We have the great Charter of Rights and Freedoms, “the highest law in the land” we are told. This video clip (above) is almost painful to watch with its self-congratulatory tone. Ask Jordan Peterson and Tamara Lich if we have rights and freedoms. Today, we are frightened to criticize anyone or anything – we just keep quiet. You cannot even tell a joke without considering whether you can. Sadly, history teaches us that advances only come through debate and discussion. Likewise, though, it also teaches us that control by the state, or self-appointed interest groups, is eventually overthrown. The point remains that if debate and discussion are closed down from fear and legislation, then we are not truly free. But the People eventually see through the propaganda, whether it is the work of Pravda or our Federal government.
One such time when the pendulum of control swung to permit criticism was the 18th Century. It was a Golden Age. People expressed their opinions, people expected there to be disagreements, and people were involved in the world around them. Words meant exactly what they meant. Declared insane three years before he died, Jonathan Swift founded St Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles, as he said, “a House for Fools and [the] Mad.” No need for euphemisms. Humour was raw; politics, religion, war, and social mores were there to be discussed and debated. Life was hard, complex, brutal – but it was essential to inform and to convince. It was also the Golden Age of satire and irony.
Dr. Jonathan Swift was Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. We know he gave sermons, (essentially long moral essays), every fifth week. We are told the pews were packed for his sermons on such topics as humility, false witness, and conscience. Reading them today we are reminded of the simple and direct beauty of the Book of Common Prayer. He was deadly serious and earnest in his religion – and in his duty to the King. But he was not one dimensional.
He was more than prolific in his political activities in writing books and pamphleteering on human nature and for various causes he supported. Besides Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, (“a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food,”) he wrote numerous pamphlets on various causes and debates. Could such writing be published today? He defended the poor and the underdogs against the rich and the exploitive. Many others wrote as well, and it was an exciting time to be alive; debate was rampant in the body politic. Satire was often vitriolic, the irony almost unlimited. Perhaps the greatest female satirist in the English language, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote:
“Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that’s scarcely felt or seen.”
Ironically, some of her writing cuts deeply and painfully. The fact remains people stood up to fight for what they believed in; there was no reward for cowering. In some ways, it could not be more different than today.
This passion spilled over in humour for some of the less important aspects of daily life. A recurrent topic over the centuries has been, and will always be, the harmless banter over the differences between men and women. Aristophanes is perhaps the best known – in his Lysistrata, women, otherwise powerless against the bloodthirsty and warring men, decide to withhold sex until peace is declared. The men, walking around with large erections from unfulfilled sex, are laughing stocks, and agree to peace. Once again, unlike today, the ageless “battle” of the sexes, is funny.
One of Swift’s lesser-known booklets is The Benefits of Farting Explained, and a better-known poem, The Lady’s Dressing Room. While the squeamish might recoil from the title of the booklet alone, it would be to their loss. The booklet and poem are clever, funny, and find a place in the canon for their richness of imagery, imagination, and poetic reach. In fact, given the responses of the day from others, flatulence and the dictates of human nature indicate an openness in our leaders that we do not tolerate to-day.
In his booklet, Swift provides pseudo-scientific reasons for the reason why women are “excitable” and “high strung” from a stereotypical male point of view. Of course, it would be considered misogynist today. He notes men are given to spontaneous and undisguised farting. Being less inhibited, men let fly farts at will, whereas women, being more polite, tend to squeeze their butt cheeks together, containing them. We may remember the ancient Sumerian joke from more than 4,000 years ago that a “wife does not fart upon her husband’s lap.” As a result of not releasing this harmful wind (it does smell, of course, and contains germs), Swift postulates, these “fart” vapours ascend to the lady’s brain upsetting her judgement and reason – causing her kind the emotional “upheavals” of stridency, bossiness, bitchiness, irrationality, etc., that some men accuse women of exhibiting. Understatement it is not. It is funny, silly and rude.
What makes the booklet amusing beyond its ouvert silliness is the inclusion of experts’ opinions from live test results and analysis. The absurdity of the hypothesis, the tests, the analysis, and the conclusions of experts on the four parameters to obtain mass flow rate of the stream of a fart; (the actual volumetric flow, temperature, pressure and composition), remind us of some of the “experts” and “science” that we are surrounded with today! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Funnier still is that others, such as Charles James Fox, continued the genre with (modified) quotations from Horace, Homer, Vergil – and he even makes the observation that Adam and Eve, before the Fall, never farted. One of his “Famous Farters through History” is the (apocryphal) Grecian army sentry who farts loudly (as reported by (the illusory) Peditorius The Elder) and unsettles a surprise Persian attack… Of course, living in his age, he cannot resist the rivalry between the French and the English, and so has the “stout, honest, and noble English turd” as the choice fertilizer chosen by French farmers, who fight over the wares of hawkers who have them. It is art as it is a combination of the imagination, cleverness, the juxtaposition of opposites and the unexpected. I can’t see it being written today. Come to think of it, when was the last time you read something funny? Fox even dedicated his book impudently to the Chancellor of the Exchequer – and suffered no ill consequences for his naughtiness.
They were clearly more robust times in those days. There were no worries about offending people; and freedom of speech was taken for granted – especially when compared to today’s world. “Taking the mickey out” of someone can be daunting – but, surprisingly to modern preconceived prejudices, women could give it back better than they received it.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was no typical lady of the 18th – or even the 21st – century. She is one lady I wish I could have met. She taught herself Latin, and, at the aged of seven, was declared the beauty of the year by no less than the famous political and literary Kit Kat Club. At six she had announced that she was writing “an uncommon history.” She also expressed an interest at an early age “to catch the setting sun.” She would indeed set out to do the impossible throughout her life. She had two books of verse by the time she was 15. It will not surprise you to learn she disobeyed her father by eloping, saying to her betrothed, “I…come to you with only a night-gown and petticoat.” She is also remembered for promoting inoculation against smallpox nearly 100 years before Jenner – giving her own children a little smallpox, in the Turkish fashion, and wrote extensively and interestingly about her life in Ottoman Istanbul (The Turkish Embassy Letters) as the wife of the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte.
Tellingly, she also wrote the poem The Reasons that Induced Dr. S to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room. This poem was written in response to Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room. Swift’s poem can be seen as a satire on the idealization of women by men. The poem has many levels – starting with the observation that the man is an interloper to the private room of a lady – and grotesquely details all of the detritus of a human – from sweat, to spit, to snot, to smelly stale pee in a chamber pot to smelly feet smells in dirty stockings. For our tastes, it is shocking. Also upset, Lady Montagu brilliantly replies in her poem by suggesting Swift is an aged man who cannot perform when he has paid for sex with a prostitute, and, when she refuses to return the money he paid for sex, that he will write a poem about the lady’s dressing room in revenge. Lady Montagu has Swift say:
“I’ll so describe your dressing room
The very Irish shall not come.
She answered short, “I’m glad you’ll write.
You’ll furnish paper when I shite.”
As I said before, it was a golden age for free speech. Back then, it was not necessary to have misleading videos of “Charters of Rights and Freedoms” that the North Koreans and Canadians have today.
