I read “A Beautiful Young
Nymph Going to Bed” as a satirical poem about women, specifically prostitutes.
Corinna is the “pride of Drury Lane” (1). She waits for men, waiting to “snap
some cully passing by” (50). As a woman who sleeps with men as a trade, she
should be beautiful, or at least semi-pleasant to look at, otherwise she would
not do any business. Men would find someone more to their liking and Corinna
would become completely destitute.
But Corinna is not a
natural beauty, is she? On line 9 she sits down and begins to disassemble
herself. This beautiful woman, this nymph of the night, is removing everything
desirable about herself. A woman’s pride is her hair, but it is the first thing
eliminated. Without her pride, she is able to take off everything else. Corinna
goes from being beautiful to monsterous, with “shankers, issues, running sores”
(30). Her clothing is taken off to reveal sagging breasts and flab. She is no
longer someone to be desired.
In her sleep, Corinna
does not escape her life. She dreams of her encounters with men and her fears.
Swift writes, “Or if she chance to close her eyes,/Of Bridewell and the compter
dreams,/And feels the lash, and faintly screams” (40-42). When Corinna dreams,
she thinks about prison and the punishment that would be inflicted upon her.
Her armor, the things she must artfully put on every day, cannon protect her
from these thoughts at night.
In lines fifty seven
through sixty four, Corinna wakes to the horrible discovery that her artifice
has been taken from her. Her plaster is stolen by rats, the crystal eye is
missing, the cat peed on her plumpers, and her hair, her pride, is riddled with
fleas. This woman is no longer able to cover herself up, her beauty destroyed.
Unfortunately, Swift reminds us in the last stanza of the poem, it isn’t just
her artificial beauty that is gone, but her livelihood as well. He writes, “Corinna
in the morning dizened,/Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poisoned” (73-74).
She cannot sell herself anymore because she is mosterously ugly.
Could this poem be about
the artificiality of society? The surface reading is pretty clearly about
prostitution, but they are not the only ones who have a public face and a
private face. Politicians are the first thing that come to mind. Relationships
are another.
Are we, the readers,
supposed to feel pity toward Corinna? As I was reading this poem, pity was the
emotion I felt the strongest. This woman is unable to escape her problems, even
in her dreams, and upon waking she learns that her life has been destroyed by
vermin. The same vermin she has to live with because her home is so squalid. Do
these vermin represent anyone specific? Are they perhaps society that looks
down on her even as the use her services?
Here are some examples of the blason form that Swift employs and mocks: http://www.units.miamioh.edu/visualrhetoric/blason.html
ReplyDeleteThe final lines are absolutely crucial to answering this question. As we discussed, the poem’s refusal to represent Corinna’s act of putting her scattered parts back together forces our awareness of the poem’s representational strategy—that it works through the mechanism of the blazon and its conventions of dismembering a woman’s body poetically. Swift’s poem is ironic because its blazon is of Corinna’s monstrosity rather than her beauty, but the final lines also indicate that reducing a person to their parts is tantamount to objectifying them. That Corinna must build herself up from objects in order to live only serves to heighten this irony. We might then read the poem both a social critique, but also as a critique of the poems that turn people, and especially woman, into lists of parts in order to celebrate their beauty.
ReplyDelete