Death Becomes Her: Figuration and Decay in Swift’s “Birthday Poems” to Stella

One need only read through the critical work about Jonathan Swift’s relationship with Stella to understand how carefully the Dean formed his favorite pupil’s mind and soul. And how willingly, it would seem, she assented to his will. According to John Middleton Murry, Swift “would shape her” into all he needed from a woman (emphasis added); Carol Houlihan Flynn describes the “ever compliant” Stella as Swift’s “earliest and most successful creation”; and most recently, Louise Barnett writes “only Stella was instructed by Swift from childhood, perhaps accounting in some measure for her greater tractability in conforming to his wishes”¹ (emphasis added). These allusions to Stella’s “shape,” “compliance,” and “tractability” repeat the long-standing critical assumptions about Swift’s interactions with Hester Johnson (AKA “Esther,” “Hester,” “Hetty,” & “Stella”), and gesture towards her importance to an under-theorized aspect of Swift’s rhetorical practice—his development of a theory of figuration through which he accounts for the ironies and pleasures of the decaying human body. In particular, this theory emphasizes the degrading effects of time on the body and complicates its reliability as a site of empirically verifiable knowledge.²

Most readers are familiar with Swift’s infamous and scatological verse in which he persistently describes women as decrepit figures whose viscosity threatens “to scatter reason, waste energy, and destroy the possibility of civilization.” ³ One experiences in these poems the “disgusted” response of Strephon to his beloved’s bodily functions, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” (“The Lady’s Dressing Room” [118]) and the oozing dismemberment of “Corinna, Pride of Drury Lane” who takes herself apart at night only to awake in the morning to a cosmetic nightmare (“A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” [1]).⁴ Tita Chico describes the epistemological consequences of figuring women in this way throughout her essay “Privacy and Speculation in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain”: for Chico, Swift “introduced, but did not explore” how the “deconstruction of female beauty and intellect” could also “deconstruct claims of general knowledge.”⁵ I would like to develop Chico’s allusion to “deconstruction” by suggesting that Swift does in fact explore the possibilities and limitations of knowledge through his deployment of the human, and specifically female, body as a figure. The rhetorical implications of this trope embody the problematic nature of human “claims to general knowledge.” The importance of figuration—the shaping of ideas and perceptions through figural language—to Swift’s critique of empirical knowledge aligns this critique with the epistemological concerns of the twentieth-century theoretical framework of deconstruction, especially the work of Paul de Man, who defines rhetoric as “the study of tropes and figures,”⁶ and whose developments in deconstruction represent a radical interpretation of Lockean empiricism.⁷

In response to Locke’s argument in Book III of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding that “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats,”⁸ de Man writes, “Nothing could be more eloquent than this denunciation of eloquence.”⁹ Calling attention to the textual instability of this unflattering description of rhetoric, which, following Locke’s denunciation, is figured as a woman (“Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against”¹⁰), de Man illustrates the radical potential of language to change shape and distort intended meaning. Locke’s narrative embodies the rhetorical effectiveness he derides, and as his narrative consistency wavers, it signals a rhetoric of disarticulation vital to understanding the figural stakes of empiricism.¹¹

Rhetoric emerges from Locke’s text as a woman’s body, a body both physical and textual, a body whose materiality Flynn characterizes as “resistant to schemes providential and scientific.”¹² The rhetorical implications of this body as they are figured in Swift’s “Birthday Poems to Stella” are proprietary and unstable: Swift controls Stella “with a language of substitution and containment” making her his “most complete literary property.”¹³ But Stella...