In 1732, the poet, satirist, and essayist Jonathan Swift published a poem entitled The Lady’s Dressing Room, which is a tell-all about the illusion that is a lady’s dressing room. Narrated by Strephon, the poem is his disillusion at the dirty towels, dirty clothing, and putrid toilet scent discovered in his lover’s dressing room. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu responds to this poem by publishing The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called The Lady's Dressing Room, a poem wittingly and sarcastically hinting at Swift’s sexual shortcomings as the reason for his degrading rhetoric about women. Two hundred and eighty-four years later, President-elect Donald Trump makes daily headlines for his negative comments about women; and Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton responds in the wittiest and sarcastic ways.
The poem The Lady’s Dressing Room opens up with a man by the name of Strephon “stealing” into his beloved Celia’s dressing room. It is important to note the significance of diction in the opening stanza: here we have a man stealing into a space where he is not welcome. This is invasive. Strephon is unwanted but “steals” entry because he can; it is 1732, and women have no rights of privacy. The underlying prejudice and objectification of women in the poem is made evident when Strephon picks up Celia’s smock, “And first a dirty smock appeared/Beneath the arm-pits well besmeared;/…[Strephon] swears how damnably the men lie/ in calling Celia sweet and cleanly." In the most demeaning way, Strephon implies that Celia is not sweet or clean, that no man has sweat stains in his clothing, and that women must be clean and sweet in order to be of significance or use. This same rhetoric is used later in the poem: “But oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels,/When he beheld and smelt the towels;/Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed;/With dirt, and sweat, and ear-wax grimed." And Strephon is just getting started:
Thus finishing his grand survey
The swain disgusted slunk away,
Repeating in his amorous fits,
“Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”
These comments further highlight the stereotypes of men objectifying women because of all things to be upset about Strephon is baffled by Celia’s toilet and exclaims, “Celia shits” as if women do not have bowels and are not supposed to use the bathroom. Men place women on an unrealistic and misogynistic pedestal: they have to have a slim waist and hips and cannot defecate or even have to blow their noses. This happens because men see women as inhuman sexual trinkets, as opposed to people. This is 1732, a time when women are being socialized to be un-ambitious homemakers and child bearers; anything outside of those two things (especially using the bathroom) is unimaginable. To finish the poem off, Swift demeans women himself: “[Strephon] soon would learn to think like me,/And bless his ravished eyes to see/Such order from confusion sprung,/Such gaudy tulips raised from dung." These last lines are hallmarks of objectification: women are seen as tulips, sweet, delicate, vibrant flowers fertilized by excrement.
Being the person that she was, Lady Montagu cannot let Swift get away with publishing The Lady’s Dressing Room without responding to him in the satirical way she knows best. Three years later she wrote The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called The Lady’s Dressing Room. In it, she tells a story of a doctor, the embodiment of Swift, visiting a prostitute whom he has been trying to impress with his Oxford education and wit. The doctor pays Betty before they engage in any sexual activity like the Oxford-educated man he is, and the exchange quickly goes south:
The reverend lover with surprise
Peeps in her bubbies, and her eyes,
And kisses both, and tries—and tries…
He swore, ‘The fault is not in me.
Your damned close stool so near my nose,
Your dirty smock, and stinking toes
Would make a Hercules as tame
As any beau that you can name
Here the doctor is trying to get aroused but cannot because, according to him, he can smell the bathroom, and her feet and her clothes are dirty. Betty responds by saying that it is not her fault; instead, it is the doctor’s age of sixty-odd which causes his impotence). By this point, the Dr. is infuriated and demands his money back but Betty isn’t budging; so being the Oxford man he is, the doctor threatens to write a withering piece on her vile dressing room. This is a direct reference to Swift and his poem. Betty simply responds by saying, “‘I’m glad you’ll write./You’ll furnish paper when I shite." Montagu belittles Swift’s poem and entire writing career, indicating that its best use is to wipe oneself after using the restroom.
The exchange between Swift and Montagu is at least no different from the exchanges between Democratic Presidential candidate Clinton and President-elect Trump. During an interview with Fusion Media Network, author and actor Judah Friedlander was asked “Hillary or not Hillary?” His response best describes the current political discourse in America:
Well, the way I view it is, let’s say, you’re given a choice. You have one meal that you can have for the next four years. And you have two choices: one is like 4-day old Papa John's, corporate kind of pizza--could make you sick, maybe not and the other one is like a five-pound bucket of diarrhea, with broken glass in it. But the best quality broken glass you’ve ever seen. And you have a choice of which you can eat. Now the old Papa John’s pizza could make you sick for a little bit. But the other one, you know, what do you got to lose? So, I think the Papa John’s pizza, even though it might be horrible, you can recover from that and regroup and really start to form a third-party working with it and really get some power going so I think you have to go for that one.
One can easily guess which of the Presidential candidates is the old Papa John’s pizza and which the five-pound bucket of diarrhea. Like Swift, Trump publishes his misogynistic ideals so that the world can see them. He has posted things on Twitter such as: “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?”, “@cher should spend more time focusing on her family and dying career," and “Look at [Carly Fiorina’s] face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next President?!” (Trump). And the list goes on. A Google search for “Donald Trump sexist tweet” yields 569,000 results in .47 seconds. It is safe to say that Jonathan Swift and Donald Trump would be golf buddies. Trump is even quoted to have said, “I know where she went, it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” in reference to Clinton being a few minutes late to her debate. Clinton was in the restroom, which was farther away from the stage than the men’s restroom. This should sound familiar: “‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’” Swift and Trump are separated in time by two hundred and eighty-four years but their rhetoric is the same.
Like Montagu, Clinton responds to Trump’s insults. She responds satirically on Twitter when Trump is outraged by a Disney princess movie ad (explain):“[TRUMP] Where is the outrage for this Disney book? Is this the 'Star of David' also? Dishonest media! #Frozen” “[CLINTON] Do you want to build a strawman?” Clinton fires again when Trump tweets about Obama endorsing her: “[TRUMP] Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary. He wants four more years of Obama — but nobody else does!” “[CLINTON] Delete your account” (2016). Clinton is simply hilarious—just like Montagu: as women, they take the browbeating words of men and turn them into witty ripostes that all women can rally behind and laugh.
Another important similarity is the popularity of Montagu and Clinton as compared to Swift and Trump. The artful responses by Montagu and Clinton go unnoticed compared to the men. Swift is more popular than Montagu. One example of this is Stuart Sherman, main author of The Longman Anthology of British Literature, dedicating two full pages to introduce Swift’s work compared to Montagu’s four-paragraph introduction. Montagu was reputable and accomplished during her life having introduced smallpox inculcation in England and writing fifty-two letters detailing her fascination with the Turkish culture, but she was not as reputable and accomplished as Swift. Swift graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, twice, and Oxford University; became Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin; was chief editor of a leading Tory journal; and was in the same circle as Alexander Pope and John Gay, all of which would have made his The Lady’s Dressing Room more widely recognized than Montagu’s Response.
Trump graduated from the New York Military Academy and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania and has become a real estate magnate worth 4.5 billion dollars, highest of any presidential candidate. Clinton is a Wellesley College and Yale Law School graduate with over thirty years of government experience and more as an advocate for disenfranchised groups of people. In the professional arena, Clinton clearly boasts a more impressive curriculum vita than Trump but Trump is the 45th President. In the social media arena, Trump also dominates: he has 2.74 million more followers than Hillary on Twitter and 4,318,372 more likes on Facebook. Clinton’s tweet in response to Trump’s outcry over Frozenreceived 21,071 retweets while Trump’s tweet received 25,955.
The societal pecking order by gender that gave women a second-class status over a millennium ago still prevails today and is more amplified than ever before: a man is less qualified than his woman counterpart, and yet triumphs. The historic win of Trump as the 45th President of United States illustrates how incredibly difficult it is for women to enter and navigate through male-dominated spaces.
