Jonathan Swift

Poem Review # 109686

Jonathan Swift

An analysis of the them of impurity in Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed".

1,727 words () | 5 sources | MLA | 2008 Canada

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Jonathan Swift's poems "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed", works which might inspire, from their nauseating subject matter, more than a mere blush to rise out of one's body. It looks at how both poems glory in the grotesque impurity inherent to humanity, and particularly to feminine humanity, which were apparently conceived as mutually exclusive. It also discusses how Swift employs nauseatingly graphic descriptions of women in his poetry not to denigrate women, but to mock a literary and social tradition that would place women in only one of two categories: that of the angel and that of the whore.

From the Paper:

"These categorizations of angel and monster become problematic in "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" for several reasons, the first one being the unrelenting focus Swift puts on the physicality of both the women in the poems, which is obviously incompatible with the image of the angel. What makes these poems so interesting in juxtaposition is that they both scrutinize women to the same degree. In "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed", Corinna is most certainly not a lady; she is from its first lines established as the angel's antithesis, the whore. Unlike Celia, whose social status as a Lady makes her already quite angelic, Corinna is evidently of a low social class; there is no Betty to help her with her dressing. Instead, Corinna has only a bevy of stray animals who desert her "in a parodic reversal of the usual community of servants who attend to the dressing ritual" (Nussbaum 110). "

Sample of Sources Used:

Barnett, Louise. Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women. Oxford University Press: New York, 2007.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. Yale University Press: New Haven, 2000.
Nussbaum, Felicity. The Brink of All We Hate. University of Kentucky Press:Lexington, 1984.
Pollak, Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1985.Swift, Jonathan.
The Writings of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William B. Piper. W. W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1973.