1.
In his “A Modest Proposal” (1729), Jonathan Swift claims that Ireland is experiencing debilitating social issues because of England’s unjust policies.
Swift indirectly exposes the social issues that exists in Ireland by proposing a satirical solution to them.
Swift surfaces these issues in order to promote helping the poor and making them become beneficial members of society.
The author uses a satirical frame to address public issues, thus he mostly is directing his essay towards the general public in Ireland, the victim, and England, the culprit.
2. When one considers the satirical frame of “A Modest Proposal,” Swift’s persona implicitly mimics an individual who is serious and knowledgeable on the burdens Ireland is undertaking
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Swift dehumanizes poor mothers in paragraph six, which details how he calculates the number of poor children in Ireland. He starts by estimating the number of women capable of producing children, claiming that there are“two hundred thousand Couple whose Wives are breeders” (Swift, 6). Notice that Swift labels these women as breeders, a title that is regularly used to address animals. In the following paragraph, Swift transitions to dehumanizing children by stating that children are too worthless to be a “saleable Commodity” (Swift, 7). In this statement, he implies that children’s value can be measured in beans, apples or any other consumer product. This helps prepare the audience for Swift 's proposal that children should be eaten. Later, he quantifies Children by giving them a dollar amount: children “will not yield above three Pounds, or three Pounds and half a Crown at most on Exchange” (Swift, 7). This further prepares the audience for upcoming proposal because the quote suggests that human consumption holds financial benefits. When Swift finally makes his proposal to eat children, he lowers the value of human life by comparing their worth to that of “Sheep, black Cattle, [and] Swine” (Swift, 10). As the essay progresses, Swift continues to devalue children, and although these devaluations explicitly support the author’s proposal, they are mainly used to highlight the living conditions in Ireland. For instance, Swift calculated the number of poor families in order to