I Want A Wife: A Satirical Analysis

Throughout the history author’s created different type of genres of literature because what they wanted to tell or explain differed from one another and needed a different perspective, a different look. One of the most important and known genre of literature is satires. In my paper I am going to focus on answering various questions about satires by using Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Judy Brady’s I Want a Wife and a modern day TV-Series that we consider as satire, Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy. We can consider all these 3 different works as satire because all of them have the necessary tools to be considered as satire; irony, ridicule, dark humor, exaggeration and taking their subjects from important social and political issues.

First

Instead of doing it with a direct serious tone, satirist are using a more cynical and ridiculed but effective tone to show people about these problems. In A Modest Proposal, the idea of selling and eating the children itself is not realistic due to its horrible nature but the exaggeration of the problem actually causes people to focused on the subject, Swift wants people of Ireland to be aware of this political and social problem –high rate of uncontrolled birth – In I Want a Wife, Judy Brady is actually tries to explain all the responsibilities of a married woman, and she is trying to show us that “having a wife” is actually like a prize because it makes men’s life easier since they pretty much do all the things including working in a second job. Even though Judy Brady is woman, she wants a wife because even she thinks it will make her life easier. She wants to draw a picture in our head about what woman’s are for in those times. In this line “I want a wife who will take care of my physical needs. I want a wife who will pick up after me. I want a wife who will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced when need be, and who will see to it that my personal things are kept in proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it.”(line 20-23) , we can see that Judy Brady describing woman’s like slaves of their marriages