What is pleasing and vexing in Jonathan Swift's works

To begin this essay I believe it is necessary to define exactly what my aims are. First of all, the word ‘vex’ can be interpreted in many ways. It can mean to annoy or bother, to perplex or puzzle, to toss about or shake up, and even to plague or afflict. The question is, which of these interpretations do I decide to utilise for this essay? To me, the answer seems to be all of them. This will allow me a broader perspective with which to write, and allow me to study elements of Swift’s work that fit into one understanding but not necessarily another.

Secondly, due to the sheer amount of work that Swift produced during his lifetime, the question is which do I use as examples upon which to base the structure of this essay? It would, of course, be beneficial to me to use works that can be both pleasing and vexing in order to assess the balance between them. It is for this reason that I have chosen to look at Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal and A Lady’s Dressing Room, all of which I believe adhere to the mentioned criteria.

As Swift was a satirist (a humorist who

The third piece I have chosen is The Lady’s Dressing Room. This piece is similar to both Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, as it deals with the unmentionable – this time, the reality behind the mask that is woman. Of course, this reminds us of Gulliver’s dealings with the Brobdingnagians; Swift is attempting to expose what we, or in this case women, really are. To put it bluntly, this piece tells of the truths concealed within a lady’s dressing room – the brush clogged with ‘A paste of composition rare / Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead and hair’, a basin filled with ‘The scrapings of her teeth and gums’ and ‘ointments good for scabby chops’ to name but a few.

The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal, and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail. The era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but in Brobdingnag such facts become very important for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. In other lands it is difficult for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family relations or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated as a doll or a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids and the sexual lives of women. However, the Brobdingnagians do not symbolize a solely negative human characteristic, as the Laputans do. Some aspects of them are indeed disgusting, like their gigantic stench and the excrement left by their insects, but others are noble, like the queen’s goodwill toward Gulliver and the king’s commonsense views of politics. More than anything else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension of human existence visible at close range, under close scrutiny.

The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s excessive pride in its own existence. Swift fully intends the irony of representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the most smug, both collectively and individually. There is surely no character more hateful in all of Gulliver’s travels than Skyresh. There is more bad-mouthing and conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere else, and more of the pettiness of small minds that imagine themselves to be grand. For instance, their formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is a model of pompous and self-important verbiage, but it works quite effectively on the naïve Gulliver.

As mentioned before, this poem deals with the unmentionable and the taboo, but, again, something behind which we know there lies truth. And, like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, it is this that vexes the reader. The bathroom and dressing room habits of ladies are things that we as a society have decided to push to the back of our minds and not think upon in order to create the illusion of what being a ‘woman’ is (clean, unblemished, etc.). To upset this social construct is to cause uneasiness and discomfort, and this is of course what Swift intended when he put pen to paper and wrote such a piece. However, the piece is pleasing for two or three reasons (depending on which sex you are). First of all, one may think it is funny to remark on the truths of a lady’s secret chamber; secondly, one may think it is amusing to laugh at how absurd society is to have such social constructs in the first pla

Some topics in this essay:
Gulliver’s Travels, Brobdingnag Gulliver, Modest Proposal, Proposal Swift, Brobdingnagians Swift, , Arch Triumph, Lady’s Dressing, Lilliputians Gulliver, Ireland Swift, gulliver’s travels, modest proposal, lady’s dressing, travels modest proposal, travels modest, brobdingnagians symbolize, gulliver’s travels modest, deals unmentionable, subjects satire, english lords, attempting expose, theoretical knowledge,