A Modest Proposal

At repeated intervals, the narrator uses the language of animal husbandry to describe the infant children of Ireland’s poor. He compares the male-to-female ratio of the children kept alive as breeding stock to similar ratios used in the raising of cattle and sheep. He remarks favorably that “[i]nfant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year” (54), and he speaks of flaying and dressing infant carcasses to make men’s and women’s accessories. The use of such horrifying language serves two purposes. The first is to offer a point of contrast to the narrator’s otherwise measured rhetoric, a juxtaposition that helps lend the piece its darkly comedic tone. To be clear, this is not the comedy of catharsis or release, but rather the comedy of shock and perversion.

The other purpose of the livestock symbolism is to emphasize the dehumanizing effects of the Anglo-Irish elite’s policy proposals concerning the poor. Many of the most influential economic thinkers of Swift’s time accepted an emergent mercantile view of labor that saw workers and their families as commodities and assigned each individual a market value. With the growth of global supply chains enabled by the bloody and costly Age of Exploration, economists came to think of individuals as human capital to be invested whatever way possible into the growing machine of industrialism.