Privacy and Speculation in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain

These Maids of Honour ... would strip themselves to the Skin, and put on their Smocks in my Presence, while I was placed on their Toylet directly before their naked Bodies; which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting Sight, or from giving me any other Motions than those of Horror and Disgust. Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads; to say nothing further concerning the rest of their Persons. Neither did they at all scruple while I was by, to discharge what they had drunk, to the Quantity of at least two Hogsheads, in a Vessel that held above three Tuns.

—Jonathan Swift, Book 2 of Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift's satires accomplish the remarkable feat of making defecation seem simultaneously deviant and normative. Defecation is exemplary because it horrifies the characters who encounter it in Swift's texts: Strephon, in "The Lady's Dressing Room," plunges his hand into his beloved's chamber pot, only to be trapped into thinking that women's beauty covers excrement. But these same texts suggest that defecation is normal insofar as the reader is encouraged to take the knowing attitude that these characters are naive, if not downright delusional, for being horrified. Cassinus, of "Cassinus and Peter," looks the fool for his breakdown on discovering that his Celia shits. To many readers of Swift—and many readers of his brand of eighteenth-century satire—this is merely ironic (Leavis, 79-108).Within this understanding, Swift aims to expose the dirty truth behind any shiny exterior, revealing the dark truth beneath civilization. Swift as satirist thus becomes one afflicted with an "excremental vision" of humanity or, alternately, an "excremental reality," condemned to write only "scatological" or "excremental" satires throughout his career (Fabricant, 30; Greene, 673; Gilmore, 33; Siebert, 21).

But a beauty of Swift's strategy is the unyielding tension between horror and acceptance, so much so that any reading must ultimately account for the plausibility of both; Swift's attitude to the body is marked, as Carol Houlihan Flynn notes, by both fascination and revulsion (89). By foregrounding either the positivist or pessimistic in Swiftian satire, readers frequently ensnare themselves within the terms of the satire itself; in other words, to lambaste or to defend Swift's satires is to replicate the binaristic structure of those very same satires. To do so is also to obscure more central questions that Swift's texts demand we consider: Why do these satires return again and again to the dressing room as a locus ameonus for excrement? Why is the female body consistently figured as the site and producer of excrement? In this essay, I shall demonstrate that Swift consistently links women's privacy with illegitimacy through grotesque images of the female body. The lady's dressing room stands as the emblematic trope through which Swift acts out an often savage critique of women's embodiment. In the second section, I shall contend that the figure of the dressing room serves an additional purpose for Swift and his eighteenth-century readers: Swift's representations of the dressing room offer an empiricist blueprint for the transformation of the observed particulars of the female body into the production of general knowledge about women. Gender difference and the everyday actions of the female body thus function as a vehicle for the articulation of order in early eighteenth-century Britain, even as these same satires inevitably belie the impossibility of classification and abstraction.

In Deep Sh—t

By the early eighteenth century, women's dressing rooms appeared with increasing frequency in English homes, and their presence in such households subsequently raised concerns about what women would do in private (Girouard, 123; Fowler and Cornforth, 56-60, 78-81).Since the dressing room could enable women to be alone, a number...