Wednesday, March 28, 2012

What are the possible objections to the proposal in "A Modest Proposal"?

If you mean what possible objections people might have to the proposal itself, the most common would be that is it inhumane to solve the problem of poverty by making it possible for poor women to sell their year-old babies as food to be eaten at rich people's tables. Cannibalism is unpleasant at any age, but most people are revolted by the idea of eating a freshly killed baby served "hot off the knife." Swift meant for people to react with horror to this proposal. He hoped it would lead them to embrace a more humane solution to problem of rampant poverty in Ireland and even proposed several humane ideas in his essay (while having his narrator brush them off). It's important to note that Swift himself is not proposing eating babies. It is his clueless narrator, representing the kind of mindless bureaucrats who dealt with the poor as objects, not real human beings.


However, if you mean what possible objections people might have to the essay itself, some early audiences were horrified. They missed the satire--that Swift was in fact poking fun at this hard-hearted approach to poverty--and thought his suggestion was serious. Naturally, they reacted by thinking he was a very sick individual. Today, however, the essay is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, example of a satiric essay in the English language. 

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