User:LyleHoward/sandbox
"The Lady's Dressing Room" is a poem written by Jonathan Swift first published in 1732. In the poem, Strephon sneaks into his sweetheart Celia's dressing room while she is away only to become disillusioned at how filthy and smelly it is. Swift uses this poem to satirize both women's vain attempts to match an ideal image and men's expectation that the illusion be real. For the grotesque treatment of bodily functions in this poem and in other works, Swift was diagnosed as suffering from neurosis[1] [2] and the poem is considered an exemplar of Swift's "excremental vision".[3]
Summary
[edit]Jonathan Swift, most famous nowadays for his Gulliver's Travels, was a satirist to the core: "Swift's command of satiric effect was a thing unmatched in his own day".[4] He mocked, vexed, and made comical political commentary.
This poem chronicles the misadventure of Strephon as he explores the vacant dressing room of the woman he loves. Beginning with an ideal image of his sweetheart, he looks through the contents of her room, but encounters only objects that repulse him. He finds sweaty smocks, dirt-filled combs, greasy facecloths, grimy towels, snot-encrusted handkerchiefs, jars of spit, cosmetics derived from distilled puppies,[5] pimple medication, stockings smelling of dirty toes and a mucky, rancid clothes chest. Coming upon her chamber pot, he is struck with the realization that Celia (the name "Celia" means "heavenly") is not a "goddess", but as disgustingly human as he is, as expressed in the poem's most famous lines:
Thus finishing his grand survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits![6]
After his inventory of Celia's dressing room, Stephon can never look at women the same way again: "His foul Imagination links / Each Dame he sees with all her Stinks".
Swift ends the poem by suggesting that if young men only ignore the stench and accept the painted illusion, they can enjoy the "charms of womanhood".
Analysis
[edit]This poem is full of satire. In the hyperbolic first lines, Swift comments on the length of time it takes women to prepare themselves: "Five hours (and who can do it less in?) / By haughty Celia spent in dressing;"
He then goes on in greater detail about the repulsive things he sees and finds:
"As from within Pandora's box, / When Epimetheus oped the locks, / A sudden universal crew / Of humane evils upward flew, / He still was comforted to find / That hope at last remained behind. // So Strephon, lifting up the lid / To view what in the chest was hid, / The vapours flew from out the vent. / But Strephon cautious never meant / The bottom of the pan to grope, / And foul his hands in search of hope." // This is a satirical comment on a woman's box of belongings and beauty supplies. It symbolized evil and human flaws. We picture Strephon going through the box, as we watch laughing at him for not being able to find anything good inside.
This poem is sometimes seen as an attack on women. In response to this poem, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote "The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing Room". She argues that Swift wrote "The Lady's Dressing Room" after experiencing sexual disappointment with a prostitute. This poem has also been seen as a critique of the lengths to which women go in order to meet the ideal image of the female body and men's expectation that the illusion be real. In addition, Swift bitterly satirizes and derides in disgusting detail the human body and its functions, which he viewed as repulsive.
Swift employs Juvenalian satire in this poem. Swift's time was a period in which pretense and superficiality were the norm.[citation needed] He was often referred to as misanthropic, and this work, "The Lady's Dressing Room", led him to be "accused of misogyny".[7] Swift's offensive, and improper content, as well as the harsh manner in which he presented it, led him to have a less than favorable reputation amongst his compatriots, especially women.[8]
- ^ Karpman, Ben (1942). "Neurotic traits of Jonathan Swift; a minor contribution to the problem of psychosexual infantalism and coprophilia". The Psychoanalytic Review. 29: 132.
- ^ Ferenczi, Sándor (1955). Final contributions to the problems and methods of psycho-analysis. New York: Basic Books.
- ^ Murry, John Middleton (1955). Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
- ^ Quintana, Ricardo (1958). Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings by Jonathan Swift. New York: Random House. p. xiii.
- ^ Smith, Lisa (2018-10-23). "The Puppy Water and Other Early Modern Canine Recipes". The Recipes Project. Retrieved 2023-06-14.
- ^ This line appears also as the final line in Swift's poem "Cassinus and Peter: A Tragical Elegy" (1731).
- ^ Prescott, Anne Lake; et al., eds. (2012). "Jonathan Swift". The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Volume 3: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (2nd ed.). Broadview Press. p. 374. ISBN 9781770483484.
- ^ Rogers, Katherine (Autumn 1959). "'My Female Friends': The Misogyny of Jonathan Swift". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 1 (3): 366–379.