Some Talk About Scatology

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

INTRODUCTION

Swift’s works are abundant in scatological themes and motifs, a factor that has frustrated critics since their publication. Generally, writers who indulge in toilet-humour at length are deemed immature, and suggestion are made as to how they lack the intellect to rise above it. Alternately they are dismissed as mentally unstable people who fail to understand the need for discretion when it comes to discussing the uncomfortable realities of the human body. As it is impossible for obvious reasons, to call someone of Swift’s mental calibre immature, critics have turned to the theory of madness to explain the misanthropic glee with which Swift addresses scatological topics.

Swift’s writing has been subjected to many levels of psycho analyses and deconstruction in order to prove that the man himself was mentally unstable. Critics have referred to samples of his works to draw a steady graph of Swift’s mental decline and principle amongst these is what is known as the "Scatological Cycle;‘ a collection of poems namely The Lady‘s Dressing-Room, A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, Strephon and Chloe and Cassinius and Peter. Of these, this paper will discuss the first two in detail.

SOME TALK ABOUT SCATOLOGY

The term Scatology is directly relevant to the study, or an obsession with regard to, excrement. An analysis of the entire body of Swift‘s writings reveal the invariable reappearance of scatological themes and the monstrous potential of the human anatomy. Swift combines the two characteristics to produce a vivid sense of horror, and not to mention, a disgust of the body. Claude Rawson mentions that the invention of the microscope might have had something to do with the intensity of the graphic images that Swift tends to paint. In Gulliver’s Travels for example, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag represent an occasion to scrutinize the human body in microscopic detail.

Gulliver‘s reaction to this change of perspective is one of disgust and mortification. He describes it thus,

"the dug so verified with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous‘

The ‘Scatological Cycle‘ reappears continually in Swift’s work and instead of dismissing these themes as many critics have attempted to do we should, instead, probe into the reason why Swift continually pursues it. The simple answer is that Swift uses the reactionary disgust to advance his literary messages. Additionally, though this is not too widely accepted an interpretation, he sheds light on the humour in the matter; that human beings are disgusted by the same functions that in reality, cleanse them. In The Modest Proposal for instance, Swift refers to the human body in culinary terms, and he does this repeatedly in order to shed light on the worthlessness of human lives in Ireland; they are only meat and bones. Swift repeatedly proceeds to quantify in calories the value of the dehumanised people of Ireland in a time of famine. His intent is not to present a persuasive argument for the consumption of children, but to illuminate for an English audience the kind of impoverishment and desolation the Irish people have to live with. The idea is to draw people’s attention to their terrible realities. He wants them to recognize what they have been reduced to.

Similarly, Swift‘s scatological poems pricks at the human tendency to close their eyes at what is natural and fake gracefulness their entire lives. Just like sex, a topic which the conservative society around him abstained from bringing up in conversation, the topic of excrement was taboo, thereby giving it the nature of a sexual fetish. Swift wants human beings to break out of their lying, pretentious web of propriety; he wants human being to understand themselves for who they truly are. Above all, he wants them to stop being embarrassed of their realities.

Therefore, we understand that it is not Swift who has an unhealthy obsession with excrement, but society who has given something as natural as the cleansing of their bodies the status of a taboo, which does. Swift being Swift merely acts to educate society.

What critics who are unsure of how to deal with Swift‘s misanthropic, scatological themes do is that they deem him a historical figure, and look back upon him with what they believe is a modern perspective and with an air of patronisation. What they do not understand is that Swift did not belong to his time; he was far too ahead of it. Whether it was that which set his mental capacities on a downward trajectory or not, it is important to pity him as an intellectual who was stuck in an age too primitive for him.

A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG NYMPH GOING TO BED

A LADY’S DRESSING ROOM

(In All Their Gory Details)

To explain A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed in brief: Corianna, one of the prettiest prostitutes on the lane, is exposed to be something almost less than human. She is, in fact, a compilation of parts— she has eyebrows made of mouse fur, a glass eye, a wooden leg, dugs to support her breasts, a wig, fake teeth and everything else that one can imagine. She sits on a three legged stool after her day’s work and dismantles the evidence of what society requires her to be – fake. Corianna’s transformation helps us understand the difference between perception and reality. Moreover, we see the world for what it truly is; it fails to identify with others beyond their looks.

The first reading of A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed may appear to be extremely graphic. However, for those readers who cannot move beyond the scatological elements, the poem is a loss. The longest part of the poem focuses on the dismantling of Corianna’s beauty, and it is a direct take on the artificiality of the world that we live in. If Corianna didn’t apply her fake parts to herself every morning, nobody would look at her twice. The concept of inner beauty does not exist. When we see what the world has turned Corianna into, we cannot help but wonder if we are looking at a compilation of parts or a human being. But the human being is there somewhere, beneath her fake hair and fake breasts; the only problem is that she is not acknowledged for being that person.

We move on from the dismantling scene to Corianna’s nightmares which recapitulate her fears and her experiences; proof enough of Corianna’s suffering, and proof enough that she is a victim figure. This is a stark contrast from Belinda from Pope’s Rape of The Lock, who is beautiful and has sweet dreams. Her world is a safe place; the sort of tragedies she has to deal with comprises the loss of a lock of hair. One day she will be in Corianna’s position however, when her skin is not perfect and her hair is no longer luscious and beautiful. One day she will see that her existence cannot be preserved and that if she wants to be accepted, she will need ‘parts’ to substitute what has withered away.

Although Swift describes her dismantling in grotesque terms (Her shankers, issues and running sores,) A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed goes deeper than its scatological undertones. The reader is supposed to understand that each morning Corianna reassembles herself very, very painfully. We admit that she is a sham; her entire appearance is constructed to deceive. Nonetheless, she is a victim figure. Her only crime is that she wishes to be accepted.

Although A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed is the least discussed scatological poem for the simple reason that it is considerably less grotesque than the others, it is also considerably different in nature. What constitutes this difference, primarily, is that the readers are able to sympathize with Corianna even as they take in the vile details of her sores and issues. We perceive her as an individual who has no choice. More importantly, we catch a hint of Swift’s own pity for Corianna, a factor which remains missing throughout the scatological cycle.

On the other hand, in A Lady’s Dressing Room, Celia belongs to the same world Belinda does. Swift transforms her from a Goddess like figure in the eyes of her lover Strephon into an odious creature worth only of disgust. Briefly, once again, almost five-sixths of the poem is a painfully revolting record made by Strephon, a male suitor, the means by which Celia (currently absent) makes herself presentable for polite society in her dressing room.

Many critics, upon reading Swift’s description of the ‘paste in Celia’s comb,’ and ‘the scrapings of her teeth and gums,’ have complained that Swift could have spared one the details. However, once again we must understand that Swift was merely trying to shed light on the artificiality that constructs society. One must also take note of the dissimilarity between the tones of Strephon, the protagonist, and Swift the narrator. Strephon seems to oscillate between horror, revulsion and spiteful delight. The tone of the narrator though, even while he speaks of Celia successfully squeezing worms out of her nose, is calm and composed. This draws the comparison between youth and maturity. Swift has created a character with misogynistic inclinations; this does not mean that Swift is a misogynist himself.

The climax of the poem, both in narrative as well as scatological terms is undeniably when upon opening the chest, Strephon discovers that ‘Celia, Celia, Celia Shits!’ In the history of Swift’s Scatological poems, even so more that Strephon and Chloe who pass their marital lives farting on each other’s faces, there is no other line which is meant to attack society’s severe discretion with regard to bodily functions more than this. Swift takes a dig at a world which is embarrassed about the most innocent, the most natural of its activities. Strephon is supposed to stand for the immature youth who, in spite of his curiosity, is content to delude himself into thinking that the women they live with don’t defecate.

About the opening of the chest, Melissa M. Sexsmith further goes onto say that the most telling indication of Swift's true ideology is reflected in this instance which relates the Greek myth of Pandora's Box. While the legendary account has Pandora opening the container in which all evil was contained, thus causing the downfall of man from a state of pleasure to one of toil and pain, here Swift transfers the blame from Pandora to her husband, Epimetheus. Swift's deliberate modification of the myth, labelling man as the cause of his own demise, acts as an astounding admittance by a member of the male patriarchy that the female gender ought not to be subjugated in the manner that she has been for the entire course of Western literary history. In fact, through the inversion of the myth and the presentation of the male as the responsible party, Swift not only challenges thousands of years of literary tradition, but also dismantles the very idea of misogyny.

The ending of A Lady’s Dressing Room has incited diverse critical comment. It has been called puzzling and ambiguous. AB England has gone so far as to say that the poem leaves us with ‘nothing to hold onto.’ Donald Greene on the other hand has said that the ending is a successful resolution of the dichotomy between the flesh and the spirit. This however, according to Thomas B Gilmore Jr., Is too optimistic a view. For one, the nature of Swift’s advice to Strephon is obviously and utterly impractical. He says that to compare Celia to Venus, Strephon should have to ‘stop his nose,’ which the man is as likely to do as forget what he witnessed in Celia’s room. He would probably like to eliminate his excremental vision, yet his Goddess Celia undoubtedly has lost her stand as a deity in his eyes. Gilmore goes on to say that the ending of A Lady’s Dressing Room is full of irony because,

The Scatological Problem – how to cherish physical beauty after physical nastiness has been exposed - remains unsolved. The closing paragraphs of Strephon and Chloe, however, suggest that the approach to a resolution in A Lady’s Dressing Room is futile because it involves a continued fascination with the physical; Strephon begins in his worship of Celia/Venus, is disillusionised, yet is told (if we take Swift’s counsel seriously) to renew his worship. Strephon and Chloe offers an alternative that can break the circle of this fascination.

A Lady’s Dressing Room checks Strephon’s tinsel, decorative, deluded form of love, one that instead of cleansing, merely covers filth. Although Swift has been repeatedly called a misogynist for the gory details in the A Lady’s Dressing Room, it is important to reiterate that it is not the female race that he has a problem with, it is their artificiality. To balance it out, he also has a problem with how the male race encourages this artificiality. If he speaks of Celia’s filth in the poem then he also chastises Strephon’s immature horror at the discovery of this filth, and for sincerely thinking that womankind can survive without undergoing the same bodily functions that men experience.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Reactions to Swift’s scatological poems tend to fall in three main categories; the first and most persistent reaction until recently has been to ignore them due to the embarrassment they cause. The second reaction has been one of outrage at Swift’s obsession with filth and the degradation of mankind. The third one picks on the subject of scatology and uses it prove Swift’s mental instability. These speculations advanced, especially as science became more refined, and nobody puts it better than Thomas B. Gilmore Jr. when he says,

It was not until the rise of Freudian Psychology that writers had the scientific theories necessary to cloak their ‘Swiftophobia,’ as Milton Voigt terms it, in sophisticated jargon.

However, beginning with Herbert Davis’s Swift’s View of Poetry and Irwin Ehrenpries’s The Personality of Jonathan Swift, Swift’s scatological poems have finally received the attention that they deserve. Modern criticism agrees that Swift’s scatological poems serve to destroy man’s illusions about romantic love by exposing the human body at its filthiest. It has been derived, that in reality Swift is far from obsessed with filth. He simply presents an alternative comprising basic cleanliness, decency and friendship as opposed to extreme delusions of ethereal romance, all of which are bound to collapse into animal nastiness one day.

One of the most prominent recent critics of Swift’s scatological poems is Thomas B. Gilmore Junior who draws attention to the comic elements in his scatological poems. He points to the satirizing of the stale conventions of love songs and Swift’s relish in comic absurdities like Strephon’s compulsive search for the ‘truth,’ and the ‘rouzers’ that Strephon and Chloe tend to release on each other. This comedy acts to draw parallels between, in Gilmore’s words, ‘lofty expectations and ugly realizations, misleading appearances and squalid actualities, pretentious language and raw facts.’

Melissa M. Sexsmith defends Swift against allegations that he is nothing more than a thoroughbred misogynist. She traces the history of female subjugation back to Greek and Hebrew mythologies; of the weakness of the ‘first woman,’ with all later antifeminist writing taking one or the other of these texts as its precedent. She says that if in ‘Swiftian ideology’ one finds that Pandora is in the clear from having released evil into a world where men previously lived free from ills, hard toil and oppressive sickness, one must logically assume that simultaneous with the removal of her guilt comes her rise from subjugation to, in the least, equal status as men. Stressing that Swift makes his women ‘human,’ she says,

However crudely these facts are presented in the poem, they are nonetheless the realities of womanhood in Celia's time, and thus their description cannot in any way be said to be antifeminist — Swift tells us that women defecate, but indeed, they do! The female subject, therefore, is not the focus of Swift's satirical jest. Rather, it is the male, and his unrealistic expectations of femininity. It is "wretched Strephon" that is subject to the "pity" of the narrator. The poem's intent is thus to highlight the absurdity inherent in the belief that women are incapable of producing the same bodily fluids and excremental waste as do men.

Critical Reception of Swift’s scatological poems has come a long way. It has journeyed beyond the era when they were discarded as embarrassing non issues, meant to be rejected, to a time when critics cannot get more of them, to deconstruct and study. It has been understood, if only a little belatedly, that the poems actually have some content to them, that they are not merely to do with one man’s fascination with the filthy, and the demoralisation of women. It is important that these poems be studied further, that they be broken down and analyzed for everything they are worth. For it is not yet too late to honour a genius’s aspiration to educate mankind and thereby, render the world a slightly more intelligent place.

CONCLUSION

Therefore, to sum up, we can say that in his scatological poems, Swift has endeavoured to invert the classical view of femininity. Consequently, he also reverses the image of man as the dominant sex. The woman is shown to be as ‘human’ as the man, and this serves to rebel against the neoclassical illustration of the female-as-goddess. Moreover, he stresses on the absurdity of keeping something as natural as a woman’s bodily functions, discreet. Man, meanwhile, is presented as an ignorant and flawed entity. Therefore he is relegated the same position that he consigned women to for centuries. In lowering man to this position of defeat and at the same time, uplifting woman to the dear place of power equal (and to the position of the sex less deluded) to that of man, Swift demonstrates very clearly that his stand towards the female race is anything but misogynistic. Furthermore, we must not remember Swift as a madman of a long-gone age delving into the theme of scatology for pleasure, but rather as a progressive human being recognizing scatological discrepancy and trying to eliminate that through his writings.

Thus one can say that the ‘scatological verses' of Jonathan Swift should not to be read as they have been for a long time by literary criticism; as antifeminist writings delivered by a misogynist. Instead, they should be read in context to his "commitment to honesty, however unpleasant, and recognition that honesty may often involve unpleasantness because of the deeply flawed nature of the human character"