A Modest Proposal Essay -- essays research papers

Have You Eaten Yet? Swifts Final Solution&9As a lately favored eighteenth century essay, Jonathan Swifts "Proposal" has been canonized as a satirical model of wit. As will be discussed shortly, Swifts essay is often seen as an solelyegory for Englands oppression of Ireland. Swift, himself and Irishman (Tucker 142), would seem to have pointed his razor wit against the foreign nation trusty for his citys ruin. Wearing the lens of a New Historicist, however, requires that we reexamine the power structures at officiate in Swifts society. We must dig out into non only Swifts "Proposal," but also into other of his correspondence, and even into discourse of the epoch in order to gain a thickheaded description of the many levels of understanding present in Swifts "Proposal." &9As a model of rhetorical discourse, Jonathan Swifts "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Public" is unique among the plethora of pamphlets which circulated Ireland in the early eighteenth century. However, it is imprudent to think of the work as having emerged purely isolated from the pressures of the society in which Swift wrote. While propositions such as "A Modest Proposal for the More Certain and yet More Easie Provision for the Poor, and Likewise for the Better Suppression of TheivesTending Much to the Advancement of Trade, Especially in the most Profitable Part of It," (Author Unknown, Cited in Rawson 189) were commonly circulated in order to postulate solutions to the crises of the day, Jonathan Swifts "Proposal" has been read as a scoff of this sort of pamphlet (Rawson 189). There can be no solid support for such a thesis, and it would be wrong to infer that what is at work in Swifts "Proposal" in any important sense is a burlesque on project concerning the poor or on the titles of certain types of econo mic tracts. The mimicry of these things which Swift employs is but seasoning, and not the main point. Likewise, to suggest that Swift was radically attacking the notion of economic planning of homo affairs, or even that his attitude on certain central questions was humane or liberal is misleading. The majority of interp... ...ocaust becomes a close analogue to the "proposal," since the problem, whose formulation and truly existence might elsewhere seem preposterous, underwent a Final Solution with hideous efficiency. This comparison reinforces the point that the "proposal" is not a sheer fantasy, nor a sardonically frivolous gesture of despair. With a New Historic lens, we must examine the interplay of interpretations of the history we have been taught. As Tyson puts it, "had the Nazis won World War II, we would all be reading a very different account of the war." (Tyson 282) We cannot be satisfied with any interpretation of history which relies on subject ive information. &9It is not surprising that the targets of Swifts satire cannot be, and are not meant to be, clearly distinguished from one another, nor that Swifts allegiances between the English, the Anglo-Irish, and the natives are blurred and move things. These confusions provide essential energies of Swifts style. The "Modest Proposal" clearly is an embodiment of the complexities and contradictions of the English-Irish relationship in the eighteenth century.