A Modest Proposal Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Jonathan Swift Rhetorical Analysis
"A Modest Proposal", by Jonathan Swift, is a biting satire about life in 18th century Ireland, in which the author seeks to find "a fair, cheap, and easy method" to transform the sick and starving children of Ireland into productive members of society. Paragraph 20 -26 of the essay illustrates the advantages of Swift's proposal, hardly modest, which is to fatten up undernourished poor children and then sell them to more well-to-do families as food. By presenting this outrageous concept as an interrelated string of seemingly logical arguments, Swift leads the reader to understand that his proposal could simultaneously solve overpopulation and unemployment, save the poor from having to spend their meager resources on raising children, provide …show more content…
In the last paragraph, he likens the children to calves, piglets and foals: the mothers to cows, pigs and horses. He varies the animal, food, and normal terms, presenting first one and then another term to the reader until the ironic situation is established. Within the context of the ironic inversion, Swift achieves the illusion that year-old Irish babies are cattle. Swift seems to diminish the parents in order to diminish the children, but by ironic inversion he diminishes the Irish and Anglo-Irish who will eat this new food. The separate threads of the diminution are thus woven together, and this device, already stemming directly from the appeal to ethos, is then interlocked with the refining of the gentlemen of pleasure, who first are seen only as the persons to whom this food will be offered for sale, later as the consumers of this new food, and finally as the cause of the whole situation in Ireland. Swift uses direct appeal to the emotions to gain pity for the Irish, to play upon his reader's fears of the Pretender and the Roman Church, and to indicate by the ironic appeal to ethos, also the speaker's
"A Modest Proposal", by Jonathan Swift, is a biting satire about life in 18th century Ireland, in which the author seeks to find "a fair, cheap, and easy method" to transform the sick and starving children of Ireland into productive members of society. Paragraph 20 -26 of the essay illustrates the advantages of Swift's proposal, hardly modest, which is to fatten up undernourished poor children and then sell them to more well-to-do families as food. By presenting this outrageous concept as an interrelated string of seemingly logical arguments, Swift leads the reader to understand that his proposal could simultaneously solve overpopulation and unemployment, save the poor from having to spend their meager resources on raising children, provide …show more content…
In the last paragraph, he likens the children to calves, piglets and foals: the mothers to cows, pigs and horses. He varies the animal, food, and normal terms, presenting first one and then another term to the reader until the ironic situation is established. Within the context of the ironic inversion, Swift achieves the illusion that year-old Irish babies are cattle. Swift seems to diminish the parents in order to diminish the children, but by ironic inversion he diminishes the Irish and Anglo-Irish who will eat this new food. The separate threads of the diminution are thus woven together, and this device, already stemming directly from the appeal to ethos, is then interlocked with the refining of the gentlemen of pleasure, who first are seen only as the persons to whom this food will be offered for sale, later as the consumers of this new food, and finally as the cause of the whole situation in Ireland. Swift uses direct appeal to the emotions to gain pity for the Irish, to play upon his reader's fears of the Pretender and the Roman Church, and to indicate by the ironic appeal to ethos, also the speaker's