Analysis Of The Lady's Dressing Room

Notwithstanding Swift’s intentions in “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu two years later penned “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room,” which is a cutting and self-aggrandizing poem detailing a doctor’s encounter with a prostitute, and his failure to perform sexually: “The Reverend Lover with surprise/ Peeps in her bubbies, and her eyes,/ And kisses both, and tries–and tries./ The Evening in this hellish play,/ Beside his guineas thrown away,/ Provoked the priest to that degree/ he swore, ‘The fault is not in me’” (Montagu 63-69). The doctor claims the fault lays at the feet of the prostitute named Betty, that her dirty smock smells too strongly and that no man could possibly be aroused with such a disgusting odor near, disclosing, “Your damned close stool so near my nose, / Your dirty smock, and stinking toes/ Would make …show more content…
And according to Tito Chico a lady’s dressing room “encapsulates the history of gender roles in the eighteenth century” (Gwilliam 198). One who reads Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” may choose to equate Swift’s sexism and idealism as dated notions that endure in some sort of alternative to our current views of female vanity. Nonetheless, it is evident that the criticism of women portrayed in Swift’s poem has relevance in today’s modern opinions of women’s beauty rituals and methods of presenting one’s self. On the other hand, women like Lady Montagu have been lending a much-needed voice to