Misanthropy in a Modest Proposal

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Misanthropy in “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift “The judgements that Swift’s satires ask us to make go well beyond straightforward condemnation of the work’s obvious target; rather, we are led to form a series of deeper judgements about language, religion, and politics, and about the operations of human vice and virtue that govern these activities in others and in ourselves.” Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay written in 1729 that suggests improvements for the Irish living situations and social oppressions of the eighteenth century; Swift addresses particularly the issues regarding poverty, hunger, beggars, and abortions to avoid the expense of providing for the child, and unites all these problems in one, making each cause and consequence of the other, but an important issue worth noticing lays below the surface of his proposal, and that is the inhumanity with which he refers to the solution to this problems. Swift refers to the abortions and the providing of these children as the consequence of the economic situation in the country and as the reason for which he is writing his proposal. At the beginning he addresses the subject in a sympathetic way, but at the same time the language used in the next lines, foreshadows the proposal’s real purpose of outraging its audience: ...it will prevent those voluntary abortions, and that horrid practise of women murdering their bastard children, alas, too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes, I doubt, more to avoid the expense than the shame, which would move tears and pity in the most savage and inhuman breast. By using words such as “murder”, “bastard” and “innocent”, he demonstrates his lack of real sympathy towards the babies, by first addressing them as if they were a despised object, but afterwards, trying to produce pathos in his audience in order to
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