the mind of heroic virtue by example; "tis conveyed in verse, that it might delight while it instructs. The action always one, entire and great....all things must be grave, majestical and sublime". The classical epics had fulfilled all these characteristics. But should the modern writers imitate the ancients blindly in their theme and technique and take them as their models? The neo-classical criticism posed the question, as we find Bishop Start writing in his History of the Royal Society on the subject says: "The Wit of the Fables and Religions of the Ancient World is well nigh consumed; ....it is high time to dismiss them; especially seeing, they have this peculiar imperfection, that they were only Fictions at first: whereas Truth is never so well expressed or amplified as by those ornaments which are true and real in themselves". Thus classical myths and metaphors came to be regarded with grave suspicion as untrue. Milton solved the problem by turning to the Bible, the truth of which could never be questioned, for the materials of his Paradise Lost. Thus the Christian subject supplanted the pagan. But the lure of the epics of Homer and Virgil was still irresistible, as the translations of the works in English testify.
"It was this situation, produced by the impact of the new philosophy on epic that accelerated the development of the mock epic. For here the reader found and could enjoy all the familiar trappings of the poems of antiquity that he knew and venerated without being uneasy about the fabled subject-matter, since the subject-matter of the mock-epic did not claim to deal with 'truth' but with self-confessed triviality. Moreover, there was a way in which the mock epic offered truth of a kind which the age could accept. This was the 'truth' of satirical social commentary which the man of wit and parts never doubted was unworthy of his attention."
When Pope came to write his mock-epic in 1711 there were before him three specimens of such kind - Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1682), the French poet Boileau's Lutrin (1674), an English version of which appeared in 1708, and The Dispensary (1699) by Samuel Garth. The Rape of the Lock is "the perfection and apothesis of the mock-heroic".. (Adapted mainly from Trott and Axford's preface to The Rape of the Lock in Macmillan's English classics series).
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