Digging deeper with close reading and other fun literary analysis tools!

“It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors, crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms.”  From Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”.

Swift sets the scene for his proposal using indicative and compelling ideas to establish an authoritative ethos. In particular, the words crowded, beggars, rags, and alms project an overarching sense on poverty in his address. He provides many examples of this poverty in order to strengthen his original observation about the melancholic state of affairs in the town and country. His observation carries significance as it is the first thing he mentions in his work. It indicates that he will use his observation as evidence supporting a broader point later in the essay because he gives the reader a logical rationale to understand his argument. He mentions beggars of the female sex in particular, signifying the importance of the distinction between the levels of poverty between males and females. He draws on this distinction by mentioning children, adding motherly characteristics to the beggars and once again, sets up evidence supporting a later argument. He uses both the images of poverty and the abundance of children to offer a comprehensive solution to the melancholic situation at hand. The children, he proposes, should be used as food to feed starving people, eliminating both of the problems he presents in the first sentence.

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2 Responses to Digging deeper with close reading and other fun literary analysis tools!

  1. Eli Zelle says:

    The initial 5 words depict a description of something referred to as “it” as melancholy. Swift then expands this by giving the perspective of who “It” looks melancholy for. He makes “It” the subject rather then it’s observer to amplify the importance of “It”‘s state of being. To swift, it is more significant the “It” is melancholy rather than the observer seeing the melancholic state of affairs.

  2. Lindsey Grubbs says:

    Nice work here, Eli. The focus on poverty and the gendered dymanics of poverty are interesting here. I’m curious how the focus on gender in this sentence ties in to the larger essay in your mind. Does it particularly focus on women? Are they the audience, or just the ones being read about?

    Nice reading on the privileging of the term “it.” The “melancholiness” is tied to the scene, not to the person seeing it. But we also have the main verb clause as “when they see” things, which puts the viewer back in the center! And who is this they? Sounds like it doesn’t include the poor themselves–just the people looking at them. AND, the lookers aren’t even looking at the people. They are looking at roads, streets, etc, and these objects are modified by the kind of people in them. The people being looked at are really devalued in this sentence!

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