The Lady's Dressing Room Essay

The Lady’s Dressing Room, written by Swift is a poem that can be perceived as satire on how women have too much pride in their appearance that the hide their true selves behind makeup and closed doors. Swift uses hyperboles, and exaggerations to argue that women are purely artificial and are deceiving men because the image that they portray in public does not mirror what is found in a lady’s dressing room. Swift uses Celia’s dressing room as the example to all women.
Swift hyperbolizes that it took the beautiful Celia so long to get ready, “five hours (and who could do it less in?)” (1) Which really just emphasizes how fake and artificial she is after getting ready for hours upon hours. Every stanza after this line describes more and more how Celia is grotesque, disgusting and nothing more. Grossness and repulsiveness is the object of this satire and Swift uses humor and exaggeration to create our lady Celia. Throughout the poem Strephon ventures through Celia’s dressing room and finds things that Swift feels should not have been discovered, “so things which must not be expressed” (109) like her smelly dirty towels. Swifts tone is very ironic as he discusses the “inventory” and the “Litter [of findings] as it lay [in Celia’s dressing room.]” (7) Swift exaggerates by saying all the things in Celia’s dressing room are part of the inventory that create someone phony.
The reason Swift makes this poem so satire is because he exaggerates how women are placed on a pedestal and how that somehow makes
Swift knows that Strephon views women differently from now on after all his discoveries as disgusting and grotesque human beings. Celia’s beauty symbolizes the idealized view on how women should be, but the truth of what’s behind it all is shockingly