Satire is a literary form which traditionally uses exaggeration and irony, blended with humour, to critique social issues and the moral failings of society indirectly. This indirectness and exaggeration have the potential to expose the underlying logic of social attitudes to the reader, but they can also render the reader blind to any criticism which could be drawn from the satire at the expense of their own selves.
Swift’s A Modest Proposal illustrates how satire can both support and contradict his claim that satire exposes readers’ tendency to recognise social flaws in others, while making the reader blind to their own complicity in the social tendencies critiqued in the text. This essay will explore how satire can both reinforce and break self-deception through examining how A Modest Proposal mimics real economic discourse of the 18th century, targeting not just policy but ways of thinking, and thus may lead the reader to reflect on whether he is complicit through shared values. The essay will also comment on how the extremity of satire is a double-edged sword, which challenges this blindness to social ills by forcing attentive readers into uncomfortable self-recognition.
For Swift, satire is a “glass” (i.e. a mirror) which, rather than reflecting one’s own faults, tends to expose other people’s faults, but in either case, what satire does is to critique through exposure. Swift’s A Modest Proposal is an extreme satirical critique of poverty and exploitation, which seeks to bring a mirror to the suffering of the Irish during the early eighteenth century in the context of British occupation and poverty in Ireland, thus reflecting the British ruling class’s economic exploitation and mismanagement of Ireland. To achieve this, Swift utilises a narrator whose language reduces people to commodities. The proposer (i.e. narrator) describes children as a “saleable commodity,” reduces their corpses to “carcases,” and refers to Irish women with their biological function as “breeders.” Swift’s exposure of the easily identifiable greed and inhumanity of the British settler ruling class in Ireland works through the narrator’s language of economic efficiency, which erodes moral boundaries. Arguably, rather than identifying the narrator with Swift himself, he could be viewed as Swift’s attempt at parodying the use of language by failed reformers of the economic system in Ireland. The dehumanising language serves as a tool to expose the ineffective reformer’s language as facilitating exploitation, even when it is understated, optimistic, and without malice. This is most evident when the narrator lists the social advantages of the proposal: discouraging abortion, strengthening marriage and crucially stimulating the economy. These appeals rely on the narrator’s assumed audience to already hold these values, or at least they appeal to familiarity with capitalistic logic in the economic and political discourse of the actual audience. This familiarity serves to make the proposer’s voice appear superficially reasonable and coherent, but since cannibalism is only coherent but not reasonable, it may lead the reader to question the validity of the values which the narrator presumes the audience holds by appealing to them and by implying that cannibalism would be reasonable according to those capitalistic values. On the other hand, some readers may identify those values but only as exaggerated to absurdity, leading them to reject the satire’s criticism to protect their worldview. This rejection partially vindicates Swift’s view that people are apt not to see themselves satirised, although it could be argued that to reject the satirical portrayal as inaccurate, the reader needs to perceive the satire as a critique of their views. Near the end of the essay, the narrator does acknowledge other solutions, such as taxing landlords, treating tenants in a humane manner, and supporting domestic industry, but the narrator dismisses these suggestions quickly despite their practicality when compared to cannibalism. This rejection clarifies the real accusation of Swift’s essay. Just as the proposer’s attempt to dehumanise the poor shows how commercial language can be used to reduce them to economic objects, the inability to enact reasonable policies may be due to their not being valued as humans by the property-owning classes. The narrator’s inability to see fault in his own proposal and the reader’s ability to see it may be viewed as a countermeasure against the lack of self-criticism which Swift warned about.
Alternatively, the reader may be led to distance themselves from the proposal’s narrator due to the absurd and immoral notion of advocating for cannibalism. This satiric distance creates a sense of moral superiority over the proposer and the ruling class, which it is indirectly criticising. This sense of moral superiority separates the reader and the narrator, and in doing so may lead the reader to see the proposer as monstrous, but not themselves as monstrous. The proposal is so grotesque that the reader can comfortably assume that they themselves would never support such an idea. This reinforces Swift’s idea that people fail to see their own reflection in satire. However, by allowing the reader to have this reaction, Swift still forces the reader to self-reflect and consider why society’s or their own treatment of the poor feels less grotesque than cannibalism, thus creating the chance for unsettling the reader’s convictions. This, coupled with shock, surprise and disgust at the proposal, may jolt the reader out of the defensive lack of self-recognition in the satire, question the distance between themselves and the proposer and turn the disgust, which was a shield against self-recognition in the satire, into a tool for self-recognition rather than assumed moral superiority.
Even if exaggerated for effect, the logic of the proposal mirrors real economic thinking by using calculations of profit and a detached rational tone. For example, the narrator calmly calculates that a child would weigh around twenty-eight pounds and could therefore provide a profitable meal. He even estimates how many could be preserved for breeding and how many could be sold to wealthy landlords. These calculations then imitate the style of economic proposals that attempted to solve poverty through statistics and financial planning. The calm and deliberately rational tone of these calculations contrasts sharply with the horrifying nature of the suggested proposal to the economic issues facing Ireland in the early eighteenth century. This contrast is there to suggest that society may treat social problems through purely abstract reasoning without moral consideration. This satire’s “glass” then begins to reflect the reader’s own world, or at least the form which policy proposals with statistics take to justify the way in which society already treats the poor as expendable. Therefore, the “glass” reflects systems, not just individuals. This recognition may bring discomfort to the reader, and so not all readers will recognise themselves in the proposal’s glass, even if they may recognise the criticism of society’s systems of exploitation. Instead, some may miss the irony of looking down on the proposal’s logic or focus only on the shocking nature of cannibalism. The limits of self-recognition in satire are then set by the reader’s interpretation. This may lead many to “see everybody’s face but their own”, as Swift holds in his definition. Satire here partially relies on irony, meaning its meaning is never entirely fixed. Some readers may interpret the proposal as only shocking rather than a critique of the social attitudes pervasive in society. Others may condemn the narrator without recognising that the reasoning behind the proposal resembles real arguments used to justify exploitation. In this way, the “glass” of satire reflects different images depending on how carefully the reader chooses to analyse.
However, the extremity of satire still has the potential of pushing the reader towards awareness. For example, if the reader finds the proposal too disturbing to ignore, the shock may lead to deeper reflection to understand why the proposal feels wrong. Thus, by presenting an idea that is impossible to accept morally, the text forces the reader to confront the attitudes which make the proposal appear logically consistent. This may lead to recognition of society’s real cruelties, rather than simply distancing themselves. In other words, through disgust and shocking the reader, satire has the potential to break the pattern Swift describes. Thus, the disgust produced by the essay becomes an important factor in satire’s moral argument, as it induces the reader to reconsider how their own views might be reflected in those which the satire more directly criticises. However, not all readers will reach this conclusion, as the disgust may also be used as an exit ramp, leaving some readers to remain at the level of shock. Satire remains subject to individual reader effort to see through satire’s mixture of indirect criticism and exaggeration.
Swift’s satire then acts by balancing both recognition and denial. Initially, the reader may see only the faults of others reflected in the satire, but the exaggeration and logic of the proposal have the potential to gradually expose the similarities between the narrator’s reasoning and the values of the society to which the reader is already a member of. Swift achieves this through the irony of the narrator’s reasonable tone, which addresses and assumes an audience which prides itself on being rational, practical, and morally upright. In conclusion, while satire often allows readers to judge others rather than themselves to avoid unease, the extreme and unpleasant nature of satires like A Modest Proposal can break through this “glass” forcing the reader to change their interpretation by pushing economic thinking to its most extreme conclusion, and thus forcing the reader to question whether society already treats the poor with a similar lack of humanity, and so to the extent that the readers are part of society, to recognise aspects of themselves in the satirical logic of the narrator.
