The grotesque often incorporates a clash between content and form. Pope shapes his poem in an ordered way based on a classical model, filling its content with madness and disorder. Additionally, the grotesque often presents a world that disintegrates or terminates with automatons rather than humans behaving in an absurd way. In the Dunciad women’s bodies resemble mechanized puppets. They are made prizes of urinating competitions or drop to pools of excrement not being aware of the oddity of their behaviour. Lack of usual human reactions makes them seem alienated and inhuman. Through making the Dunciad in this sense grotesque, Pope ridicules the individual taste of women writers, focusing on their breaching of natural organization and classical taste in literature. Not only is Pope frightened by Grub Street productivity, but he perceives this world as frightening and presents it as grotesque in the Dunciad.

     Moreover, Mikhail Bakhtin presents his idea of the grotesque body, describing senile hags in the following way: “This is a typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. . . . There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed.”23 Thus, the female grotesque presents the body as a process. Furthermore, theoreticians model the grotesque alining it with “the grotto-esque, or cave, [proceeding] quite swiftly to the further identification of the grotto with the womb, and with woman-as-mother.”24 

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In the Dunciad improper female behaviour is criticized through Dulness’ rejection of social and sexual passivity. The grotesque body of the mother transgresses its limitations by producing dunces begotten from the ever-active womb and making this procreation an unfinished process. In the world where she rules boundaries are crossed since opposite genres, different moments, and the fluid and stable – ocean and land – are joined:

She sees a Mob of Metaphors advance,
Pleas’d with the madness of the mazy dance:
How Tragedy and Comedy embrace;
How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race;
How Time himself stands still at her command,
Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land.26

Nothing is stable and finished. Dulness’ body crosses all boundaries and becomes universal in this sense. Her power is as endless as is her procreation. In this respect she is similar to Pope. His writings become part of an endless polemic reaching far beyond the eighteenth century.