Analysis Of Jonathan Swift 's ' The Lady 's Dressing Room '

In Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal", he discusses the problem with the number of poor children in the streets whose families are too poor to support them. Swift comes up with a plan to solve this problem that will hopefully help the number of poor children. The plan is to eat the children because he believes that they are going to be an excellent source of food for anybody. The satirical essay mocks how the rich treat the poor as if they are poor animals. Throughout the essay, Swift uses the rhetorical appeals, ethos, pathos and logos to convince the audience to agree with his solution.

Presenting literature to the public that is meant to be a commentary on social or political issues, masked under the guise of entertaining and fictional, is a tool implemented by authors and activists for centuries. While not all satire is as overt as Jonathan Swift’s suggestion that we eat the babies, it does not diminish the eyebrow raising suggestions that are conveyed once the meaning has been discovered. In Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina, the established expectations of the female role within society are brought into question then directly rejected. These expectations establish that women should be deferential to men, morally unblemished, and virtuous at all times. Men, however, are not held to these expectations in the same way. The masculine roles assumed by Isabella and Fantomina demonstrate a private rebellion against the established patriarchal society as it warns against the under-estimation of women and proves that women exist independently.

One may contend that Sexton rejects the appalling degradation of women as being witches, foul-fiends and tempting creatures in literature, too. She admits that men’s “dead body did not feel the spade and the sewer as [her] live body felt the fire” (92). Shakespeare depicts Joan, in Henry VI, as “a ‘troll,’ ‘witch,’ ‘strumpet,’ ‘foul fiend of France’ (qtd. in Sarawsat 90). Likewise, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales represents the ‘wife of Bath Tale’ as bawdy. The protagonist Alison “still submits to the rule of patriarchal world”, she suffers because she is oppressed to the bone. She “struggles for respect in her own household”. That is why; she needs an inner upheaval to dispel any sense of dejection. She is

Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is an archetype exploring the duality of the separation of public and private and the role each played within the society and culture of the time. The poem describes the character of Strephon exploring a lady’s dressing room and exhibits how literature has the ability to take private matters into the public sphere, in this case, ones that are applied directly to the female sex. The question is, whether or not Swift intended to target women in his satire for entertainment, or if he was displaying misogynistic beliefs. According to Swift, women are purely artificial, they appear to be creatures of beauty, but underneath, exhibit vile habits and act opposite of what they appear to be in society. By portraying a man going through a woman’s dressing room, Swift is able to paint a repulsive picture of the fairer sex. The poem concludes with Strephon finding Celia’s bathroom, “And bless his ravisht Sight to see/Such Order from Confusion Sprung/Such gaudy Tulips rais’d from Dung” (141-143). Although this poem has been interpreted as one that explores the often awkward happenings of private relations between men and women, this satire can also be seen as an unfairly focused, misogynistic viewpoint on the female sex. Another example of Swift’s derogatory themed poetry is “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed”. Both are examples of scatology poems, or verses meant to gross the reader out. Another similarity between these two poems would be

While Dorothy Mermin provides a plethora of examples through the inclusion of verse and detailed analysis of poetic texts, she does not provide a solution for the gendering of poetry that is causing both male and female poets to suffer. Her article focuses on detailing the problems arguing that women struggle to be more than just the object and men “[struggle] against the difficulty of a situation in which poetic structures [are] still framed for male subjects but poetry’s qualities were those associated with women.” (165) Her work, much like Victorian gender ideals, largely ignores the suffering of women in favour of the suffering of others (in this case, men). This perhaps stems from the Victorian notion that one must talk about another’s suffering (men’s) to discuss the point at hand (women’s suffering).

Swift’s poems celebrate her last birthdays because it was then, not earlier, that she needed to be told that her life was not lived in vain; neither were her youth and beauty wasted nor were her age and ailments pointless, for all of her qualities nourished her immortality through text. Indeed, it seems that, as Stella ages, she grows steadily in Swift’s valued intellectual virtues. Ultimately, she redeems Swift’s perceived mysgonistic writings on other women because she proves that his masochism is not towards women, but towards the human race in general. Stella deviates from the common perceptions of women as stipulated by the male sphere. Resultantly, she enables Swift’s denouncement of the shortcomings of the masculine imperatives that obliterate and reduce women to nothing more than a superficial representation of the “fairer

In Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde, Wilde reveals the changing nature of the late 19th century Victorian society through the characters values of gender roles, eliteness, and marriage. Through these values, Wilde exhibits gender inequality, the flaws of the socioeconomic classes, and the foolishness of marriage during Victorian times. Wilde uses humor with the Duchess of Berwick’s values to uncover the gender inequality during Victorian times. The Duchess of Berwick states, “Our husbands would really forget our existence if we didn’t nag at them from time to time” (42-43). By having the Duchess of Berwick value the gender role of a woman being an accessory to their husband, Wilde points out the obvious gender inequality of this situation.

Swift’s tone is mocking when he calls Corinna a “beautiful, young nymph”, a “Goddess”, going to her “bow’r, when she is in fact an aging prostitute in a rat and lice infested room. His ridicule, however, seems to be aimed at men who elevate women’s beauty to the impossible standard of Goddesses. By making Corinna as grotesque as possible and reducing her looks to the most base and horrible, it punctures the idea of unearthly female beauty. Corinna plucks out her glass eye, removes her teeth and tends her oozing sores, it’s a litany of horrors designed to evoke disgust and demonstrates that the female body is far from divine, it is human and decaying.

Humans, by a way of life, are inherently disgusting creatures. Normal bodily functions are often considered impolite and gross. Beauty is a way of life as well, which can, at times, be a little unpolished. In “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” the male character and, at protagonist at first glance, Strephon, seems to go on a vile adventure because of his curiosity and blinding adoration for his lover, Celia. His blinding adoration became glaring disgust as his adventure through Celia’s dressing room continued. Though at first the poem seemed misogynistic, Swift did not criticize just women, but people in general. He mocked women and their seemingly revolting task of beautification, as well as men for their curiosity and false, implausible standards for women and beauty.

Swift illustrates lawyers as being stupid, hated, and lairs. His master is in disbelief that anyone with reason could have such qualities. Swift depicts people of authority as being corrupted, evil, and foolish. I believe these passages serve to mock the way Swift's society is governed.

The author Joseph Conrad once remarked, "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men." In analyzing Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire's Candide, it is intriguing and revealing how these male authors deal with women. Through understanding how these seminal works portray women one can gain the literary criticism tools to examine similar social issues in other texts.

People often use humor to mask serious topics, this can be seen in many works of satire such as The Female Tatler. Through the style and tone used by Rosella in passage fifty-five, the reader is able to see how women are treated in this time and the ways the author appeals to the reader to help them fix the problems in society. By using an informal style for passage fifty-five it can be seen that the book as a whole is written to educate all levels of society and is therefore, optimistic. In passage one, the author who goes by “Female Tatler”, says that the purpose of the passages is “not to reflect upon any person whatsoever, but gently to correct the vices and vanities which some...wilfully commit” (Tatler 2). The tone of The Female Tatler is created through style and diction to show the reader the importance of issues at this time in a lighthearted and urgent way. Rosella, uses this urgent yet lighthearted tone to express the problem of men’s control over woman and woman’s obligation to take their power back.

It is Swifts depiction of women that makes his work so unique from other authors. His associations with women has evoked much speculation amid his readers since the beginning of his writing career. Swift's view of woman was prejudiced by the society that he lived in and the time that he lived through. Swifts representation of women, as seen through his work, is severely complex with underlying meanings hidden throughout many of his stories. Many critics believe that Swift considered women inferior to men, highlighting his sexist nature. It is alleged that this was due to his lack of relationships with women himself as there is very little evidence to suggest that he had much interest in women. We even witness Swifts negative outlook on women and sexual relations, particularly when discussing marital behaviour as he looks at the sexual part with repugnance in opposition to its

The author I decided to write about is Jonathan Swift for he had a keen sense for effective sarcasm. As Jonathan Swift said “The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.” Though he was known in different ways, he was mostly popularized through his gift in writing, particularly his satire, or his use of humor and irony, essays. Through out swift life, there has been plenty of events where I believe shape the way he was, hence his writing style, some might even say it led to the point of insanity.

​Jonathan Swift was a writer known for his use of satire: the application of humor, irony, exaggeration, and ridicule to expose and criticize. At a glance, the novel seems to be a travel log of Lemuel Gulliver’s adventures, but is primarily a work of satire. Through Gulliver’s Travels, Swift strives to satirize the eighteenth century humanity. Swift was titled a misanthrope, a hater of humanity, his misanthropy rose from his disappointment in mankind. Swift utilizes Gulliver in satirizing the population, which he was disappointed with, in each voyage of the novel. The satire used in Gulliver’s Travels is used to reveal how Swift regarded mankind, as societies who did not exist to their utmost potential to be great but were instead exhibiting the frills of greatness.