Vanity

The poem has a complex relationship with the idea of vanity. In literature, and perhaps especially in the satiric literature of the period, vanity was attributed to women as one of the principal traits that defined femininity. This is particularly true for women who were considered to be beautiful. Many texts, visual and literary, reveal a deep-seated sense of resentment and distaste for the effort that women put into maintaining their physical appearances. The idea that female beauty was deceptive, or at least maintained through deception, and that women put care into their appearances in order to “trick” men into being interested in them, is one that persists even today. This construction of female vanity goes along with a number of other misogynistic tropes: that women are shallow, that they care only about appearances, that they are incapable of deeper thought, and that they are deceptive...