The Lady’s Dressing

Room

A Little Context• This comic satire is one of Swift’s most immediately likeable

poems, with its rollicking diction full of cleverly juxtaposed hard consonants, and probably his most viscerally affecting as well. (It begs to be read aloud)

• And I shall do just that...

• In an inversion of John Donne’s elegy “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in which the lover catalogues each item of the beloved’s clothing and the beautiful body part it reveals when he orders her to take it off, Swift’s poem catalogues each item of clothing or instrument of beautification and the bodily waste it reveals.

An excerpt from “To His Mistress Going to Bed”:

Off with that girdle, like heaven’s Zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you, that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals.

“The Lady’s” Satire• There’s no doubt that “The Lady’s Dressing

Room” is satirical in nature.

• The difficult question is: “Exactly what or whom is it satirizing?”– Context of the poem– Why is Strephon in the room?– Celia’s descriptions/routines vs. Strephon’s

reactions– Who does the speaker say is at fault? (71-74)– How are both Celia and Strephon “tainted”?

• Misanthropy: (n) a hatred or distrust of humankind

• In a letter sent to Alexander Pope in 1725, Swift writes, “I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth.”

Misanthropy and Misogyny• Misogyny: (n) a hatred of women

• The society of women does not escape Swift’s censure; women are nearly universally depicted as vain and deceptive, repulsively filthy, and/or dangerously naïve

A Battle of the Sexes: A Literary Dialogue

• Much as Donne’s poem prompted a response from Swift, so too did Swift’s poem prompt a reaction from Restoration poetess Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her satire “The Reasons that Induced Dr S to write a Poem called The Lady's Dressing Room.”

• Questions to consider as you read:• How does each author use language?• What are the “reasons” Montagu feels Swift wrote

the poem?• Considering if “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is

misanthropic or misogynistic, How does Lady Mary seem to have answered the question?