Editor's Choice
Do both Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room and Montagu's The Reasons accomplish their intent?
Quick answer:
Both Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and Montagu's "The Reasons" achieve their satirical intents, though reader reception varies. Swift's poem humorously critiques women's grooming rituals, eliciting mixed responses of hilarity or offense, indicating its success. Montagu's response is more direct and personal, targeting Swift with biting humor. While lighter in tone, it effectively insults Swift, achieving its aim. Both pieces are successful in their respective satirical objectives.
The answer to this question is very subjective and highly dependent on individual readers. I've had many students think that Swift's poem is absolutely hilarious, while some students find it unbelievably offensive. If that was Swift's intent, then the poem fulfills it. It's amazing that Swift was able to get both types of responses from a poem that is "heroic" in its format.
Montagu's poem is much more light-hearted, so it feels more fun to read; however, it also seems to be much more biting and caustic in its intent. Again, my classes tend to be split on this poem. Many find the poem directly insulting against a particular person (Swift), while some feel that Swift simply had it coming to him. If that was Montagu's intent, then she succeeded. Her poem is definitely targeted at a specific person, while Swift's poem leans more toward a general commentary about women...
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in general.
Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room (1732) is a typical, extended Swift scatalogical (toilet humor) satire on an ostensibly upper-class woman's (Celia) dressing room and beautification techniques. The satire, however, is so successful that most readers would not want to go within a hundred feet of Celia's dressing room.
The poem is immediately set up with mock-heroic overtones with the names of Celia and Strephon, both classical characters and, of course, Celia is actually described as "the Goddess." After Celia leaves her dressing room, Strephon decides to examine its contents, and from the beginning of the third stanza, the inventory becomes increasingly unsavory and grotesque.
Swift tells us, for example, that Celia's "dirty Smock" has stained arm-pits: her comb is so dirty that no brush could clean it; Celia, that dainty Goddess, wears gloves to smooth her hands made of her most recent lapdog's skin; and the oil she uses on her skin is either puppy piss from "Tripsey's whelp" or oil rendered from the puppy's body. The litany of the grotesque bodily fluids goes from worse to much worse when we get to "the scrapings of her Teeth and Gums,/A nasty Compound of all Hues. . . ."
When Strephon looks into Celia's chest--which is characterized as "Pandora's Box," the box that contains all the evils in the world--he's hit with "Vapours." But, as he feels the bottom of the chest, he finds "such vile Machine" that his horrified reaction is that "she better learn to keep/Those Secrets of the hoary deep!" This is undoubtedly a reference to what in polite society is called a "sex toy," and even in the context of this poem, is a bit startling.
Strephon is so horrified by what he finds during his search that he can no longer see the charms in Celia or other women, and Swift notes that Strephon needs to see women as Swift does--look at the result and forget how the result is obtained.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's is a much more light-hearted, generally non-scatalogical (until the last two lines) poem not based on mock heroics. Montagu essentially has "Doctor Swift," emphasizing that he's a cleric, meeting his "dearest Betty," who happens to be a prostitute and whom Montagu describes as "this dull hard hearted creature" who accepts four Pounds (a significant sum) for her companionship.
In addition to satirizing Swift himself, she manages to get a dig in at Alexander Pope, one of Swift's friends and part of his literary circle, who wrote a blistering satire against Montagu as "Sappho." According to Montagu, Pope's writing is "so much rhyme and little reason."
When Swift attempts to engage in sex with Betty, and apparently cannot, he blames his inability on Betty's "damned close stool so near my nose," reminding the reader that a chamberpot was kept right under the bed for convenience, and in an echo of Swift's satire on Celia, Montagu has Swift cry out, "Your dirty smock, and stinking toes/Would make a Hercules as tame/As any beau. . . ."
After demanding his money Swift and threatening to describe Betty's dressing room, Betty responds, "I'm glad you'll write/You'll furnish paper when I shite," directly comparing his poetry to toilet paper.
Both poems accomplish their satiric goals admirably.