Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's 'The Lady's Dressing Room' and (Alleged) Coprophobia

Portrait of Jonathan Swift by Charles Jervas (c. 1718) 

Detail from National Conveniances by James Gillray (1796)

 

I. 

 

D. H. Lawrence famously accuses the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift of being mad with fear for the body and its potencies. He was, says Lawrence, particularly troubled by the thought that even the fairest of young ladies had to defecate: 

 

"The insanity of a great mind like Swift's is at least partly traceable to this cause. In the poem to his mistress Celia, which has the maddened refrain: 'But - Celia, Celia, Celia shits!' we see what can happen to a great mind, when it falls into panic. A great wit like Swift could not see how ridiculous he made himself. Of course Celia shits, who doesn't? And how much worse if she didn't." [2]

I don't know if that's entirely true or fair, but it's certainly the case that Swift was one of the most consistently scatological of writers in a period in which many authors were as equally obsessed by the fact that man is born inter faeces et urinam, as Saint Augustine famously put it, and one suspects that whilst he often exploited his obsession for comical purposes, there was an element of fear and horror beneath the laughter ... but then isn't there always?

 

 

II. 

Swift's notorious poem, 'The Lady's Dressing Room' (1732), tells of of how a lover, Strephon [3], driven by perverse curiosity and the will to know, sneaks into his sweetheart Celia's dressing room while she's away only to quickly become disillusioned at what he discovers there; namely, that women are not ideal beings after all, but physical creatures who sweat, and shit, and blow their noses just like men.   

 

Although Lawrence is keen to attack Swift for his excremental vision and perceived misogyny [4], the latter is arguably satirising the fact that it is men who foolishly oblige women to try and live up to an ideal model or fantasy of femininity born of the male imagination. 

 

And so, one might have thought Lawrence would have been a bit more sympathetic, as he himself condemned this game of female adaptation to masculine theories of womanhood [5]. But all Lawrence's sympathies are with Celia, not Swift, and he insists that beneath any attempt to provoke laughter, the latter - like Strephon - was driven mad by the thought of Celia defecating:

 

"It was not the fact that Celia shits which so deranged him, it was the thought. His mind couldn't bear the thought. Great wit as he was, he could not see how ridiculous his revulsions were. His arrogant mind overbore him. He couldn't even see how much worse it would be if Celia didn't shit. His physical sympathies were too weak, his guts were too cold to sympathise with poor Celia in her natural functions. His insolent and sickly squeamish mind just turned her into a thing of horror, because she was merely natural and went to the WC. It is monstrous! One feels like going back across all the years to poor Celia, to say to her: It's alright, don't you take any notice of that mental lunatic." [6] 

 

 

III.

 

That's very decent of Lawrence - an example, perhaps, of phallic tenderness. 

 

But still I'm grateful to Swift for reminding us that the charms of womanhood are founded upon illusion or artifice and require a clever use of clothes, cosmetics, wigs, etc. 

 

Although, as noted by the philosopher Michael Hauskeller [7], this fact doesn't detract from the charms of womanhood, any more than does their corporeal reality detract from their spiritual nature; the latter being rooted in the former as Swift makes clear when, at the close of the poem, he speaks of colourful tulips rising from the dung (just as order is born of chaos). 

Like Hauskeller, I think the most crucial couplet in Swift's poem is this one: "Should I the queen of love refuse, / Because she rose from stinking ooze?” 

 

The answer that Swift supplies to this question is an emphatic No and Lawrence really should've given this more attention than the line he chooses (like so many other critics and readers) to focus upon. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Both these works can be found in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Click here and here for further details and to buy prints if interested. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, A Props of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 309. 

      Lawrence goes on to say that it is monstrous for a man to make a woman "feel iniquitous about her proper natural function" and blames it on a failure to keep the mind "sufficiently developed in physical and sexual consciousness" (309). The poem by Swift to which Lawrence refers is 'The Lady's Dressing Room' (1732): click here to read online.    

      See also Lawrence's 'Introduction to Pansies' in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Pess, 2013), Appendix 6, pp. 663-666, in which he first makes his critique of Swift, insisting that the latter was reduced to gnashing insanity by thoughts of women defecating: "Such thoughts poisoned him, like some terrible constipation. They poisoned his mind."

[3] Strephon is a name traditionally used within pastoral poetry to refer to a lover. Amusingly, a lesbian friend of mine has reimagined Swift's poem and named the character Strapon.

 

[4] 'The Lady's Dressing Room' is often viewed as a vicious attack on the falsity of women. In a poetic response entitled 'The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing Room' (1734), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu suggests that Swift wrote his verse following a frustrating encounter with a prostitute (i.e., that it was born of impotence, not madness as Lawrence claims). Click here to read Lady Montagu's poem online.

 

[5] See the essay by Lawrence entitled 'Giver Her a Pattern', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 160-165. 

      Note that Lawrence does not object to the giving of patterns per se or the female need for such and their use of cosmetics to keep up appearances - nor even to the fact that "men give them such abominable patterns [...] perverted from any real natural fulness of a human being" (163) - but, rather, to the fact that "as soon as a woman has really lived up to the man's pattern, the man dislikes her for it" (163). In other words, it's male fickleness and foolishness that Lawrence finds objectionable.    

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. I, Appendix 6, pp. 665-666.

[7] See Hauskeller's blog post 'Celia Shits: on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room"' (25 October 2013): click here. Hauskeller's philosophical musings anticipate and closely mirror my own. I agree with his argument that Lawrence ultimately misunderstands Swift and misinterprets 'The Lady's Dressing Room'. 

 

Birthday Reflections

 

 

I. 

 

February 13th is a day of quiet reflection for me now: the day I was born (1963) and the day my mother died (2023).

 

In the Bhagavad Gita it is written: Learned is he to whom the mystery of birth and death is revealed. [1]

 

But I'm not a Hindu and don't particularly wish to be learned in the religious sense indicated here. For I remain sceptical of the idea that there is a mystery to be revealed. And even if there is, I prefer that Isis remain veiled and keep her secrets. 

 

 

II. 

 

Not that the idea of reincarnation is much of a mystery any longer. For it's common knowledge that Hindus believe that the salvational goal is to fully realise the self as some kind of pure, unchanging spiritual essence following a series of material and transient incarnations.

 

Birth and death are facts of little real importance, according to Hindu teaching. What matters is liberating the soul from this cycle so that it may achieve lasting perfection in the great sea of Being that lies beyond life and death.   

 

Thus we can say of the great Hindu gurus what Lawrence says of Buddha, Plato, and Jesus; namely, that these grand idealists were utter pessimists, teaching that Truth lay in "abstracting oneself from the daily, yearly, seasonal life of birth and death and fruition, and in living in the 'immutable' or eternal spirit" [2]. 

 

Personally, I don't want to move from the known world to the unknown world; from the visible to the invisible; from the seen to the unseen. I know, as Lawrence knew, that such abstraction brings "neither bliss nor liberation, but nullity" [3].

 

I'm happy to live and die and be endlessly reincarnated in the flesh like a karma chameleon forever changing colour, shape, form, etc., and I don't want to lose myself in the infinite completeness of the Whole thank you very much. 

 

If that means never being free from desire, pain, anxiety, and delusion - never obtaining supreme wisdom or eternal peace - well, again, that's fine with me. 

 

When holy fools tell me I must learn not to identify with the objects of the world I immediately wish to bring one of these objects crashing down on their heads; when they tell me not to become attached to my body I want to give them a kick up the arse. 

To conclude, if I may, with another quotation from Lawrence: 

 

"For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh." [4] 

Notes 

 

[1] The Bhagavad Gita ('Song of God') is a 700-verse Hindu scripture, which forms chapters 23-40 of Book 6 of the epic Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva. The work is dated to the second half of the first millennium BC.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', published together with Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 330.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 331.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149. 

 

 

This post is for all those who were born (like me and Kim Novak) or who died (like my mother and Richard Wagner) on this day. 

How the Metaverse Reduces Us All in Stature

As Paul Murray's waist chopped avatar soon discovers:

 "The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world ..." [1]

 

 

I. 

 

My friend Catherine, who has an academic interest in the topic of torture and capital punishment, will doubtless know that one of the favoured methods of execution in ancient China involved the condemned being cut in two at the waist by someone wielding a very large blade.

 

Thankfully, in the modern world this practice has been abolished - unless performed by a surgeon as a life-saving last resort [2].  

However, if you ever decide to enter the so-called metaverse - an immersive virtual environment - you may be shocked to find yourself (or, more precisely, your avatar) without legs, genitals, buttocks, or anything else below the waist, having effectively been given a digital hemicorporectomy the moment you don your VR headset. 

 

That's certainly the case in Mark Zuckerberg's derisible first attempt to establish a techno-utopia, despite his investing huge - HUGE - sums of money [3] in a project which the Facebook founder sincerely believes to be the future for human interaction and digital socialization.    

 

Known as Horizon Worlds, it's been described as a desperately sad and lonely space; like an abandoned shopping mall or theme park. Certainly not the kind of 3D cartoon world anyone would willingly choose to hang out in for very long - even if they are eventually promised legs! [4] 

 

 

II. 

 

"It's hard", writes Paul Murray, "not to read the fact that half of you disappears when you enter Horizon Worlds as symbolic somehow ..." [5]. 

 

That's true: and what it's symbolic of is (i) once you enter the metaverse there's no running away and (ii) Zuckerberg wants us to exchange the sheer intensity of lived experience - the full-life of the body, it's forces, flows and desires - for the mere simulation of such. 

 

D. H. Lawrence was alert to the danger of this almost a century ago: 

 

"The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the emotions belong to the body, and are only recognised by the mind." [6] 

 

Today, to paraphrase Lawrence, many people live and die without having had any real thoughts, feelings or experiences, even if they've spent many long hours chatting on social media or hanging out in a virtual reality. 

 

For they've effectively been cut off at the waist and become creatures for whom everything is in the head and "whose active emotional self has no real existence, but is all reflected downward from the mind" [7].   

 

Mark Zuckerberg likes to present himself as a liberator, but really he's just another executioner ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Wallace Stevens, 'Esthétique du Mal', in Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, (The Library of America, 1997), p. 286.  

 

[2] Hemicorporectomy - or trans-lumbar amputation as it is also known - is an extremely rare (and extremely radical) procedure, used, for example, to stop the spread of aggressive cancers in the spine and pelvic region, or other uncontainable conditions. Apparently, the key to surving such surgery is having sufficient emotional and psychological maturity to cope - as well as the physical resources to undergo intensive rehab. So not for everyone then - and certainly not for me (even having eyestrain or a toothache makes me ponder if it wouldn't be better to be dead).      

 

[2] In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo reports that Zuckerberg has invested staggering sums in his metaverse project; tens of billions of dollars in just a couple of years. See 'My Sad, Lonely, Expensive Adventures in Zuckerberg's V. R.' (4 Nov 2022): click here.     

 

[3] Meta promises that its Horizon avatars will be getting legs sometime this year, so you'll not just have to float around with half your body missing. (Apparently, legs that move in concert with the user are very hard to get right in virtual reality systems, but the technical engineers are working on the problem.)

[4] Paul Murray, 'Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland', New York Magazine (13 Mar 2023): click here for the online version in Intelligencer.

 

[5-6] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 311. 

 

On D. H. Lawrence's Objection to Pirated Books and Counterfeit Emotions

I. 

As Michael Squires reminds us, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" originally consisted of a brief expository essay in which Lawrence takes on the pirates who had moved quickly to produce various counterfeit editions of his controversial novel, which had been published privately, in July 1928.   

Later, Lawrence radically expanded the essay in order to defend the work from critics and censors - whom he despised more than the pirates - and offer a "final, eloquent statement of his belief" [1] in an authentic model of sexuality and the importance of what he termed phallic marriage.

I'll comment on these ideas shortly, but I'd like to begin by discussing Lawrence's skirmish with Jolly Roger ... 

II. 

Towards the end of 1928, Lawrence became aware that Lady C. had been pirated, as unauthorised versions of the work began appearing in New York, London, and Paris, much to his irritation. 

He decided the best thing to do as a countermeasure would be to bring out a new, inexpensive paperbound edition of his own. This French edition, which came with the original short introduction mentioned above ('My Skirmish with Jolly Roger') - appeared in May 1929 and quickly sold out. 

But what, we might ask - apart from the loss of royalties (and Lawrence wasn't indifferent to this issue) - was his problem with the pirate books? 

 

In A Propos, he objects at first purely on aesthetic grounds; they are either cheap and inferior or gloomy and depressing looking. But that's rather unconvincing coming from someone who, just five years earlier, had written of his contempt for the "actual corpus and substance" of the book as an actual object; i.e., as a published volume that is marketed and put on sale:

"Books to me are incorporate things [...] What do I care for first or last editions? I have never read one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no book has a binding.

      What do I care if 'e' is somewhere upside down, or 'g' comes from the wrong fount? I really don't." [2]  

So there's obviously something else going on ... And that something else is to do with the question of authenticity: In brief, Lawrence hates the pirate books because they're forgeries and facsimiles. In other words, they're not the real deal as authorised (and signed) by him; they're counterfeit copies, or replicas as he calls them. 

And that's what troubles him: just as, later in A Propos, it becomes clear what troubles him most of all about modern expressions of sexuality and human emotion is that they are, in his view, fake and fraudulent. Lawrence contrasts emotions as (false) mental representations with real feelings that belong to the body: 

"Today, many people live and die without having had any real feelings - though they have had a 'rich emotional life' apparently, having showed strong mental feeling. But it is all counterfeit." [3]

Above all else, it's love that is a counterfeit feeling today and reduced to a stereotyped set of behaviours. Which means, says Lawrence, that there is no real sex - it's been killed, or, at the very least, perverted into a thing that is cold and bloodless. And that's a catastrophe because, for Lawrence, sex is an impersonal, cosmic principle that not only keeps men and women in balance, but holds the very heavens in place.    

III.

What, as readers in 2019, are we to make of this?

Personally, I can only echo Michel Foucault who ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality with a quotation from Lawrence's A Propos calling for the "full conscious realisation of sex" (i.e. sex thought completely, honestly and cleanly). [3]

Foucault responds to this passage, in which Lawrence would have us believe our ontological future is at stake, with amused irony:

"Perhaps one day people will wonder at this. They will not be able to understand how a civilization [...] found the time and the infinite patience to inquire so anxiously concerning the actual state of sex; people will smile perhaps when they recall that here were men - meaning ourselves - who believed that therein resided a truth every bit as precious as the one they had already demanded from the earth, the stars, and the pure forms of their thought ..." [4]

Notes

[1] Michael Squires, Introduction to A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press,1993), p. lv.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Bad Side of Books', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 75-6.

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover", in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 311 and 308.

[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, (Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 157-58. 

Readers interested in this topic might like to read an earlier post on Lady Chatterley's postmodern lover: click here.

See also: Chris Forster, 'Skirmishing with Jolly Roger: D. H. Lawrence, Obscenity, and Book Piracy', Ch. 3 of Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity, (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 61-88. Forster cleverly - and, in my view, rightly - argues that Lawrence "frames his critique of piracy as one more expression of the corrupt state of [inauthentic] modernity" [71]

Musical bonus: Adam and the Ants, 'Jolly Roger', from the album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS, 1980): click here.  

Blood, Sex, and the Inviolable Nature of Objects

Still from the video for the song Animals by Maroon 5 

Featuring Adam Levine and his wife Behati Prinsloo 

Dir. Samuel Bayer, (2014)

The amorous subject of John Donne's metaphysically conceited poem The Flea, cleverly attempts to persuade his beloved into consenting to a premarital sexual relationship by drawing her attention to a parasitic insect that has suck'd and sampled them both. His argument is that since their separate bloodstreams are united within the body of the flea, then they have, essentially, already been joined as man and wife and so may as well fuck without any further hesitation, embarrassment, or feeling of shame.  

It's a witty and imaginative argument, that rests on the religious idea that sex is a form of blood covenant or physical union consummated between two people. But, like most religious arguments, it's a fallacy; one that even D. H. Lawrence, for whom coition is a vital experience providing a crucial clue to existence, has to concede at last ...  

In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence describes how the blood of a man "acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity ... rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge" towards the polarized blood of a woman. Thus, the desire on the part of both parties to engage in genital intercourse. And, in the act of coition, says Lawrence, "the two seas of blood ... rocking and surging towards contact ... clash into a oneness", resulting in a great flash of interchange, before the two individuals fall separate once more, reinvigorated and tingling with newness in their blood and being.

Writing in A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (1930), however, Lawrence subtly qualifies his position; now, rather than talking about two seas of blood surging towards contact and clashing together into a oneness, he writes about marriage as a correspondence of blood and insists "the blood of man and the blood of woman are two eternally different streams, that can never be mingled ..." [my emphasis].

Thus, whilst the phallus may indeed be a column of blood that enters the valley of blood of woman, no matter how deeply the former penetrates the latter, neither breaks its bounds. In other words, there's a degree of communion, but there's no actual merging - and, if there were, it would be deadly to both parties; a horrible nullification of identity and singular being.

Ultimately, it's not only a fallacy but also a fatal form of idealism to posit the idea of two-becoming-one (even within the body of a flea). Whether we accept it or not, man, like all other objects, is limited, isolate and alone and all the penetrative sex in the world - be it oral, anal, or vaginal in character - doesn't change this. We are, if you like, unfuckable at last; that is to say, we never encounter or touch one another in our deepest being, which is forever withdrawn and vacuum-sealed.

See:

John Donne, The Flea, click here to read online at the Poetry Foundation and click here to read my analysis of this verse on Torpedo the Ark.

D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and Other Essays, (Penguin Books, 1961).

Note: I am indebted to Graham Harman for the idea of vacuum-sealed objects existing in subterranean cellars of being beyond all relations - an idea that presents a serious challenge to the Lawrentian notion of touch as advanced in Lady Chatterley's Lover and elsewhere. 

See: Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Open Court Publishing Company, 2002).