During the Great Potato Famine of 1740, Ireland was undergoing a potato famine as well as over population. A different problem from this time period was that the protestant government was being overbearing and controlling with their Penal Laws that discriminated against the lower classes in Ireland. These three problems put together caused many families to become poor and depressed and in need of laughter and comedy, and that is exactly what Jonathan Swift brought with his essay. Shifting from a grim to a sarcastic tone in A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift employs dramatic imagery, humorous pantagruelism, and skewed logic in order to mock the overruling government and provide humor for the lower classes.
The beginning of the proposal immediately provides the audience with illustrations of “cabbin-doors crowded with beggars of the female sex” and “six children, all in rags, and importuning every passenger for an alms.” These descriptions provide the reader insight to the lives of the inferior Irish individuals who were constantly pulling the short end of the stick. It describes the scene where mothers would have their children “in [their] arms, or on [their] backs, or at [their] heels” while they all begged for food and money to help them survive. With this first paragraph alone, the reader can now imagine the difficulties that the majority of Ireland’s population was having because there were too many mouths to feed, and not enough potatoes, or food in general, to go around. Soon introducing his modest proposal, though, Swift now offers images of “young healthy child[ren]” as “a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food.” In continuation of his proposal he continues to use this sarcastic tone to bring humor to his paper and laughter to his audience.
As a resident himself, Jonathan Swift knows firsthand how serious of a situation is it in Ireland. He starts off the proposal with a serious tone, stating only the facts and using only one point of view. Soon he is able to transform the work into having a sarcastic tone where he can poke fun at the government and their lack of validity. Statements about eating children, such as “the nation’s stock will be thereby increased fifty thousand pounds per annum,” create pantagruelism by directing the attention to the nation and how it will benefit from such a gruesome action as eating a child. By describing that “infant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March, and a little before and after,” suggests that children are like fruit; they are best if picked and eaten while still ripe. Another example of pantagruelism is with a man towards his wife. For example, this simile: “men would become as fond of their wives, during the time of their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares in foal,” creates a different condition where Swift is making fun of the treatment of a woman by her husband, even though domestic abuse is a serious topic.
Logic, in a proposal such as this, is important to include. Jonathan Swift’s use of logos towards the beginning of his essay supplies a base for everything else to work off of and support. Also, it is important that he provided the logic before he transferred to a sarcastic tone because otherwise all of this statistics would have been discredited. “There only remain an hundred and twenty thousand children of poor parents annually born” is only one example of Swift’s logos, but it is very useful because it includes information about the large amount of children that are being born and causing the over population. On the other hand, Swift does continue to use logos after he establishes his proposal, and that is what makes it skewed. An example of this new skewed logic is when he says, “I am assured by our merchants,” then proceeds to talk about older children being “no saleable commodity.” The introduction phrase gives the rest of the sentence validity because it infers that what he is about to say is not just a guess, it is a fact—but really, it is completely fake. Also, Swift’s strategic use of numbers, as in, “of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed,” offer a different form of validity that is similar to the previous answer in that it makes it more real, but false at the same time. Swift’s use of logic, although in some places not true, presents reliable statements for the rest of the malarkey to build off of.
The bluntness of the imagery, the reliability of the logos, and the humor of the pantagruelism all come together to form the humorous piece of work that Jonathan Swift was striving for. It is an essay that was able to include all of Ireland’s troubles and capitalize on each. The most important one, it seems, was his cure for over population—just eat the babies before they get too old. There was also an emphasis on the government’s discrimination of the lower class Irish individuals when he mentioned that women and their children have to beg for food and money. That same scene provides an example of the poverty and hunger that the potato famine caused. Jonathan Swift was able to bring humor into A Modest Proposal by creating over exaggerated sarcasm through imagery, pantagruelism and logos.
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