The Furniture of a Woman’s Mind
The poem is a catalogue of thoughts that exist inside the head of one particular woman, none of these thoughts (at least according to Swift’s criteria) worth having at all. As I see it, you can roughly divide these thoughts (and Swift’s abhorrence for them) into two categories: flawed knowledge on topics about which things might be worth knowing and expert knowledge on topics that are frivolous. In the first category, we have the following:
Will prove herself a Tory plain,
From principles the Whigs maintain;
And, to defend the Whiggish cause,
Her topics from the Tories draws.
In addition to her lack of ability to support her political positions, what really seems to bother Swift about women and politics is (what he perceives as) their ability to pin themselves down to a particular coherent set of premises. Women don’t fit neatly into boxes like “Tory” and “Whig,” and Swift ascribes this to women’s own ignorance.
Now, in the second category we have lines like these:
If chance a mouse creeps in her sight,
Can finely counterfeit a fright;
So, sweetly screams if it comes near her,
She ravishes all hearts to hear her.
Aside from perhaps the finer points of fashion, the area in which Swift is most apt to concede that women have expert knowledge is in manipulating men. In fact, the way that the woman in the above passage can emit both terror and sympathy is quite impressive, though Swift hardly values this sort of skill since it does not work toward the types of ends that he values. Again, here there is an anxiety about pinning down what, exactly is going on: is the women actually afraid of the mouse or not? Is she a Tory or a Whig? The inability of women’s thoughts to be integrated into patterns and systems like these really seems to get under Swift’s skin.
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