Illusions and Impressions
This week we looked at Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room," and I think like most people did, I absolutely loved it. I found the bluntness of it to be fabulous and the harshness to be delicious. The amount of effort some women put into their appearance is questionable. It almost makes you wonder what they would ordinarily look like. Although I think Swift's poem is overly exaggerated (however, quite rightly so considering it is a satiric piece), there is truth behind it. Recently in one of my other courses, my professor was talking about his wife and how she would often complain of being a woman. She would tell him how lucky he was. He never had to worry about putting on makeup, being humiliated for not wearing a bra, or being overweight at the beach. Not many would question the appearance of a man. So why should women care so much? Why should they be so dependent on what others think? I think this poem illustrates the extent to which women worry about these things. They waste five hours of their day trying to make a good impression. I think this poem also has a lot do with appearances and visual illusions. Things are not as they always seem. Margaret Atwood wrote under a similar context when she wrote "At the Tourist Centre in Boston." The beginning of the poem discusses a tourist office in which there is a map of Canada, where the cities are displayed by red dots and the provinces are reduced to ten blownup snapshots. In each snapshot there is not "mountains and lakes and more lakes[...]with nobody climbing the trails and hauling out the fish and splashing in the water but arrangements of grinning tourists." She argues that Canada has covered up Native life, that anything left of the natural world has been reduced to "machines and assorted garbage." Who would want to visit Canada? Especially when everything is a "manufatured hallucination, a cynical fiction, a lure for export only." Like Swift, Atwood exposes Canada's need to make a good impression. Just like the repulsive and shameless woman, we are a repulsive and shameless country, simply trying to make a few bucks off an illusion.