The Lady's Dressing Room

"The Lady's Dressing Room" is a poem written by Jonathan Swift first published in 1732. In the poem, Strephon sneaks into his lover Celia’s dressing room while she is away only to become disillusioned at how filthy and smelly it is. Swift uses this poem to satirize both women’s vain attempts to match an ideal image and men’s expectation that the illusion be real. For the poem's grotesque treatment of bodily functions, Swift was slandered by literary critics and psychoanalyzed as suffering from "the excremental vision."

The poem was written by Jonathan Swift, who was most famous for his book Gulliver’s Travels. This author was a satirist to the core. He mocked, vexed, and made comical political commentary. Thomas Sheridan called him “a man whose original genius and uncommon talents have raised him, in the general estimation, above all other writers of the age.”

This poem chronicles the misadventure of Strephon as he explores his mistress’s vacant dressing room. Beginning with an ideal image of his lover he looks through the contents of her room, but encounters only objects that repulse him. He finds sweaty smocks, dirt-filled combs, oily cloths, grimy towels, snot encrusted handkerchiefs, jars of spit, cosmetics derived from dog intestines, and a mucky, rancid clothes chest. Beholding this filth, culminating in the discovery of her chamber pot, he is slapped with the reality that Celia (the name "Celia" means "heavenly") is not a “goddess,” but as disgustingly human as he is, as shown in line 118: “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”

Ever after his discovery of Celia’s nauseating dressing room he can never look at women the same way again. In every woman he sees through the powdered wigs and painted faces to the grime beneath.

Swift ends the poem by suggesting that if young men only ignore the stench and accept the painted illusion, they can enjoy the “charms of womanhood.”

He couldn't handle the realization that women aren't perfect and angelic as they appear to be. He realized that women do indeed defecate, they smell, they get sick, and they are human beings. Another interpretation of the poem is that he was perhaps on the side of women, and men for that matter, in calling everyone to be more merciful and accept people the way they are. Both Strephon and Celia are metaphors for men and women, representing everything good and bad. He comments on the "game" that courting, mating, and existing together has become.

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