Abstract:
Jonathan Swift, one of the most famous satirists in the English
canon, is renowned for his misogyny and his general misanthropy is
infamous; some of the most reviled allegedly antifeminine works he
produced are included among a small collection of poems composed by
him in the 1730s, known as the "scatological verses." Each of these poems
deals with the ostensibly degrading topic of women's bodily functions.
Each presents women in a decidedly unsavoury manner, according to the
predominant contemporaneous conventions. However, upon closer
examination, it is revealed that the victim of Swift's ruthless satires may not
in fact be woman, but rather, man. Through his expressions of "pity"
toward the impractical male "heroes" of the poems, and his deliberate
inversion of imagery in the Hesiodic myth of Pandora (placing the blame
squarely on Epimetheus' shoulders), Swift endeavours to illustrate that the
contemporaneous patriarchal culture and its unrealistic standards of femininity are deeply flawed.