Stella

Clearly, Swift had a single mould into which he tried to press the character of any young lady who attracted him, and that mould was constructed from his own experience as a child. He evaded marriage ¹ in order to escape his father’s fate: an untimely death, with the abandonment of a pregnant wife to the dependence of poverty. So also his way of showing love was to offer the most valuable gift he knew, the role of the father he never possessed. He had to educate the woman in such a way as to eradicate the sexual difference that excited and troubled him; he had to depreciate the physical basis of her seductive power and to elevate the moral and intellectual qualities. Yet he kept the prerogatives of male hegemony in an enlarged form and even added those of a female; for he required women to make the first advances to him rather than he to them. ² He chose frail women and separated them from their mothers to increase their dependence; but he attentively guarded their interests and urged them to learn independence; because as surrogates for his younger self they had to be cherished and respected as he had not been. In caring for them, he was both repeating and mending the wrongs he had once suffered.