I put links to Wednesday's reading in the right-hand sidebar, in case you didn't get the Montagu handout or haven't bought the C18 Poetry anthology yet.
The question for you to consider: What is Swift's problem? Do you think Montagu's diagnosis of the situation is correct, or are there other ways to understand the emotions and ideas at play in "The Lady's Dressing Room"?
The updated question, following Wednesday's excellent discussion (where we never got to Montagu's poem): Reflect here on how Montagu interprets Swift's poem. To what extent is she reading "A Lady's Dressing Room" accurately? To what extent does she miss the point? What about Swift's poem seems to bother her most? What evidence do you find to support the suggestion that Montagu's response is a "friendly jest"? Your answer does not need to answer all these questions! But do offer your thoughts on the nature (tone, point, biographical subtext, gender politics) of Montagu's role in this poetic interaction--and be sure to support your claims with evidence drawn from the poem.
Deadline:
5 comments:
It is possible that Swift is a scorned John but the last four lines do not seem to uphold that assumption very well. Swift ends the poem in amazement and awe that a woman can transform herself like "Tulips rais'd from dung." I personally think that Swift is simply using his satire to comment on all the pains that women go through to make themselves look better for others, men in particular. Swift's satire has a tendency of being very descriptive, think of "A Modest Proposal,"and this poem is extremely descriptive, even to the point of revolting. I believe that Swift is just commenting on a portion of everyday life that he possibly had never experienced before. Is it possible, since he was a friend of Lady Mary Montagu, that she was how Swift was exposed to the interior of a lady's dressing room?
The first two lines of Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” show me that his text has a sarcastic tone. He describes his protagonist, Celia, as “haughty” and comments on her “Five Hours, (and who can do it less in?) . . . spent in dressing”. He is clearly poking fun at the fact that it takes this woman such an outrageous amount of time to get ready. The nauseating details that follow are employed to enlighten the (probably male) reading audience to a ‘secret world’ that is a lady’s dressing room. Swift suggests that, even though Celia may look beautiful, the process by which this came to be is completely foul.
However, the poet relates her to Venus / Aphrodite towards the end of the poem, musing “Should I the Queen of Love refuse, / Because she rose from stinking ooze?” At this point, the poem takes a turn back to the more jocular mood with which it began, as Swift implies that he is more accepting of Celia and women with similar daily routines than is his character, Strephon, whose “foul Imagination links / Each Dame he sees with all her Stinks.”
In reading “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and Montagu’s response to it, I feel that, while Swift lightly mocks women, Montagu sends a bit of ridicule back in his direction. Noting the light-hearted temper of both poems, I see Montagu’s response to be more of a friendly jest than a diagnosis of Swift’s motives.
It seems that Swift's satire knows no bounds. In this poem, the fun is poked toward every angle: pastoral "mythology," the social conventions of eighteenth-century aristocracy, and as Ezra so insightfully put it in class, the miscalculated and unjustified idealization of the human female.
While I cannot argue that the poem is backed with a misogynistic glare, I must admit that the poet does indeed make enough room in the text to allow for an anti-misogynistic reading through his depiction of an utterly clueless Strephon. This device, the use of a character so dumb as to assume a woman's "shit don't stink," gives me the impression that the poet is in fact not attacking women, but the conventions of gender itself, conventions which, in some ways, still exist today (how many millions are made each year in the perfume/cologne industry?).
In some ways, I think Montagu is right on the money. She describes the speaker as an older male who in trying to bed this woman is insulted and sent back. He feels abused and out of revenge, Montagu says he writes this poem. I don’t think that the speaker of “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Strephon, tried to sleep with the mistress but I do think that he has a problem with her and he wants to defame her as much as possible. If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t use phrases like “that careless Wench!” in line 71. Being a servant of the house I think Strephon’s problem is that he is tired of cleaning after her and taking care of all her needs. By surveying her room he is trying to prove that his mistress is a dirty woman that doesn’t deserve to have service clean up after her. His exaggerations show that he is utterly distressed by her room but they also show a hidden dislike for his mistress. If he indeed was a servant who only out of curiosity walked into his mistress’s room, he probably wouldn’t have written in such detail about the various tools he finds in her room. No, this is the work of someone who had the intentions of unleashing the secrets that is a woman. In the line, “Virtues we must not let pass of Celia’s magnifying glass..” Strephon is only assuming that she uses the magnifying glass to take a close look at her face and describes her face as having worms coming out of it. That image is so disgusting that how else would we, the readers, picture Lady Celia? It gives us no choice but to think of her as a creature of the wild rather than the head-of-the-household mistress she is. This is exactly what the speaker of the poem wants, which is why his descriptions cannot fully be trusted—a statement that is clear in Montagu’s poem. Montagu wants to give us the background of the story because in Swift’s poem, there is no chance for us to understand the woman’s perspective. I think she is also saying that a woman’s bedroom is no place for a strange man to poke about. A man is out of his element which is maybe why the speaker of her poem can’t please the woman he is trying to pursue. He blames her “damned close stool so near [his] nose” and that is where the fascination that it is the woman’s fault and not his own begins.
Excellent responses! Everyone's doing a great job picking up on the emotions circulating behind this exchange of verse. Let's be precise on the details though: as you reflect on the questions posted in the blog, consider why, in Montagu's poem, Swift/"The Doctor"/"the priest" gets so "Provoked"?
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