Rhetorical devices in Swift

Jonathan Swift’s eternal A Modest Proposal represents a satirist at the pinnacle of his craft, weaving various rhetorical and humorous devices together to create a piece that demonstrates the lasting nature of effective political writing. Throughout, he makes use of all three types of rhetorical argumentation to drive home his points concerning British exploitation of the Irish lower classes. Between his oft-facetious deployments of logical, ethical, and emotional devices lies a biting sort of political activist satire cutting into the deplorable practices of British landowners taking constant advantage of the Irish poor under their dominion. However, in part due to the ridiculousness of his ideas but primarily because of his routine undermining of his own rhetorical devices, these arguments only serve to further his pamphlet’s humor and also to bolster the satire of his suggestions.

First, and perhaps most prominently, is his use of logical arguments in suggesting the benefits of consuming Irish Catholic children. His constant incorporation of fabricated statistics, from the relative ages and weights of the invented populations of the children in question to his ruminations on their possible exchange values, serves to lend credence to a fictional logical basis to his ideas. Additionally, he mentions that the removal of these children from the streets would prevent crime and stem the tide of Catholic beggars clogging the Dublin thoroughfares. However, as his numbers and arithmetic fail to add up — pun intended — these very same statements aim to suggest a lack of logical thinking and highlight instead the gross socioeconomic problems that inspired his pamphlet.

“I am assured by our merchants,” Swift claims when expounding upon the commoditization of the flesh of prepubescent boys and girls; “I have been assured by a very knowing American,” he intones when discussing the relative deliciousness of toddler meat. These devices are intended to suggest ethos, a credibility and authority that would sway the audience’s opinion of him and render them more impressionable and susceptible to accepting the validity of his argument. Again, however, he undermines his own credibility by citing authorities who would have been questioned or ridiculed by his audience. Americans were, by and large, considered by European minds to be savage or backwards. In addition, merchants would not be given much ethical authority seeing as they existed on the fringes of society and were often thought of as blindly chasing dividends rather than karma points with their respective creator.

Finally, his appeals to pathos receive a similar treatment. Despite his bemoaning the “beggars of the female sex [. . .] followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags” as a “melancholy object,” Swift’s argument is in and of itself the largest refutation of this emotional claim. He explicitly seeks to aid the poor of Ireland by first taking their children, burdens, off their hands; second by reducing the population of beggars and ruffians wandering Dublin streets; and third to provide a fresh source of sustenance to those harried millions bearing the brunt of the perennial famines striking the emerald isle. Using these lofty moral causes as his justification, Swift suggests something doubtless among the most despicable sins imaginable: cannibalism of babies. Once again, despite the lengths Swift goes to in inventing justifications for his reasonings, he intentionally undermines his arguments to both remove any doubt of his insincerity and also draw attention to the profound societal issues he pretends to address.