Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the Anglo-Irish writer, has become an essential personage in the English literary corpus, his most famous work being the novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This novel has been held in high esteem for centuries now and showcases the novelist’s ability to create a universe alien to us and yet which reflects customs of our world in all its strangeness and flamboyance. But apart from this artistic work, Swift left us his essays too, one of them being A Modest Proposal (1729), subtitled For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public. In this, I believe, Swift ascends to a divine political satirist, who empathizes with the oppressing class for once and undresses their moral world and motives to a fearful degree.
As in all satirical works, the tone is of utmost necessity in order to understand the intent of the author, so that their true emotions can be evaluated and, their beliefs and pain can be sympathized with. To better understand the moral overtures that Swift proposes and to appreciate the depth of his understanding of, what I have currently deemed most suitable to define as, “Hegemonic Morality in Nude”, I would attempt to study his essay through a triangulation with two other objects of ingenious taste from the perspective of an ethical philosopher, namely the American serial killer, rapist and pedophiliac cannibal, Albert Fish’s (1870-1973), letter to family of one of his adolescent victims, and Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematically bland and disturbing masterpiece Saló, or 120 Days of Sodom (1975), which is based on French Enlightenment sensualist philosopher , Marquis de Sade’s (1740-1814), literary novel of almost the same name (1785). Through these two, we can reach a more complete understanding of the complexity of Swift’s Final Solution.
The essay, even with it’s wave of confidence and veneer of scientific mannerism, carries cries of anguish of its writer. The colonial philosophy of Prometheanism, as defined by the political theorist John Dryzek in more recent times, which was in itself partly encouraged by the false and momentary guised success of Enlightenment, attempted to master men and nature through overt and covert physical, psychological, sociopolitical, and economical violence. Thus, colonialism became an unconscious part of this metaphysical project that Marx and Nietzsche wept over on their pages after the end of this Enlightenment period, and A Modest Proposal was birthed in reaction to all this conundrum. As alluded to earlier, the essay is cruelly moral in nature. Throughout it, the writer assumes a persona of a troubled philanthropist riddled with political and statal responsibilities and problems, as a tamed attempt is made to appear “modest”.
The satirist presents an overarching, sprawling, deep and nexal cure to the Irish kingdom’s economical, social, familial, religious and political issues that plague it, which is, to put it in most simplest wording, cannibalism by the able of the fattened flesh, yet emaciated souls, of a year-old infants of the repressed, underdressed and impoverished Irish families. The whole matter is adequately problematized first before presenting the answer to all colonial pleas, beginning with a heartfelt picturizing of the ragged mothers on the streets of Dublin, with a platoon of hungry and greedy faces following them. From there on, the author, in his Utilitarian-sounding, logical leaps and frolicking, characterizes the non-elites as non-humans too with plans exuberantly detailed of consciously outrageous undertakings, that mainly involve butchering of voiceless and wordless balls of meat for a suitable amount, as Swift himself argues, “ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child”. The flesh would be boiled and dressed in fantastic flavors, curated to the taste of worthy aristocrats. With this, Swift drenched in his persona, connects more ethical reasoning, including dwindling of the number of papists in the country and limiting the quantity of forced abortions and miscarriages of the beggarly women, who are finely subjugated to an ultimate role as “breeder”, with such frank raiment of moral superiority that it reminds one of the Nazi’s breeding ground, Lebensborn.
Here the concept of Hegemonic Morality in Nude can be best understood, but for the want of words and time , the analysis would still be incredibly limited. The concept speaks of a phenomenon in literature and the real world too when we are presented with an openness the psychological and unconscious morality of the ruling class or an oppressor during the act of oppression, conscious and the unconscious one, on the castrated and raped masses and individuals, which would usually be most definitely be dreadfully shocking moral choices and beliefs, now in a tasteless and normalized manner. This is the case with Swift’s essay, as well as Fish’s letter and, several times banned film, Saló.
In 1934, Fish wrote a letter to Grace Budd’s, his ten-year old victim, mother, narrating to her with precision and sensuality his mental dispositions and the cannibalistic acts he performed in regards to her daughter. He begins his letter with “ My dear Mrs. Budd”, as he is reminiscing about a friend of his who visited China in 1894. This friend told him strange tales of how the famine had created a culture of cannibalism as he writes : “So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold to the Butchers to be cut up and sold for food in order to keep others from starving.” He further explains how this incident led him to try human flesh for his own self, observing how his traveler friend had become obsessed with it himself. After going over the act of murdering and eating her child, Albert Fish finishes his letter with: “She died a virgin.” Throughout his letter, the tone is incredibly calm and self-assuring, just like in A Modest Proposal, and the commodification of children and their meat being sold on the streets is a reality that has been very much realized already, not only in this particular famine in China but centuries ago too. But what is most ingenious about Fish’s letter is his utterly unapologetic way he morally supersedes all of societal morals and presents himself as a bearer of a new kind of morality, just like Swift does, though in satire and fiction.
Following the usurping of all moral positivistic bearings of our societies, Saló does the same by dulling the tortures and inhumane, yet still they remain very much humane, acts of sexual and mental perversions four wealthy libertines perform with 18 teenagers, both male and female, away from the eyes of gods and masses in a private castle. They enjoy a freedom and sadomasochistic shame and pain the society would never allow, as Freud already psychoanalyzed in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). But, here too, what is most important to note is the style of presenting these violent actions that take away the universal dignity of man, as proved by Kant in his deontological morality and Categorical Imperative that argues for human beings as ends in themselves instead of a Machiavellian approach to human life, as cinematically endeavored in Saló. Whether it be rape or collaring their victims with dog leashes and treating them to nails-filled cupcakes, the oppressors do it all so dry and monotonous that the viewer does not have the graphic enough to be violently jolted by the brutalities practiced in the movie, making it far more psychologically appalling and yet the colors and the dialogues dandily synthesize themselves in a courtly dance that they can hardly incur a gasp from the audience.
Therefore, through this study, I have moderately exposed how Jonathon Swift’s writing is a brilliant example of Hegemonic Morality in Nude, and have utilized more recent examples of this concept, i.e. Fish’s letter and Saló, to give a broader understanding of the nature of this proposal, which, when seen from the naked perspective of the elites, is morally perfect and natural.
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