When a person hears the names of Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf they can hardly be separated from the notion of women’s rights. Although two of them lived and died before… Continue reading
A close reading of Jonathan Swift’s famously obscene poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” offers several targets for the author’s satire. The focus on Celia’s vanity and deceit, compared with the forgivability of Strephon’s crimes… Continue reading
When looking over Swift’s, The Lady’s Dressing Room, it is easy to be swept away by the contents, most pertaining to the grotesque. The shock is that the grotesque belongs to Celia, the “victim” of the… Continue reading
During the height of satirical workmanship, Alexander Pope writes in response to an actual situation that occurred to the detriment of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. (Longman, 2471) In this situation, a lock of Arabella’s… Continue reading
When confronted with Eliza Haywood’s novel Fantomina, or really any other text dealing with women of antiquity, I imagine one reaction within the average modern reader is as follows: well, at least women have it better… Continue reading
Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s direct response, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S to Write a Poem Call’d the Lady’s Dressing Room” from 1734… Continue reading
18th century society in England mandated a chasm as wide as the Atlantic Ocean between the roles of the sexes. The men supposed themselves England: superior, imperial, and conquering, while giving the women… Continue reading
Jonathan Swift shamelessly shows us his views about women in his poem “A Lady’s Dressing Room.” As such Swift has been been called misogynist throughout his satire. However I believe that while Swifts… Continue reading
In her work Fantomina: or Love in a Maze, Eliza Haywood explores the misogyny and the atypical brand of freedom prostitution in 1700s England offered women. When Fantomina observes the “mistresses” in the… Continue reading
In the eighteenth century the spleen served as a means of psychological oppression and as a mechanism for the misogynistic construct of hysteria. Although the mental affliction was not scientifically understood, our predecessors… Continue reading
