Lady's Dressing Room

Swift begins his essay by describing walking down a street in Ireland. He describes how you would see, “beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms” (Swift, Para. 1). This gives the reader a mental

During the 19th century female authors were commonly degraded especially when books had a sexual nature. A now notable biography from this period is Charlotte Brontё’s “Jane Eyre”, a detailed account of the life of a young girl that blossoms into adulthood having to face the challenges and social norms of the time. In many works of literature a character intentionally deceives others to either hurt or offer protection. In “Jane Eyre” a character intentionally deceives a loved one with the intention to protect everyone including himself. This particular deception plays a large role in developing the characters of the narrative and the plot development, contributing to the work as a whole.

Fantomina is a novella describing how a young woman Fantomina goes about trying to seduce Beauplaisir.Fantomina details the events of how a young woman curiosity leads her into “faked prostitution” and ultimately falling in love with Beauplaisir.The novella chronicles how the young woman does whatever she can through disguising her identity to be always with the one she has fallen in with, Beauplaisir.The story ends when Fantomina gets pregnant and is sent to a monastery in France. Haywood’s Fantomina represents an important moment in the evolution of gender constructions in the eighteenth century.This research essay is from short story Fantomina.Eliza Haywood Fantomina perceives that gender

Fantomina, written by Eliza Haywood in 1725, elicits revolutionary topics calling into question the woman’s role in patriarchal societies and their lack of sexual freedom. Distinguished in the genre of amatory fiction, Haywood covers the transformation of the eighteenth century protagonist, from a “young lady of distinguished birth” (Haywood 632), to a series of different persona’s, including a prostitute, maid, widow, and an anonymous woman, in Fantomina. The reader is constantly aware of who the protagonist claims to be under disguise, but the original identity of the protagonist is left fairly nonexistent. Rather than remaining the mold of her original identity, the protagonist of Haywood’s novel consciously chooses to take the disguise

The 18th century was a time where there were very strong gender norms that were strictly followed. But in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, those gender norms are challenged with the creation of a cunning, and manipulative female protagonist. We are given a text that empowers the main character, Fantomina, throughout the story and shows us a woman's power to exercise their control over men. As a women of a higher class, Fantomina would have been expected to follow a certain code of conduct and uphold a good reputation. However, her ability to deceive Beauplaisir shows her power over him, as well as her skill and intelligence.

Throughout all of Jonathan Swift’s writings there are many commonalities. One in particular that stands out is the use of satire throughout both “Gulliver’s Travels”, which tells the story of a series of voyages of Lemuel Gulliver’s published in 1726, and “A Modest Proposal”, where Swift uses the idea of cannibalism to captivate his audience as well as focus on society’s problems. Throughout Swift’s life, politics and religion had a huge impact on him and more importantly, his writing. Many of the satires that Swift uses in his works have to do with politics and the changing ways of the Catholic church in the 1800’s.

Swift on the other hand is trying to expose the private world of a lady’s dressing room, something new to society at the time, and he does this through satirically comparing the public and private versions of women. Tita Chico argues in Privacy and Speculation in Eighteenth-Century Britain that there were “[…] exclusive privileges associated with the privacy of the gentleman’s closet” (p.42) which were now seen as being threatened by women’s dressing rooms. There was a feeling of fear about what women might get up to in private and Swift exposes a satirised reality in his poem which “[…] links women’s privacy with illegitimacy through grotesque images of the female body” (p. 41). Throughout Eighteenth-Century literature, the use of a dressing room represented women as “[…] theatrical and excessive” (Chico, T. Designing Women: The Dressing Room in

“The Lady’s Dressing Room” scrutinizes the act that women put on in regard to their exterior appearance, and is used both to criticize women for these exploits, and to potentially condemn men for allowing themselves to believe that such a standard of beauty could be exists without the use of cosmetics, perfumes, and the like. Swift starts the poem off with a below the belt hit to women, “Five hours (who can do it less in?)” (Swift 1). Swift attempts to begin the poem with some form of comedy in hopes to garner a laugh or two from the reader out with a laugh here. William Freedman describes Strephon in the early stage on the poem as a “rogue who probes too eagerly into the hidden scurrilities of humankind and, for the revolted pleasure of all who watch, turns them "round on every Side" (Freedman 476). Strephon sneaks into Celia’s dressing room only to find it in shambles and full of unpleasant personal effects, “And first a dirty smock appeared, / Beneath the armpits well besmeared” (Swift 11-12). As Strephon stumbles upon the smock, he begins to articulate that women are not what they give the impression of. In the following

There are many similarities found between 19th Century Victorian fairy tales and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In Jen Cadwallader’s study,” ‘Formed for labour, not for love’: Plain Jane and the Limits of Female Beauty,” she argues that Charlotte Bronte believed a woman could be formed for both love and labor. In this article, Cadwallader draws many parallels between Bronte’s Jane Eyre and fairy tales such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast. However, at the same time eradicates any resemblance of miss Jane Eyre to the fairy tale heroine. Cadwallader further discusses the emphasis that upper-class societies placed on the value of feminine beauty and how class education played a role in this molding. Making feminine beauty a societal priority

Jonathan Swift describes how these beautiful women that you see at these banquets and events and went into detail the transformation that they have to go through of how women get to that point. He explains through the eyes of Strephon the ordeal that a woman has to go through and it is not pretty. Strephon after watching and seeing first hand of what happened shocks him to his core, and his outlook of women has changed. Swift's “The Lady's Dressing Room” is a standard satire on a high class woman's dressing room and transformation. Strephon is so shocked and disturbed by what he finds during his search that he can no longer see the allure in Celia or other women.

In Jonathan Swift’s poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” the epistemology of experience is mostly endorsed. In Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s response poem to Swift, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S[wift] to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room,” the epistemology of experience is critiqued. The endorsement and critique is seen in the aesthetics of the poem (rhyme scheme, alliteration, and diction), how knowledge is presented or acquired, and how knowledge is used. Jonathan Swift’s poem endorses knowledge through experience by taking Strephon into the female space in order to discover and report his experience in the female dressing room to his audience. Aesthetically, the rhyme scheme of the poem is AABB, with some of the lines in slant rhyme.

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.

Her aunt then proceeded to examine the simplicity of her dress, adding, that she expected to see her attired with gaiety and taste; after which she condescended to shew Emily the splendour of her chateau, and to point out the particular beauty, or elegance, which she thought distinguished each of her numerous suites of apartments. (Radcliffe 113-114).

Surprise! Women have sexual desires just like men do. Roles set for women in the 18th century demonstrated the constrictions women endured. The idea of sex, status, and character to a woman depended on what men thought of them. However Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina demonstrates what occurs when the gender power roles are reversed and women are the dominant gender.