A Modest Proposal Analysis
- A Modest Proposal satirizes politicians and officials who sought to "solve" the food shortages in Ireland with figures and calculations. Swift's essay presents an absurd idea (the consumption of babies to solve the food shortage) in a rational, scientific way, highlighting the limits of a logical approach.
- The full title of the essay is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick. Readers soon learn, however, that Swift's proposal is anything but "modest." This makes the title ironic.
Analysis
Last Updated on May 4, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 310
The essay begins innocently by establishing the speaker as a concerned citizen genuinely sympathetic to the Irish poor, whose suffering he describes in moving detail. Most readers no doubt find the voice of this speaker strikingly familiar: like a politician, social scientist, or committee chairperson, he presents himself as sensitive, knowledgeable, and confident in his ability to resolve a serious problem by rational analysis.
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The reader’s confidence in the speaker vanishes quickly after the first few paragraphs, however, as Swift engineers one of the most shocking moments in all of English literature. The modest proposal, humbly presented and drafted at great length, argues for the many advantages of the Irish people raising their children as food to be sold at great profit to the landlords throughout the kingdom. Far from being horrified by this suggestion, as the reader surely is, the speaker continues to imagine himself as a disinterested patriot offering his countrymen a practical and almost miraculously effective way to reduce poverty, overpopulation, and an unfavorable balance of trade with England.
The most powerfully ironic aspect of this essay is rather obvious. The modest proposal is of course anything but modest: it is savage, frightening, perhaps even insane. But other subtle ironies and satiric targets may be overlooked if the speaker is simply dismissed as an extravagant madman. Most important, Swift characterizes him as rational and calculating in order to show that these qualities are dangerous when taken to an extreme: people who rely on speculative reason to solve problems may end up thinking the unthinkable rather than following what should be more natural and humane impulses of common sense and compassion, and those who treat humans as numbers rather than as living beings—recall how often the speaker in the essay computes and quantifies—are only one short step away from making it easier to murder them.
Bibliography
Last Updated on May 4, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 407
Akroyd, Clarissa. Savage Satire: The Story of Jonathan Swift. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 2006. Intended for young adults, this biography includes commentary on Swift’s greatest works, Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.
Barnett, Louise. Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. A study of Swift’s relations to women in his life and writings; links A Modest Proposal to Swift’s repugnance at overpopulation, untrammeled human reproduction, and coldly biological motherhood.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Jonathan Swift: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 2000. In this critical biography for young adult readers, the noted literary critic Harold Bloom describes A Modest Proposal as a preeminent example of Swift’s satire, the most savage and merciless in the history of Western literature.
DeGategno, Paul, and R. Jay Stubblefield. Critical Companion to Jonathan Swift: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2006. Comprehensive survey and analysis of Swift’s life and writings, topically arranged.
Fox, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. In this collection of essays on Swift’s life and literature, essayist Patrick Kelly finds A Modest Proposal rhetorically brilliant but mistaken in its economic diagnosis of Irish poverty.
Kelly, Ann. Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Study of Swift as a maker of his own cultural myth and as a modern mythologized literary celebrity. Argues that, in modern culture, Swift as the author of A Modest Proposal represents the epitome of the artist as hero, presenting truths that polite society finds offensive.
Meyers, Jeffrey. “Swift and Kafka.” Papers on Language and Literature 40, no. 3 (Summer, 2004): 329–336. Short study of Swift’s influence on the writer Franz Kafka. Meyer’s description of the animalistic imagery favored by Swift and Kafka is well exemplified in A Modest Proposal, with its farm animal references to breeders and to humans as table fare.
Rawson, Claude, and Ian Higgins. The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. A volume in the masterful Norton Critical Edition series, including the best editions of Swift’s major works, with biographical and critical annotations and essays.
Wittkowsky, George. “Swift’s Modest Proposal: The Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4, no. 1 (January, 1943): 74–104. Pioneering literary study of A Modest Proposal, demonstrating its parody of contemporary political tracts that proposed newfangled economic solutions to Great Britain’s woes.
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