Swift - A Modest Proposal

Q: How does the producer convey meanings and create representations? How do the attitudes and techniques suit the context?

When looking at Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’, perhaps what is most interesting is his depiction of children and how they are almost acting as a burden. One of the main ideas conveyed by Swift is that a potential way to stop children being a burden is to actually eat them. This is shown with the independent subordinate clause ‘that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious’, with the pre modifiers ‘young’ and ‘healthy’ being coupled with the adjectival phrase ‘most delicious’ perhaps being used as a form of hyperbole to disgust the audience. By using the pre-modifiers ‘young’ and ‘healthy’, Swift potentially wanted the audience to depict this image in their head which is then reinforced with the use of verb phrase ‘well nursed’. Only with this to be broken down with the metaphorical asyndetic listing of how he believes children should be cooked ‘whether stewed, roasted, baked...’. By using this asyndetic list and the use of the subordinating conjunction ‘whether’, it is almost as though Swift is claiming that there are several alternatives to how we can eat children. Although this is a vulgar and inhumane portrayal solution to the matter, Swift’s work is known to be satirical and humorous and therefore the audience may expect to see such conceptions in his work. Back in the 17^th century, the only way for authors to actually get their work published is if they had a unique voice and of course, if they were male. Therefore, because Swift is using this use of irony, then the audience are able to understand the satirical devices used.

It could also be proposed that Swift believes that women are almost required to look after children rather than their own choice, shown with the dynamic verb ‘forced’ in the independent subordinate clause ‘are forced to employ all their time..’. By combining the progressive aspect relative verb ‘are’ with the dynamic verb ‘forced’, this suggests that this process is on going, and that mothers do not actually want to tend for their children but are instead manipulated to do so. This could raise questions as to whether males only want children to help them with work, which could have been a prevalent idea in the 17^th century and the insurgence of labour work. The children are then portrayed as abandoned, shown with the noun phrase ‘helpless infants’ to further reinforce the negative perception of children. With the use of the derivational suffix ‘less’ in the abstract noun ‘help’, this could have been used to aid the humorous aspects of the text because it was likely that the mothers stayed at home whilst the father went out to do the work. Furthermore, the positioning of the adverbial clause ‘instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood’ in the middle of the clause could have been used by Swift as a way to explain an alternative for women. However, this could have been used by Swift as a way to mock women’s subordinate position in society, as in the 17^th century women were often known to be domestic workers, rather than working to earn money. Although this may have been seen as humorous to the audience of the 17^th century, audiences in the present day may not see any humour in this adverbial clause, as the gap between women and men is closing rapidly with the insurgence of the feminist movement.