Pope, Swift, and Aristocratic Women Essay

The Courtier, originally written as a “courtesy book”, can now be considered to provide significant insight into the norms and practices associated with courtship and gender during the Renaissance era. The book’s third volume is a particularly insightful window into 16th century romantic ideals. Throughout Book Three, Baldassare Castiglione builds an elaborate perspective on what makes the perfect court lady, what sexual and social behavior is acceptable, and how an ideal couple (both courtier and court lady) should function.

In 17th century Euro-America Puritan society believed that men played a patriarchal role upon women, and that this role was instituted by God and nature. The seniority of men over women lay within both the household and the public sphere. The household, immediate family living in the same dwelling was subject to the male as head figure of the house. The public sphere also known as the social life within the Puritan community consisted of two echelons. These echelons consisted of formal and informal public. The formal public consisted of woman and indentured servants. Women were to stay within the informal public and stay in the shadows of the men. The government held large ties with the church in the 17th century. Though women were

After marriage, the husband was considered lord and master of the family. But not all the women were meek and submissive. By the 1700's, the woman’s status had rapidly improved in colonial America. A wife and child made as much as a man did. Although women did not have equality with men, their status greatly improved from their status in Europe. A woman’s station in life was determined by the position of their husbands or fathers. The women of the poorest families, compiled to work in the fields, stood at the bottom of the social ladder. One of the surest signs of the accomplishments a family had made, was the exemption of their women from the fields. Before 1740, girls were trained in household crafts and the practical arts of family management. But afterwards they began to study subjects that required reading and studying such subjects as grammer and arithmetic. The women of the upper classes occupied themselves mainly with planning the work of the home and with supervising the domestic servants. Along with these tasks the women also baked, nursed, and sewed. But there were many social restrictions placed on the women of that time. One such restriction was that a wife, in absence of her husband, was not allowed to lodge men even if they were close relatives. For

Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary essay “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” acts as a direct, scathing response to Edmund Burke’s opinionated piece regarding the French Revolution, “Reflections on the Revolution in France”. This essay will examine the use of satire as a mode in the opening sections of Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication”, as well as comparing her lexical choices to those of her addressee, Edmund Burke. The Oxford English Dictionary states that “satire” is “… [A] work of art which uses humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize prevailing immorality or foolishness, esp. [sic] as a form of social or political commentary.” Humour is too exaggerated to relate to Wollstonecraft’s work, but ridicule as a

Marie de France lived in a time when social graces were paramount to a good reputation, lordships and to securing good marriages. A woman was considered less valuable if she lost her virginity; a wife was subjected to her feudal lord, father, brother or son after her husband’s death. According to Angela Sandison’s article “The Role of Women in the Middle Ages”, this was because in the Middle Ages the Church and the aristocracy controlled public opinion and the legal system. These authorities of the times believed a woman’s place was in a submissive role to a man. In The Lay of the Nightingale, we will see how this social and religious hierarchy will impact the behaviors of the three people involved.

The attitudes portrayed in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” towards mankind is strikingly similar. Both acknowledge the view that man has dominion over the earth, as created and instituted by God. However, the difference is seen in their approaches to this subject. Pope primarily focuses on man’s pride and place in society, whereas Swift discusses how man deals with certain situations reasonably or unreasonably. Pope and Swift present situations that man has to face in conjunction with illogical conclusions. Besides exhibiting illogical conclusions, they also show the selfish, prideful, rebellious, jealous, and the ungrateful characteristics of man.

Thus, the intent of Pope is not to be invective or bitter but rather to give insight to the comical nature of the event, to bring to light that the universe does not move to the cutting of one's hair and that to have such a mistaken belief is foolhardy. This mockery and satire of aristocratic society is revealed by Pope throughout the poem: Belinda is depicted as a heroine goddess whose beauty causes "The tortoise here and elephant unite, / Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white" (English,1113). Furthermore,her trinkets are depicted as being spoils and ornaments of war, as one would use to prepare for battle: "files of pins extend their shining rows, / Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, [and] billet-doux" (English,1113). This is comical in that such commoneveryday items suddenly have grave importance to the preservation and transformation of Belinda's beauty. They bring her from the mundane to God-like. Yet, the irony exists that these are just everyday items. The tortoises and elephants did not give

Use of Satire in Canterbury Tales, Pride and Prejudice and The Rape of the Lock

Women who did not have a husband were considered-- According to A Widening Sphere-- previously cited, “ [a] ‘distressed gentlewomen,’ judged by her society to have ‘failed in business’ and forced to demean herself by seeking employment for which she had little to no training.” Victorian society taught women to believe that they were failures unless they had a husband. However, there was an epiphany that Victorian society had during that era, that women could have a successful career on their own. Education was not offered to women during the first half of the 19th century.

The poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” written by Jonathan Swift is a satire. Its not attacking women, but mockery of the lover’s vision and imagination, that a woman is a goddess, and not a normal human being in the society. Swift describes how strephon has felled in the society’s trap, where so many men unknowingly fall into. That’s the problem with our society, its nature vs nurture, influenced by this life experiences and environment. Swift uses Hyperbole and Bluraque, for his satire.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women, had almost no rights in society. They were not permitted to own or inherit property, their education was severely limited, there was a period in which they were not permitted to divorce their husband, and when they were given this right, they were not permitted to retain guardianship over their children. Since women were not allowed to have their own property it was essential that they married men who were able to provide for them the status that they had enjoyed in their father’s home. Preferably the status they gained in marriage was greater than what they had before. The hope was that the husband would help support the woman’s mother when her father passed away. For women who did not find husbands there were limited options left to them. In

(A Discussion of Geoffrey Chaucer’s use of Satire in Canterbury Tales Directed Towards Church Hypocrisy, Class Nobility, and the Patriarchy)

During the restoration in the eighteenth century, wit and reason came to the forefront of literary works. Keen intellect and sharp observation exposed moral corruption of the neoclassic British society through the use of satiric literature. Although they placed importance on the ideals of order, knowledge, and rational, there was an underlying obsession with maintaining a façade of moral and political supremacy. British satirists, such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, aimed to expose their society’s shortcomings, and to ridicule centuries of conditioned thought. Although Pope and Swift used different mediums to present their satire, they both focused on the ludicrous aspects of British nobility, and found ways to point out their morally corrupt standards of living.

It is also necessary to discuss the fact that Pope seems to realize that the extreme vanity is caused by his own gender. If Belinda's preparations are not for her male acquaintances, then why? Speaking through Clarissa, Pope allows the reader to take a step away from satire with a taste of sensibility, "How vain are the Glories, all our Pains, / Unless good sense preserve what beauty gains…." (N. 1) Here the author seems to be pushing for a lack of shallowness in the opposite sex.