50 pages • 1 hour read
Jonathan SwiftA Modest Proposal
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1729A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Livestock
At repeated intervals, the narrator uses the language of animal husbandry to describe the infant children of Ireland’s poor. He compares the male-to-female ratio of the children kept alive as breeding stock to similar ratios used in the raising of cattle and sheep. He remarks favorably that “[i]nfant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year” (54), and he speaks of flaying and dressing infant carcasses to make men’s and women’s accessories. The use of such horrifying language serves two purposes. The first is to offer a point of contrast to the narrator’s otherwise measured rhetoric, a juxtaposition that helps lend the piece its darkly comedic tone. To be clear, this is not the comedy of catharsis or release, but rather the comedy of shock and perversion.
The other purpose of the livestock symbolism is to emphasize the dehumanizing effects of the Anglo-Irish elite’s policy proposals concerning the poor. Many of the most influential economic thinkers of Swift’s time accepted an emergent mercantile view of labor that saw workers and their families as commodities and assigned each individual a market value. With the growth of global supply chains enabled by the bloody and costly Age of Exploration, economists came to think of individuals as human capital to be invested whatever way possible into the growing machine of industrialism. By taking this paradigm to its logical extreme, Swift’s narrator sees no more value in a poor infant than he does in a hog or a sheep.
Absentees
When Swift’s narrator rejects “taxing our absentees” (57) as an alternative to eating babies, many modern readers may fail to ascertain his meaning. To the 18th-century reader, however, the meaning of “absentee” is clear: The narrator refers to absentee landlords who rent property to tenants without living in the local region themselves. To Swift and his Irish contemporaries, landlord absenteeism was an enormous source of contention. Dating back to the 16th century, England confiscated much of the land in Ireland from Catholics and granted it to settlers of English and Scottish descent. By the early 18th century, a huge portion of Irish Catholics lived on land rented by landlords who maintained English or Scottish residency. Therefore, the rent payments would circulate in England and Scotland, supporting those economies rather than Ireland’s and leaving non-landowning Catholics—in other words, virtually all Catholics—stuck in a cycle of poverty with virtually no opportunity for upward mobility. Thus, the narrator’s repeated invocations of “landlords” and “absentees” fits into the broader sociopolitical context of 18th-century Ireland.
Psalmanazar
“Psalmanazar” refers to George Psalmanazar, a French-born imposter who gained fame and notoriety for posing as a native of Taiwan. For Swift’s purposes, he attributes portions of his child-eating proposal to the authority of Psalmanazar, who by the time of Swift’s writing had long ago confessed his deception, causing the public to hold him in generally low repute. Therefore, invoking Psalmanazar as an authority on any matter casts the narrator as deeply out of touch. Furthermore, Swift’s use of the authoritative argument here is consistent with the rhetoric found in the pamphlets he seeks to lampoon.
Related Titles
By Jonathan Swift
