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The present essay argues that the notion of politeness spans the distance between two disparate views of the Modest Proposal: one in which Swift is detached from his speaker, and another in which Swift is complicit in his speaker's brutality. Swift's essay can be seen as an attack on politeness in two ways. In the first, Swift attacks presuppositions about politeness of the sort embraced by contemporary Whigs, whose spokesmen were eager to regard it as yoking civility with natural benevolence. While Swift's speaker is superficially modest, his barbaric proposal shows that the putative link between politeness and kindness is spurious. The second way in which the Modest Proposal attacks politeness involves Swift's regard for his own idea of it. While Swift believed that politeness entailed self-command-the suppression of one's asocial impulses-his various writings on politeness suggest that he nonetheless found the rigors of self-command vexing. As an ironic satire, Swift's work attacks self-command in the process of embodying it. A comparison of the Modest Proposal with one of Swift's non-Cronic proposals for dealing with the poor reveals clearly the hostility and the impulse to self-aggrandizement that Swift had to suppress in order to write the Modest Proposal.
JONATHAN Swift's A Modest Proposal has long been regarded as a perfect example of its kind. In 1974, Wayne Booth named it "the finest of all ironic satires," a defining instance of what he calls the "ironic sublime." The Modest Proposal, says Booth, is a work that has produced enough critical consensus to justify calling it "stable, not only in intent but in effect."1 Other readers, both before and since the '70s, have shared Booth's perspective. Indeed, Booth's is only the most explicitly theoretical of a number of readings of the Proposal that see Swift as fully detached from his speaker's argument and totally in control, both distanced from his rhetorical subject and rid of the emotions out of which he shapes that subject from a carefully walled-off distance. The question of what Swift is attacking in the Proposal, establishing the object of its satire, is often uppermost in these readings; and critics who have approached the Proposal by attempting to specify its satiric irritants have collectively done much to place Swift's work in its economic,...