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A Discussion Of Scatalogical Imagery In The Poetry Of Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift is one of my favourite poets - at university I particularly enjoyed studying poems such as `Strephon and Chloe`, in which male characters discover that the women who they idealize are p

Date : 19/06/2013

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Joe

Uploaded by : Joe
Uploaded on : 19/06/2013
Subject : English

'Nothing short of the most violent love or the intensest loathing could possibly account for so obsessive a preoccupation with the visceral and excrementitious subject.' Examine the role of scatological imagery in the poetry of Jonathan Swift.

For fine ideas vanish fast, While all the gross and filthy last (Strephon and Chloe, l.233-4)

The title quote is taken from Aldous Huxley's 1929 essay on Swift. It argues that the images of bodies and excrement in Swift's writing ought to be attributed to his diseased mind or to his latent and repressed childishness. It goes on to argue that 'Swift's greatness lies in the intensity, the almost insane violence of that "hatred of bowels" which is the essence of his misanthropy and which underlies the whole of his work.' This essay will agree with Huxley by arguing that Swift's scatological imagery is indeed one source of his 'greatness'. It will disagree, however, with Huxley's belief that such a focus is caused exclusively by a 'violent love' or 'loathing'. In fact, far from being a merely 'obsessive' preoccupation, Swift's scatological imagery reveals a sustained and coherent engagement with the epistemological problems of his age. In its discussion of this theme, this essay will use two poems - 'The Lady's Dressing Room' and 'Strephon and Chloe' - to demonstrate how Swift's scatological images undermine idealized perceptions of feminine sexuality, and thus highlight the tension between imaginative fictions and reality itself . In order to lend strength to its argument, this essay will then attempt to show that this concern was central to Swift's period of literary history, by pointing to its origin in the epistemological writings of John Locke and the presence of similar themes in the poetry of Alexander Pope.

In her study of this theme, 'The Body in Swift and Defoe', Carol Houlihan relates Swift's writing on the body to the 'epistemological bind of his age':

The body had always complicated the very human desire for spiritual certainty. Idealists for centuries scourged it, refined it, shed it altogether in attempts to link it into larger patterns of coherent meaning. But after Hobbes, after Locke ... the body would not go away easily. It became instead matter difficult, perhaps impossible, to idealize - matter in the way. The epistemological bind of his age, the confinement of thought to matter that could only be patterned self-consciously, made knowing the body at best problematic .

Certainly, when Swift writes about the body, particularly when using scatological imagery, it is often depicted in contrast to idealized versions of the human form. This is particularly apparent in his scatological poems, in which Swift delights in dismantling perceptions of female sexuality. This is because Swift is fascinated by the way in which idealized, selective visions of female sexuality are so easily undermined by real-world bodily processes - or, more particularly, excretory processes . In two poems, 'Strephon and Chloe' and 'The Lady's Dressing Room', male characters are brought to the sudden realization that their untested perceptions of feminine beauty are flawed after witnessing the results of female bodily processes (the first character encounters a used bedpan; the second witnesses his new wife urinating). In both poems, the moment is dramatized in a climactic line of diction:

'Can Chloe, heav'nly Chloe piss?' ('Strephon and Chloe', l.178) 'Oh, Celia, Celia, Celia, shits!' ('The Lady's Dressing Room', l.118)

An analysis of both poems will demonstrate this theme more clearly. 'Strephon and Chloe' begins by expressing the flawless appearance of Chloe, a local beauty. These expressions ironically compare her to the Classical gods: the reader is told that 'Her graceful Mein, her Shape, and Face, / Confest her of no mortal Race' (7-8). These comparisons are particularly frequent in the passage which describes Strephon and Chloe's wedding rites (47-65); in this passage the narrator suggests that Phoebus, the goddess of the sun, sang for the newly-wed couple herself in the phrase: 'The Nymph was cover'd with her Flammeum, / And Phoebus sung th'Epithalamium' (61-2).

Swift's intention here is not to undermine Chloe's beauty, but to satirize those who believe that such beauty could negate the existence of her bodily processes. The narrator ironically adopts this view himself whilst describing Chloe's beauty, in the phrase, 'No noisome Whiffs, or sweaty Streams, / . Could from her taintless Body flow' (12-14). This idea is developed soon after: 'You'd swear that so divine a Creature / Felt no Necessities of Nature' (19-20). The irony of the narrator's tone - coupled with the hyperbole already mentioned - makes the reader aware that this is an illusion. As such, the reader begins to anticipate the comically inevitable revelation that Chloe does, in fact, 'piss'. Swift captures Strephon's horror at the moment of revelation by using images which describe the sound, smell and warmth of his wife's urine: 'Strephon ... heard the fuming Rill / As from a mossy cliff distill' (175/6); '...he smelt a noysom Steam / Which oft attends that luke-warm Stream' (179-180). In this way, scatological images are employed to prolong and increase the tension at an important moment in the poem's narrative.

The narrator begins to conclude the poem by arguing that illusory perceptions of beauty are a bad base on which to build a marriage. An analogy in the following lines develops this idea: 'What House, when its Materials crumble, / Must not inevitably tumble?' (297/8). The 'tumbling house' image can be located within a larger tension at the end of the poem: images of solidity ('Foundation', 'Ground', 'Basis' and 'cement') are contrasted with images of fragility ('crumble', 'sand' and 'bubble'). By figuring them respectively as 'hard' and 'soft' substances, these final lines emphasise the poem's focus on the opposition between reality and imaginative fictions. Thus the poem's scatological imagery, which engages with the same problem, ought to be interpreted as part of this wider strategy.

A similar narrative structure is used in 'The Lady's Dressing Room'; in this poem, a naive male subject is brought to a sudden realization when he encounters evidence of the female excretory process. The poem makes use of scatological images from its beginning, with reference to 'a dirty Smock.../ Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear'd' (11-12). Then come long descri ptive passages which are equally full of 'visceral' imagery:

Here Gallypots and Vials plac'd, Some fill'd with Washes, some with Paste, Some with Pomatum, Paints and Slops, And Ointments good for scabby Chops. Hard by a filthy Bason stands, Fowl'd with the Scouring of her Hands; The Bason takes whatever comes The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums, A nasty Compound of all Hues, For here she spits, and here she spues. (33-42)

The structure of the poem increases the intensity with which these images accumulate in the mind of the reader: the next stage of the poem consists of three stanzas, the first and last of which are over forty lines long. The effect is to create a relentless list of repulsive images, which finally accumulate in the climactic line,

'Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia, shits!' (180).

The sheer density of these images might support Huxley's claim that Swift had an 'obsessive preoccupation' with bowels. Certainly, the bulk of the poem consists of documenting the disgusting products of Celia's own bowels. Yet the poem's close has a different focus: in this part, Strephon's psychological trauma is described. It reveals that, having learned about the existence of Celia's bodily functions, Strephon is unable to remove the thought of her waste products from his mind. Furthermore, the images of excrement and of the female form are irrevocably linked in his imagination. The thought of one gives rise to thought of the other:

His foul imagination links Each dame he sees with all her stinks: And, if unsav'ry Odours fly, Conceives a lady standing by (120-4)

The importance of this ending is that it emphasises Strephon's imaginative processes. The phrases, 'foul imagination', 'vicious fancy' (127) and 'Ideas' (126) stress that Strephon's new perception of feminine beauty - as exclusively associated with excrement and dirt - is a product of his imagination, and bears little resemblance to things as they actually are. As a solution to this problem, the poem's narrator suggests the possibility of a middle way, a wise and worldly alternative to the selective visions experienced by Strephon. The narrator reveals that he pities 'wretched Strephon blind / To all the Charms of Female Kind' (129/30); he goes on to suggest that an appreciation of female beauty, coupled with an awareness of female bodily processes, could make for a happier engagement with reality: 'He soon would learn to think like me, / And bless his ravisht Sight to see / Such order from Confusion sprung, / Such gaudy Tulips raised from Dung' (141-4).

Simultaneously, however, the narrator hints that this middle way might be an impossibility. The phrase 'ravisht Sight' suggests that an irrevocable change has taken place in Strephon's mind. The definitions of 'ravisht' in the OED as 'to be driven away from a state of belief' or to be 'spoiled or corrupted' mostly suggest a permanent rather than a temporary change . Whilst the poem's last line ostensibly argues that the 'middle way' is a possibility, the juxtaposition of images of 'Tulips' and 'Dung' suggests the opposite. The line is used to argue that the sublime and disgusting elements of female sexuality can exist harmoniously in the imagination, yet the poem's intense and unbalanced focus on images of filth has a residual effect on the reader. Given the context of the poem, the image of 'Dung' has a greater resonance than the image of 'Tulips', and thus overwhelms its opposing image. In the word 'Tulips' itself, there is a pun which also undermines the possibility of this middle way: the word denotes the flower, and brings to mind its connotations of beauty, yet it has a close phonetic resemblance to the phrase, 'two lips' (which invokes images of the female pudenda). This pun continues the poem's strategy of conflating the sublime and the physical elements of feminine sexuality.

A reader of these poems is left with the frustrating feeling that no alternative has been provided. To ignore the bodily functions of the object of one's desires is naïve, yet an awareness of these bodily functions is presented as incompatible with an appreciation of beauty. Critics such as Donald Greene argue that Swift's scatological focus is used to confront those who are unduly disgusted by it:

`If Swift makes such frank mention of the human excremental function, it is in order to discount its importance and satirize those who think it is important, in the hope that those obsessed by its importance may come to recognize their values .`

Certainly, Swift's poems cannot be said to advocate an 'obsessive preoccupation' with the body's processes. Nevertheless the intense bodily focus of the poems' narrators cannot be ignored. Arguably it is best understood in epistemological terms. John Locke, in 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding' (1689), wrote extensively on the possibilities of human knowledge . In Chapter 11, he supplies an analogy for human understanding which could be applied almost directly to Strephon in 'The Lady's Dressing Room':

`...methinks the Understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut out from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible Resemblances, or Ideas of things without.`

Strephon's perceptions of femininity - firstly ignoring the excremental function, and then being fixated by it - are like 'Resemblances, or Ideas of things without.' Neither is the whole truth, yet both are constructed upon observations of the real world. The faulty discernments of his understanding are the cause of his problem.

The centrality of this theme to the period was arguably produced by Locke's treatment of the subject of understanding in his 'Essay'. In Chapter 8 of this work, he makes a distinction between what he refers to as 'primary qualities' and 'secondary qualities': primary qualities are the properties possessed by an object, from which it is 'utterly inseparable '. In other words, primary qualities can objectively be said to exist. 'Secondary qualities', on the other hand, do not exist themselves, but are the 'powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities .' These qualities can only be said to exist in the mind itself. The significance of this distinction is that it suggests an inconsistency between reality and the human understanding of reality. Locke summarised this truth in this passage from Chapter 8:

`From whence I think it is easy to draw this conclusion, That the ideas of primary qualities of bodies, are resemblances of them, and their patterns really do exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas, produced in us by these secondary qualities, have no resemblances of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves .`

In a similar passage, Locke demonstrates how physical sensations themselves can be misinterpreted by the understanding:

`We may be able to give an account, how the water, at the same time, may produce the idea of cold by one hand, and of heat by the other: whereas it is impossible, that the same water, if those ideas really were in it, should at the same time be both hot and cold .`

Thus Locke argues that the senses are unreliable because they are moderated by human understanding, which is incomplete or incorrect. The result of this conclusion was an intellectual climate in which writers and philosophers became interested in the nature of human understanding . Swift's scatological poems, when they reveal an opposition between imagination and reality, ought to be understood as engaging with this problem.

Alexander Pope, a friend and correspondent of Swift, was similarly interested by the nature of human understanding. His 'Essay on Man' (1734) argues that 'Reason' is mankind's best asset in discovering truth and overcoming its natural tendencies towards self-deception. He represents mankind's faculties as inconstant in phrases such as this, from his 'Epistle to Lord Cobham': 'Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds, /Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, of our minds?' (23/4) . Such phrases appear throughout his writing and suggest his perception of the mind's capacity for self-deception and ignorance. In the same poem, Pope goes on to elaborate his understanding of this capacity: 'All manners take a tincture from our own; / Or come discoloured through our passions shown. / Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, / Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.

Like Pope, Swift was aware that individual understandings of the world are as much coloured by 'fancy' and 'passion' as by the evidence provided by the senses. In demonstrating this truth, Swift's writing often employs scatological imagery. Although such imagery is repulsive - and leads some, like Huxley, to question Swift's own sanity - it is best understood in the intellectual context of the age. The most worthwhile response a reader can have is to assess the cause of his or her own reaction. As Swift shows in 'The Lady's Dressing Room', an extreme dislike for such images may be the result of one's own untested delusions. The enduring popularity of these poems, and the debate they still cause, both go to show the effect poetry can have when it gets a little too close for comfort.

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