Duality and Power in the Works of Swift and Wollstonecraft

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Jonathan Swift and Mary Wollstonecraft were both consummate social commentators on the duality of power and oppression. Through the analysis of two of their works, namely, Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Right of Women", the paper looks at how one can see an easy assimilation of the challenges that such minds made to the disproportionate balance between the powerful and the oppressed. It also examines how each offers a differing view of the powerful as the greatest evil in the world. Swift does so through the use of sarcasm, indicting the wealthy and powerful as heartless and capable of almost anything to retain control, and Wollstonecraft by directly annihilating the wealthy and powerful for openly subjugating fifty percent of the human population (women).

From the Paper:

"Swift's work has been analyzed from countless angles with some even assassinating him, in the assumption that he really meant for the rich to eat the poor's children, even though such a stand is completely divergent from all his other progress building proposals. (Swift 377) Swift really just meant to garner attention, for the social conditions that plagues Ireland at the time. He was also making fun of the fact that so many proposals that are secondary to the humanitarian are put forward by those in power and even implemented without thought of the consequences that they will have upon the people. The people in Ireland at the time of his writing were still very much subjects of English colonization, with little real power and even less freedom to change the situation they were in, even though those in power assumed that the famine and poverty was their own fault and needed to be dealt with by their own sacrifices. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Swift, Jonathan, Craig, Hardin, ed. Jonathan Swift: Selections. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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