Inverting the Image of Swift’s “Triumfeminate”

JEMCS4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) Inverting the Image of Swift's "Triumfeminate" Paula Backscheider The study of Jonathan Swift's relationships with women and his opinions about womankind dates to his own life time, and the results are seldom flattering to Swift. In a recent evidence-rich essay on Swift and Stella and Vanessa, for instance, Louise Barnett concludes that Stella was "the perfect audience. Swift could imagine nothing higher for women." Most studies find that Swift was able to fashion, to use Barnett's words, "exactly the relationship he wanted."1 In a letter to Alexander Pope on 20 April 1731, three years after Stella's death in January 1728, Swift suggested that "talking females, who will go on, or stop at your commands" were as healthful a diversion as cards, fables, or bowls and recommended his "middling folks, whom one may govern as one pleases, and who will think it an honor and happiness to attend us, to talk or be silent, to laugh or look grave just as they are directed" (Williams, Correspondence 3:457-8). These "talking females" were his Irish women friends, Mary Barber, Laetitia Pilkington, Elizabeth Sican, and sometimes Constantia Grierson.2 Swift called them his "Triumfeminate" and "Shopkeepers wives" (Correspondence 3:369, 394). The Earl of Orrery described them as Swift's "constant seraglio" (Orrery 168)?all descriptions with references to gender. These women have been perceived as sources of infor mation about Swift's life and, if treated as poets at all, as his acolytes and imitators. Even the authors of the best assess 38 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies merits of Swift and women poets discuss their poetry in terms of Swift's "influence."3 Iwant to break from this famil iar approach and consider these women as poets and read ers of poetry with their own individual styles and tastes, to relate their work to that of other women poets rather than to Swift, and finally to hypothesize something of a dynamic poetic tradition of which Swift was a part, not the originator or primary example. This essay, then, is part of the contin ued rethinking of the idea that early modern women writers, when brought into proximity with a powerful male poet, are brought under his influence and their development and independent creativity stifled. 1. Self-Made Women Patrick Delany had introduced Swift to his neighbors Mary and Rupert Barber in 1728,4 and she and Delany introduced him to Laetitia Pilkington, Constantia Grierson, and Elizabeth Sican. The women were already something of a writing circle, sharing what they read, writing poetry, and engaging in poet ic correspondence. Barber and Grierson were published authors, and Grierson was notable enough to be attacked in the press for setting herself up as "a profound Critick on Ancient and Modern Authors" (Elias, "Manuscript Book" 53). All of them were already in the habit of putting their thoughts and experiences "into rhyme" and had "literary aspirations or interests" (Glendinning 211). They were a remarkable group of women?wives of a grocer, woolen draper, clergyman, and the King's Printer in Ireland. Their relationships were multiple. Barber and Grierson were close friends and had been encour aging each other's reading and writing for some time. Grierson, who would trust Barber to publish her poems after her death,5 had been apprenticed to Laetitia Pilkington's father to learn midwifery. She and Pilkington were friends by 1721, and Pilkington describes them as "seldom asunder" until their marriages ("Manuscript Book" 39; Pilkington 1:18). By the time Grierson met Swift, she was already famous for her learning, and her editions of Virgil (1724) and Terrence (1727) had been published. When Swift writes about her, he always calls her a poet and scholar.6 A.C. Elias pictures Grierson adeptly as "a prodigy, a busy and productive figure Backscheider 39 working in a bewildering range of areas" ("Manuscript Book" 42). Barber was "an early friend and patron" of Pilkington (Elias, "Editing" 131). Swift describes her as "wholly turn'd to Poetry" and Ireland's "chief poetess" (Correspondence 3:479 and 3:369). Sican was an avid and discriminating reader, and Swift told Pope she...