First Paper: "The Lady's Dressing Room" by Jonathan Swift

The Missing Misogyny

Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” “vividly depicts how a naïf [stet] Strephon explores his Celia's dressing room, with its evidence of slatternly filth (including an unemptied chamber-pot), and steals away disgusted” (Halsband).

Feminist authors of the time accused Swift of being a misogynist, and one—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu—even wrote some scathing verse in reply.  In her “The Dean's Provocation for Writing the Lady's Dressing Room,” Lady Mary “spins out a fiction of how he had gone to a prostitute, who demanded payment before her services; how when he proved impotent and demanded the return of his payment, the prostitute refused; whereupon he vowed that in revenge he would ruin her trade by describing her dressing room” (Halsband).  In her poem, Lady Mary “complains that it is men who encourage women to devote themselves to the frivolities of fashion,”, and that there are “economic reasons that men would like to believe that women are contemptible, from their resentment of mothers who hold jointures to their desire to be rid of wives who keep them from remarrying some ‘great Fortune’” (Campbell).

Upon closer inspection, however, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is actually pro-feminist; or rather, the poem describes a more realistic form of love than that of nineteenth century romanticism.  If lovers cannot see each other’s faults and still be in love, the speaker of the poem says with its final chiding lines, are they really in love after all?

In “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Strephon sees all of Celia’s faults, down even to the fact that “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits” (Swift line 118), and is repulsed by them.  The speaker of the poem rebukes him, saying:

If Strephon would but stop his nose,
Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her ointments, daubs, and paints, and creams,
Her washes, slops, and every clout
With which she makes so foul a rout,
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravished eyes to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung. (Swift lines 136-144)

            In Celia’s absence, Strephon finds that she is not the woman he fell in love with in all her perfection and beauty, but is just as disgusting and gross and he can be—and he cannot handle the truth.  Swift’s final nine lines seek to reprimand Strephon, and others like him, for putting women on pedestals—for setting on them images to which it is impossible to be true.

            Not only does Swift encourage taking women off of the pedestal, as well as encourage women to forego vanity, but he also, according to Laura Baudot, by Celia’s absence, “does more than complicate the assumed misogyny of the poem” (Baudot).  It is in exploring the void provided by Celia’s absence from the room Strephon discovers that Baudot finds the true target of Swift’s satire, namely: artists.

            On the surface, Strephon and Celia are lovers.  But underneath that surface, Baudot argues, Strephon is the archetypal artist, and Celia his “muse” (Baudot).  She is behind his every creation, and she works hard to keep herself there.  Philosophers in Swift’s time attempted to “reconcile the competing claims of poetry and science” (Baudot).

Instead of a misogynistic harangue, which is difficult in the absence of the woman in question (Celia), Swift’s poem instead is a question—or a series of questions: “what is the nature of poetic inspiration? What is the fate of the muse in a materialist conception of nature? Is a sense of transcendence necessary for a poem to be good, or even worthy of the name? How can poets act like poets in a disenchanted natural world” (Baudot)?

            The one answer Swift provides to all these questions lies in the same nine lines in which the speaker chides Strephon for his folly.  Instead of becoming disenchanted with the natural world, see it for what it really is, and appreciate how beauty and order can come from the chaos of the universe (Swift 136-144).

            “The Lady’s Dressing Room” by Jonathan Swift is not a misogynistic tirade against the vanity of women.  Nor is it merely a poem to poke fun at a poor, unsuspecting young lover who wanders into his lady’s dressing room unannounced one day.  The poem is, instead, the atheist’s answer to the question of “artistic enthusiasm,” or “inspiration” in an atheist’s world (Baudot).

Works Cited

Baudot, Laura. "What not to avoid in Swift's 'The Lady's Dressing Room'." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 49.3 (2009): 637+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Mar. 2012.  http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA208536196&v=2.1&u=fred14595&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w

Campbell, Jill. "Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Historical Machinery of Female Identity." History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. The University of Georgia Press, 1994. 64-85. Rpt. in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 57. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Mar. 2012.  http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420032586&v=2.1&u=fred14595&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w

Halsband, Robert. "Condemned to Petticoats: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as Feminist and Writer." The Dress of Words: Essays on Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature in Honor of Richmond P. Bond. Ed. Robert B. White, Jr. University of Kansas Libraries, 1978. 35-52. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Margaret Haerens and Christine Slovey. Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Web. 2 Mar. 2012.  http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420016783&v=2.1&u=fred14595&it=r&p=LitRG&sw=w

Swift, Jonathan. "The Lady's Dressing Room." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. By Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 2590-593. Print.

Teacher Comments and Grade: Interesting, but underdeveloped.  You use statements and some proof, but too little interpretation.  Take it deeper.  B.