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• Title: Splenetic Ogres and Heroic Cannibals in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (1729) (Critical Essay)
• Author : English Studies in Canada
• Release Date : January 01, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 256 KB

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I. Cannibalism: Ethnic Defamation or a Trope of Liberation? In A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents and Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public (1729) Swift exploits the age-old discourse of ethnic defamation against the Irish that had legitimated the English colonization of Ireland for centuries. One of the most damning elements in Swift's use of this discourse is that of cannibalism. The discourse of ethnic defamation arose out of the Norman conquest of Ireland in the twelfth century. Clare Carroll points out that "the colonization of the Americas and the reformation as events ... generated new discourses inflecting the inherited discourse of barbarism" in early-modern English writing about Ireland (14). Narratives of native cannibalism were an indispensable part of these new discourses and practices. For the English authors as well as their continental counterparts, the cannibalistic other of the New World became a yardstick by which to measure the threat posed by internal enemies, be it the indigenous Irish, the French Catholics, or the Moorish inhabitants of Spain. (1) Thus, it was against the backdrop of the reformation and counter-reformation conflicts as well as the exploration of the New World that Montaigne flirted with the notion as a metaphor in his comparison between the Tupinamba practice of eating the dead bodies of their enemies and the live torture practised by the Europeans. By contrast, the Protestant cleric and polemicist Jean de Lery used his graphic accounts of Tupinamba cannibalism as a preamble to the equally gory descriptions of the cannibalistic atrocities against the French Protestants perpetrated by the Catholics. (2) Ireland, an anomalous pocket of Romish bigotry and superstition in the Protestant British Isles, also became a fertile breeding ground for religio-ethnic defamation; the Catholicism of the native Irish almost naturally complemented their putatively barbaric ethnic origins in the minds of such Protestant polemicists as Edmund Spenser, Camden, Fynes Morrison, and others. Whether the cannibal slur is implied or explicitly stated, such polemical writing invariably condemns the Irish for being bestial creatures given to dietary practices not fit for the civilized part of humanity. (3) Even when the authors are sympathetic, pity is inevitably mixed with disgust and contempt for the objects of the slur. Swift's tract exists in this troubled continuum of ethnic abuse against the Irish. According to Frank Lestringant:

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