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'.
DHL's palpable lack of literary sophistication is surely what is most evidenced by his 'ad hominem' reading of Swift's famous poem, in which it is Swift's satiric cipher, Strephon (a fictive name taken from pastoral romance), who is the main vessel for the action, even if there are clear collisions with 'high' mythological learning (whereby Swift surely, by implication, is also sending up himself). As Thomas Gilmore has written in his paper 'The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems', and to amplify the writer's reference to his 'will to know', Strephon resembles 'a comic Oedipus: "Let's get to the bottom of this" is his creed. Or, perhaps more appropriately, since we are dealing with Swift, he is like those anatomists of "A Tale o' a Tub" who flay a woman and strip a beau, thinking thereby to discover consequential truths. But a beau is by definition all appearance or surface; nothing is to be learned by stripping his carcass. And it is doubtful that anything can be gained by flaying a person, whose "truth" resides not in materiality but in spirit. Inside and outside, high and low, seem always in Swift equal departures, with similar results, from the common forms in which the truth lies. In his anatomizing expedition, Strephon merely substitutes inside for outside and ends up no closer to any truth. What makes him most strikingly comical, however, is the gravity of his compulsiveness. There is a burlesque resemblance between his search and the traditional, self-appointed mission of the satirist. But training laughter on this mission is one of Swift's saving graces and his most distinctive characteristic as satirist. Strephon totally lacks this ability.' In this way, we might say, Swift's thoroughgoing satire (the depth of which Lawrence both misses and represses through his psychologising moralism about Swift's supposed deficits as a human being) comes out in service of spirit, or, more precisely, the inseparability of Celia the 'goddess' and her abject other.
ReplyDeleteAs Gilmore concludes by way of context, 'Paul Fussell has pointed out in "The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965)" that man's depravity was one of the basic assumptions and themes of eighteenth-century writers. But Strephon's arrival at this assumption about womankind, his reductive conclusion that women and stink are one (a generalization based on insufficient evidence, to say the least), and his subsequent behavior constitute a comic travesty of this concern'. Nothing, in a word, is to be taken seriously with Swift, whose ultimate teaching is to show us of the limits of our tolerance of the parodic, and whose superlative mind continues to serve as a deconstruction of all forms of fascism, fundamentalism, idealism and solemnity - and all those who lack the high-minded humility to laugh at themselves.