The Satiric Economy of the Toilet in Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants
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This paper investigates Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants (1745) in terms of transgressive corporeality. Less studied and little mentioned by Swift scholars, Directions has been understood as a minor work with little coherence. The purpose of this paper is to newly assert that Directions sharply highlights the very dynamics of Swiftian inversion evinced in his poems. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731), “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), and “The Progress of Beauty” (1720) are all located at the site designated as the “toilet.” The word “toilet” in the early eighteenth century connotes both female space for and activities of dressing and making up, which Swift translates into the processes of defecation and decomposition. The categorization of servants and their daily jobs described in Directions correlates “toilet” activities with the whole household. The presence of servants who blur the divide between private and the public gives rise to an economy of transgression in which grotesque physicality simultaneously serves to establish and erase existing boundaries. The conceptual transfiguration of the body that the eighteenth century witnessed from the communal to the individual, and from the promiscuous to the enclosed, codifies the idea of private spaces within the household, which ultimately stand in opposition to social and physical heterogeneity. Directions not only highlights the rise of divisions within domestic confines but ultimately anticipates the futility of such boundaries. Swift’s directives for servants hinges upon the economy of satiric inversion as such, making Directions an integral work of Swiftian parody.
Abstract
This paper investigates Jonathan Swift’s Directions to Servants (1745) in terms of transgressive corporeality. Less studied and little mentioned by Swift scholars, Directions has been understood as a minor work with little coherence. The purpose of this paper is to newly assert that Directions sharply highlights the very dynamics of Swiftian inversion evinced in his poems. “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1731), “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), and “The Progress of Beauty” (1720) are all located at the site designated as the “toilet.” The word “toilet” in the early eighteenth century connotes both female space for and activities of dressing and making up, which Swift translates into the processes of defecation and decomposition. The categorization of servants and their daily jobs described in Directions correlates “toilet” activities with the whole household. The presence of servants who blur the divide between private and the public gives rise to an economy of transgression in which grotesque physicality simultaneously serves to establish and erase existing boundaries. The conceptual transfiguration of the body that the eighteenth century witnessed from the communal to the individual, and from the promiscuous to the enclosed, codifies the idea of private spaces within the household, which ultimately stand in opposition to social and physical heterogeneity. Directions not only highlights the rise of divisions within domestic confines but ultimately anticipates the futility of such boundaries. Swift’s directives for servants hinges upon the economy of satiric inversion as such, making Directions an integral work of Swiftian parody.
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