from Part VI - Social and Intellectual Topics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2024
Swift has often been labelled an outright misogynist. This chapter focuses on how several of Swift’s most misogynistic poems spoke to wider ideas about gender circulating in the early eighteenth century: in particular, the widespread concern that the idolisation of the female sex as paragons of virtue had lifted women well above their capacities in the name of beauty, morality, and social behaviour. The first section, on the idealisation of female virtue, includes an extended reading of ‘Cadenus and Vanessa’, while the second section explores the links between cosmetics and scatology in ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’.
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