Satire In Susan Staves's The Cry

Most present day literary theorists are more preoccupied with the contemplation of her authorship of The Cry than discussing one of the most substantial female works of satire in history. But Satire is the most difficult genre to tackle. There are a multitude of layers and insinuations that require an, at times subjective, assumption regarding the author’s intent. Most writings require an application of a lens and an interpretation. But satire requires those elements along side intense historical context as well as popular ideas and culture of the time. I do not believe it would be overreaching to assume that the magnitude of the task may cause a resistance to writing in depth on her work. Susan Staves has argued that one of the reasons many

Mure’s sentiment is demonstrated in the education of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who taught herself Latin at a very young age by eavesdropping on her brother’s lessons. Women at this time were taking their education into their own hands. Collier was well educated and made no hesitations to demonstrate this education in using complex references in her own work, and in An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting points out some of the negative opinions of the educated

The poem, signed L. is claimed by the Lion, the leopard, and the lynx. All immediately dismissive of the lamb who is later revealed by the all-knowing Horse, to be the true author. The moral is that the Lamb knows better than the others what it is like to suffer because it has experienced it first hand. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting is all about suffering. The suffering occurs at the hand of some horrible mistress, but in ending the work this way the readers is forced to question how this narrator has become so intimately aware of the effects of tormenting that she can then inflict it with such precision. Castillo-Garsow writes that “if women, traditionally the lambs in English society, are also its tormentors, it is because they have suffered the worst” (Castillo-Garsow, 18). Jane Collier had an inside authority on the class and gender struggles that emerge in her writing. If she had not to some extent experienced them herself writing about them would not come so easy to her. Satire is meant to make the reader feel uncomfortable, and to seek reform for injustices in society. In the case of Jane Collier’s An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting the reader is left aware of some of their own hypocrisies in the treatment of