In Gulliver’s Travels, Book IV by Jonathan Swift, the narrator, Gulliver, finds himself in an unknown land where he encounters the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The well-ordered and rationally driven Houyhnhnm society is compared with the greedy, irrational, and violent society of the Yahoos who are deformed and singular-shaped creatures that closely resemble humans. While a society based on structure and reason has positive attributes, nevertheless employing these attributes to an extreme has severe consequences. Gulliver represents the social reality that as people go through life and face various situations, they assign different meanings to what they perceive. Throughout the book, Gulliver presents significant details about the culture of the …show more content…
The Houyhnhnms procreate for eugenic reasons, and their marriages lack romance. Once “the matron Houyhnhnms have produced one of each sex, they no longer accompany with their consorts” (1122). This statement shows that the superficial nature of the Houyhnhnms way of life is demonstrated by the absence of profound sentiments such as courtship, love, presents, and jointures that are essential to human experiences. They treat each other with “the same friendship, and mutual benevolence that they bear to others of the same species who come in their way” (1122). There are no feelings of jealousy, discontent, fondness, or quarreling, which indicates an inhuman way of living. The Houyhnhnms function like robots, that have no depth to their lives. Furthermore, parent-child bonding, which plays a significant role in healthy development is nonexistent. If one family has two males and another has two females, they exchange with each other. This way each family has one of each sex. However, in a utopia, the regulation of children would be handled with a great deal of care. The parental duty of care is to provide protection, guidance, appreciation, and love for a child. Moreover, the Houyhnhnms preserve their race, but do not display signs of progression. Their society is not developed to its maximum potential because they have a limited way of thinking. Thus, it does not represent a
After being stranded on an island with no sign of rescue or grownups, the schoolboys need some form of government or leader to rule them all. The first day they discover they are not alone, the boys elect Ralph, one of the older boys, to lead them. He believes they need authority, in place of the grownups. Otherwise, chaos will break out, as it does later on. Golding’s Lord of the Flies serves as a perfect illustration of Hobbes’s philosophy on the brutish, selfish nature of man and, therefore, the need for a strong government.
Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” examines the proposal of consuming human flesh in order to solve the dilemma of the Potato Famine, in which drought was exacerbated by crop failures, and this tribulation of the Irish was largely snubbed by English landowners. His ironic persona (speaker), is one of confidence, reason, and worth. In addition, this persona presents a multitude of rhetorical strategies to prepare the audience for this overly deranged proposal, ranging from juxtapositions, to using emotion, reason, and credibility, to persuade the reader. Therefore, the ironic persona in “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift illustrates a wide assortment of rhetorical devices to convey the solution to the Potato Famine, and more broadly, Swift intended this ironic platform to serve as an expository of the avarice of landowners and their gain for self-interest.
While Holinshed and Shakespeare portray King Henry as both a Machiavellian king and a Christian king in their works the Chronicles of England, Ireland, and Scotland and Henry V, the writers do have biases. Holinshed tends to show Henry in a more virtuous and kingly manner, while Shakespeare writes him as a ruler moving pieces on a board in order to achieve what he wants. A major difference in how Holinshed and Shakespeare characterize Henry can be seen in the infamous tennis ball scene. The tennis ball embassy is arguably the tipping point in Henry’s decision to go to war with France. As such, the way a writer builds this scene has much to do with how the reader views Henry and affects one’s opinion of Henry throughout the rest of the work.
When it came to Ethos, Swift was not quite as persuasive as he could have been. He does have a background when it comes to writing about corrupt governments in tales such as “Gulliver’s Travels.” The way Swift wrote this essay, however, makes it feel slightly less objective. Even when he is writing from the point of a wealthier Irishman, his overall tone shows a large amount of contempt towards the higher economic classes. Instead of allowing the readers to read alternative arguments on this subject, he focused strictly on his own opinion.
Leta S. Hollingworth was an American psychologist who focused most of her research on giftedness, educational psychology, psychology of women, and the variability hypothesis. She conducted numerous studies to reject the variability hypothesis that deemed women for destined for mediocrity and did her dissertation on how women were not mentally incapacitated during menstruation (Held, 2010). Hollingworth wrote six articles on the social factors that contributed to the social status of women. (1) One being “Social Devices for Impelling Women to Bear and Rear Children,” this article focused on the eight social constructs that motivated and pressured women to have and raise children. Of the eight, seven were first proposed by E. A. Ross in his book
Authors of classic American literature often utilize a character’s development to establish a worldview or opinion. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald use their narrators, Huck Finn and Nick Carraway, to suggest an argument about American society. Seeking adventure, both characters embark on a journey, but their encounters with society leave them appalled. While they each have personal motives for abandoning their past, both end up interacting with different cultures that lead them to a similar decision about society and their futures. Ultimately, they stray from the dominant culture in order to escape the influence of society.
Mohammed Ismail AP Language Composition Lyons, William December 9, 2014 Rhetorical Devices Used in Jonathan Swifts Modest Proposal The essay Modest Proposal, written by Jonathan Swift perhaps known better for his novel Gulliver’s travels wrote this piece, because during his time he addressed solutions to many contemporary social issues by writing them on pamphlets. Swift’s main purpose in writing this essay is to avert children from being less of a problem to their parents and the public. The author tries not addressing his subject directly, children, instead Swift introduces the concept of a market, livestock, breeders, etc., to address the overcrowding and poverty stricken children in Dublin, Ireland.
In the novel “Brave New World”, Aldous Huxley depicts his vision of a utopia in which the sacrifices humanity has made are not worth maintaining stability, and include individuality, feeling7, and intimacy. Individuals in this society are thoroughly conditioned from birth in order to maximize efficiency which results in the loss of free choice. In the World State, people are created in vials and raised to fill specific roles from embryos. They are conditioned physically using Freudian techniques and sleep hypnopaedia is used to moralize and socialize children in a predestined fashion. When The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning shows a group of students the hypnopaedia in action, he tells them excitedly, “The mind that judges and desires
Dr. Jonathan Swift uses rhetorical devices, logical, ethical, as well as emotional appeals to highlight the difference between Swift’s satirical attitude and the narrator’s serious attitude concerning poverty and starvation. In order to understand the nature of Swift’s proposal,
“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people”. This quote is perfect for this novel because Gulliver’s Travels judges the British society of the particular time period through the heart and soul of the main character Gulliver. Gulliver’s Travels makes many annotations on British society of their particular time period. As Gulliver visits different islands at the time he discovers many different societies and their people. All the societies that Gulliver discovers are used as a comparison to British society of the time period throughout the novel.
In Aldous Huxley’s book, Brave New World, an unimaginable dystopia has been created. The World State was formed on three principles: community, identity, and stability. These three principles dictate how members of this society live and interact with one another. In modern society, there is an emphasis on the importance of motherhood, commitment, and countless other ideals that are rejected in the World State. Throughout the novel, the principle of community is shown with castes and hypnopaedic slogans, such as everybody belongs to everybody else.
Overall, the concept of Social Darwinism greatly supports the development of a more advanced society as its goal is to produce stronger humans, and thus a stronger society. In the Descent of Man, Darwin writes that “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care” (227). Based on this, it is suggested that humans should take immense care in choosing their partners as if they were choosing a breeding match for one of their animals. This would mean looking back at the pedigree, or descent, of perspective partners to make sure they are descended from people who meet the standard. Distinguishing these standards would be simple, as the offspring of wise parents would not be on the same level as the offspring of foolish parents (Sumner 233), and a similar categorization would be made for all characteristics.
Jonathan Swift is an enlightenment thinker that uses satire in his writings to bring awareness to the political power and mistreatment of the people of Ireland, ‘‘he was angry or in a fit of despair over Ireland 's economic condition’’(DeGategno). Swift uses satire throughout his proposal, by suggesting to the people of Ireland that they should harvest the little children of the poor. Swift stated that by making ‘‘Them Beneficial to the Public", Ireland would be in a better circumstance. Swift proposed that the poor children 's guardians should give birth to however many number of children as would be possible and offer them for sustenance. Instead of Swift addressing the issue straightforward, Swift used Satire ¬¬¬¬which employs irony sayings- one thing while meaning its opposite—in order to present an argument.
Swift’s satire consisted of many “modest theories.” For example, you may have heard people talk about overpopulation. You may have your own theories about it, but what about eating children? In this instance, Jonathan Swift used his form of humor, also known as satire, to get his point across, in which wrote a pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal,” a mockery for the ideas of how to deal with overpopulation. “Satire is a technique employed by writers to
Critical Analysis of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” In the work entitled “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift, the theme of social injustice is enhanced by the use of verbal irony to convey a charged message. The ambiguous title and introduction to Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece does little to prepare the reader for shocking content revealed later in the text. Swift’s work is powerful, poignant and persuasive because it strikes at the heart of the modern readers ethics, as it likely would have done for the author’s contemporary audiences. Jonathan Swift’s 1729 masterpiece is a satirical metaphor centered around the pervasive assertion, “the English are devouring the Irish.” Jonathan Swift gives a more comprehensive exordium concerning his work stating that is it “a modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents and country, and for making them beneficial to the public (Swift 1199).