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What is "The Lady's Dressing Room" about and what is Lady Montagu's response?
Quick answer:
"The Lady's Dressing Room" is an extended "toilet humor" satire about an upper class woman's dressing room and her efforts to beautify herself. Strephon enters the room, and the poem begins to spiral into more and more disgusting descriptions of what Strephon finds left in the dressing room. The poem ends with Swift telling readers that the sights have ruined Strephon's opinion of women, but Swift says that Strephon needs to just enjoy the results and not think about how a woman eventually got that way.
Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" is an extended "toilet humor" satire about an upper class woman's dressing room and her efforts to beautify herself. The woman's name is Celia, and she leaves her dressing room after five hours of getting herself ready. Strephon then enters the room, and the poem begins to spiral into more and more disgusting descriptions of what Strephon finds left in the dressing room.
The basin takes whatever comes
The scrapings of her teeth and gums,
A nasty compound of all hues,
For here she spits, and here she spews.
But oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels,
When he beheld and smelled the towels,
Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed
With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed.
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Montagu's poem is an equally hilarious poem that pokes fun of a man visiting a prostitute; however, the man is unable to perform. The man in question is supposedly Swift, and Montagu is essentially saying that Swift's knowledge must surely be based on the rooms of prostitutes. While both poems are equally funny, I tend to think that Montagu's poem is more malicious in that it is targeting a specific, real person.