By the Lord, cries She then, if my Husband e’er come,
Once again with his Will for to tickle my Bum,
I’ll storm, and I’ll swear, and I’ll run staring wild;
And yet the next Night, the Man got her with Child.
S. M. 1708.
(Pt. 2, pp. 10-11)
S. M. is clearly unsympathetic to the plight of married women in an age with only the most primitive forms of birth control.[4] The picture of her as a long-suffering person is undercut by the casual male assumption that giving birth was not really dangerous and that women make too much of the pain and difficulty. That women were often forced to go through thirteen or fourteen deliveries when little thought had yet been given to creating an antiseptic environment for childbirth is apparently of little concern to S. M., who finds in the apparent willingness of the woman to have sexual intercourse one more time sufficient reason for contempt.
In addition to giving glimpses into social attitudes, The Merry-Thought has a variety of inscriptions that show the way these writings functioned. Professor George Guffey, in his introduction to the first part of this work (ARS 216 [1982], iii-iv), remarks upon the proposal scene carried on in Moll Flanders between Moll and the admirer who will prove her third husband and her brother. Such scenes involving witty proposals and responses cut into the windows of taverns were real enough at the time. The exchange in part two of The Merry-Thought is not, however, half so satisfactory. The woman takes umbrage at her admirer’s suggestions that the glass on which he writes is “the Emblem” of her mind in being “brittle, slipp’ry, [and] pois’nous,” and writes in retort:
I must confess, kind Sir, that though this Glass,
Can’t prove me brittle, it proves you an Ass.