Who Is Disgust In A Lady's Dressing Room

Disgust is a profound disapproval of a certain thing that is aroused by its foulness or distastefulness. People find disgust in various things such as in nature, food, or even in themselves. Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” illustrates a man named Strephon’s ideology shattered as he discovers what lays in his lover Celia’s room. Swift writes “O! ne’er may such a vile machine, / Be once in Celia’s chamber seen! / O! may she better learn to keep, / ‘Those secrets of the hoary deep.’” (Swift 95-99). Strephon is repulsed by Celia’s behaviors such as using the bathroom or sweating in spite of them being normal for all humans. This raises the question of what is the poem representing of why Strephon is so disgusted with Celia’s actions.

Nevertheless, when he enters his lover’s, Celia, room, he finds bodily fluids such as sweat, dandruff from her hair, and a basin filled with “nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews” (Swift 41-42). Also, “when frightened Strephon cast his eyes on’t, / … The smallest worm in Celia’s nose, / And faithfully direct her nail,/ To squeeze out from head to tail, / For catch it nicely by the head, / It must come out alive or dead” (Swift 61, 64-68). Strephon becomes appalled at the what he finds in Celia’s room because he does not associate these actions to the behaviors of what he believed to be present in women. He presupposed that Celia would have “all the charms of womankind” such as being kind, mannerly, and especially clean (Swift 130). Nonetheless, after this incident, “his foul imagination links, / each dame he sees with all her stinks,” demonstrating that every time he passes by a woman, he will be reminded of all the “disgusting” conducts that women like Celia have (Swift 121-122). His vision of women has been shattered at the new revelation that women can also be dirty and unhygienic. Additionally, when Strephon finds a gruesome stench in which came from Celia’s feces, he repeats “in his amorous fits, / “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” (Swift 117-118). The discovery of learning that Celia uses the toilet and can smell terribly is shocking to Strephon because he did not think women can produce such a foul smell. This relates to The Anatomy of Disgust when Miller’s children became disgusted at the sight of their own bodily fluids that they refused to have any contact with them since they were taught that these fluids are meant to be putrid . Although both instances have different roots, where the disgust resides on in