A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift

Journal What should be done to prevent poverty or lessen the personal and the social devastation it causes?

Background A Modest Proposal grows out of Swift’s furious indignation, his disgust with English oppression and Irish corruption and stupidity. Swift insisted that Ireland deserved fair treatment as part of the United Kingdom – he hated his fellow Anglo-Irishmen and despised the masses of what he saw as ignorant, self-destructive peasants He became a national hero in Ireland’s defense

The Projector Through a created persona (the projector), Swift proposes a solution for poverty in eighteenth century Ireland Instead of speaking in his own voice, Swift creates a character who resembles a modern economic planner with ideas about restructuring society to make it better He is out to analyze conditions rather than to assign blame for them

Satire Making fun of an issue in order to improve it Satiric device: the calm, reasonable projector who humbly presents a totally unreasonable proposal to solve Ireland’s economic problems The projector’s announced benevolent, humanitarian purpose (to alleviate suffering, decrease crime, and improve the economy) and objectivity (expressed in the language of calculation) lull leaders into a mood of acceptance from which they suddenly awaken to an awful realization.

Where did the idea come from? “People are the riches of a nation” was a political maxim of Swift’s time One political arithmetician (economist) published a tract referring to people as “a most precious commodity” Swift extends “commodity” to its logical (if unexpected) extreme

Metaphor Just after making his proposal, the speaker admits that babies will be somewhat expensive food and therefore “very proper for landlords, who as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children” By devoured, he can’t mean actual eating – the word is a metaphor: by exploiting their tenants, the landlords are “eating them up”

Is he serious? Especially in our own time, some readers have found this a confusing essay. They have missed the irony Swift intended and thought that he was seriously proposing cannabalism. – Why is there this confusion?

The Language of Calculation Why does he keep quoting numbers and assigning financial value to human bodies? – References to statistics, costs, and benefits make human problems seem only an economic problem of commodities and their prices By using this language of calculation, and what we might call “cost-benefit analysis” is Swift attacking a certain kind of approach to human problems? – Swift attacks blindness of any approach that replaces moral and human values with economic values

Real suggestions? In italics Swift himself had proposed these measures elsewhere

Types of Appeal Logical: supports a position with evidence such as facts, statistics, and expert testimony Emotional: arouses strong feelings, often by using charged words Ethical: establishes the writer’s credibility and objectivity

Assignment Write a modest proposal concerning a contemporary social problem – it can be a community or a school problem. Write three body paragraphs (use a different type of appeal in each paragraph)