FREE ESSAY ON HARD TIMES

HARD TIMES

A Modest ProposalJonathan Swift wrote this essay as a satirical proposal for the purpose
of exploiting social and economic issues in a sophisticated and comic way. Its main
purpose is to prevent the poor people of Ireland, particularly the children, not to be
burdens on their parents and to their country and for making them useful to society. This
proposal suggesting the idea of cannibalism is a grimly sarcastic letter of
recommendation in which the citizens of Ireland suggest that economic conditions could be
diminished if the poor parent=s children were used as dainty for the nobles and
gentlemen=s dinner table. Swift presented his proposal by making his idea appealing to
the public. He does this by focusing on the positive outcome of his proposal: the number
of Catholics will be lessened, the poor people will have something to pay their bills
with and the shortage of food will be solved. 
Swift was concerned mainly with the dilemma of his own class that=s why he made this
proposal. He was annoyed at the apathy of the Irish people who got used to their
situation that they seemed powerless to change how England and a wealthy Irish
businessman mistreated their own kind. 
Swift expressed his rage and anger by making his proposal bizarre, which he suggested
cannibalism-- eating babies, selling them to the market as a source of income. He
suggests that since babies cannot be useful to the nation because they are
still-dependant on their parents, and since their parents only earn little money, why not
treat them as livestock? So that it gives the parent extra money after they sell the
babies meat to the market. 
 I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who,
as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the
children. In this quotation the proposer suggested that a way for the poor people to pay
their rent, by breeding and selling their year old infants to the landlord in order to
gain enough money to pay their logging. His intention wasn't only to help the Irish
people but also to ridicule ( in a satirical way) the Catholic religion because it's a
well-known fact that the stereotypical Catholic (native Irish Catholics) likes to have a
lot of children and the Anglo Irish (rich Protestant Irish) were worried because they
were being out numbered by the native Irish. 
The consumption of the poor Irish babies by the rich, implicates that the Protestants are
winning the holy religious war by grossly reducing the number of Catholic with respect to
the number of Protestant.
This essay can be considered as a work of satire because of Swift's peculiar idea of
making the poor peoples baby as a prime delicacy to feed the starving people of Ireland.
He treated the poor people as if they had no personality or character, in other words
like animals. Behind this bizarre proposal is a serious Jonathan Swift who is deeply
concern in the future of Ireland in the hands of England.  A Modest Proposal is a
presentation of Swift's anger and aggravation, but also it is simply the most cruel, the
most inhuman and the most heavily ironic proposal in an attempt to humiliate England and
to stun Ireland out of its lifeless state. 
The cleverest thing that Jonathan Swift does is when he excludes himself by saying  I
have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine
years old, and my wife past childbearing. He makes a final shot at lawmakers, and proves
him self a hypocrite, having known fully well that he himself could not have gone through
these hardships he proposed--a final bit of humor since he would, ironically, never be
able be to profit from his own proposal.
A modern reader would consider this proposal as abhorrent, and a heinous proposal because
it deviates all the norms and values of our modern society, but if we are going to look
at Swift point of view, it's not bad at all because his main purpose was not to
annihilate the Catholic race, his main purpose was to make England and the wealthy Irish
businessmen to be aware of what they are doing.
ARVIN E. MATIENZO
Student # 9810104
Teacher: Liam Phelan-Cox
Subject: Humanities
April 15, 1999