Satire In A Modest Proposal

In the satirical essay, A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift mockingly discusses dark comical solutions to the Irish’s economy, provoking dangerous aspects of satire. Satire often exposes a subject to ridicule, often through exaggeration or irony, which is used in this essay to depict poverty and passivity of Ireland. Swift takes advantage of overlooked political pamphlets, during late seventeenth century, to construct his own satirical proposal: working-class families should sell their children to the English upper-class as a scheme to produce themselves an income. Thus, the danger of this, in the perspective of how it is likely to inflict problems, is if the audience perceive this at face value and take offence to the stereotype Swift is ridiculing

Swift uses The Proposer as a vehicle to demonstrate the absurdity of discrimination against Irish Catholics as he ‘observed’ that the other beneficial factor to eating Irish children is that ‘it would greatly lessen the Number of Papists’. The ‘papists’ are Catholics, those who believe in the spiritual primacy of the Pope and are the Irish Protestants ‘dangerous enemies’; therefore, his proposal ‘will have one other Collateral Advantage’ due to the decrease of Papists. Thus, this is symbolic of the religious prejudices Swift intended to expose with A Modest Proposal. During the time, Irish Catholics were treated as second-class citizens with less rights than Irish protestants, where it was illegal for them to buy land and obtain a mortgage. An ethical issue that is continually debated within Christian denominations such as Protestants and Catholics are abortions to which the Proposer has concluded. He believes that his ‘Scheme’ will have a ‘great Advantage’ as by consuming children will ‘prevent those voluntary Abortions’. Despite the proposer’s reputation as a cold calculator, he actually makes frequent reference to moral feelings to justify his decisions, as when he suggests that his scheme to kill children for food later on “will prevent those voluntary Abortions, and that horrid Practice of Women murdering their Bastard Children; alas! too