Satire and Censure: A Thesis and Critical Analysis of Swift

Satire as a Protective and Exclusionary Device

In the most simplified terms, satire is a protective and exclusionary device, almost like scapegoating or stigmatization.  It targets some behavior, characteristic or idea as unacceptable and uses criticism, mockery, ridicule, and exaggeration to mark it as vicious, dangerous or disgusting and to place people who exhibit the targeted trait outside of the community.  It divides the population into “them” and “us,” making “them” different and “us” more recognizable to each other.  A valuable study of satire as creating and using differences among people is Fredric Bogel’s The Difference Satire Makes (Cornell UP, 2001).

But many writers and readers—in the 18th-century and in our own time—have not been satisfied to think of satire in polarizing terms.  Samuel Johnson, in defining “satire” for his Dictionary insisted that satire is about “censuring”—not merely ridiculingfolly” or “vice”:  its goal has to be corrective; satirists have to be pointing out ways of thinking or acting that can be corrected.  Further, they must not be attacking individuals:  libelers, slanderers, and lampooners did that; satirists attacked kinds of acts and thoughts.  Satirists carried out a duty to help readers improve morally;

they did not gratify their own wish to criticize individuals who may have offended them or with whom they otherwise were at odds. In this approach, the goal of satire is not exclusion but inclusion, albeit inclusion depending on conformity to collective standards:  it aims to make those who are not behaving according to standards feel bad about that and want to change; it aims to keep those who are upholding standards wish to continue to do so.

Johnson’s position does imply that satirists have more ethical insight than many of their contemporaries, and scholars in our own time have questioned the notion that satirists may be more ethically secure.  Many scholars now favor a view of satire as an expression of anxiety: satirists are mocking behaviors, characteristics and ideas that make them and a good number of their contemporaries uncomfortable; they are trying to relieve their discomfort and uncertainty and hoping that ridicule might lead not only to relief but to resolution:  either satire will keep the discomforting target distant or it will show that the target is not really as bad as imagined.  Widespread consideration of satire as an expression of anxiety began with Dustin Griffin’s Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (U of Kentucky P) in 1994.  In this approach, satire is a means for clarifying collective standards that may be otherwise unclear or have been made unclear by changes in values, material conditions, or social practices.

Johnson's Definition of Satire and its Ethical Implications

Somewhere between the anxiety-expressive approach and the morally superior approach is a “sympathetic” approach that Matthew Kinservik has written about in Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage (Bucknell UP, 2002).  Though written specifically about drama (which we’ll return to when we read Gay’s Beggar’s Opera after Swift and Pope), many of the points are relevant to satire in other modes.

In fact, Kinservik credits Richard Steele (who was involved with the theater as well as with The Tatler) with promoting this approach. By “sympathetic” satire, Kinservik means an approach in which writers present themselves as having behaved or as being likely to behave as foolishly or mistakenly as the people whose behavior or ideas they are criticizing.  

In this approach, satire has the goal of correcting targeted behaviors and getting people to conform, but it does not separate the satirist from others:  all are characterized as prone to error and in need of reminders of how to conduct themselves appropriately.

1. Do a preliminary reading of the poem, looking for the primary object of ridicule or censure.  What is that object and does the poem suggest that it is correctable?  If correctable, how and why?  If not correctable, why not?  Keep in mind what my Orientation to the readings from Swift says about ridicule, censure and satire as you answer this question.

 

2. After your preliminary reading, consider the poem more closely and analytically.  Structurally, it can be divided into three sections—ll. 1-72, 73-298, 299-484.  What is the main topic in each section?  How are the sections related to each other?  Some readers also divide the first section into three parts and see it as a miniature version of the whole poem.  What evidence do you see in the first section to support or challenge this approach?  If you would divide the section into three parts, where would you put the divisions?  Why?  If you would not divide it, why would do you not do so?

 

3. This poem makes much use of the technique of irony, which you should recognize as a term with a precise definition:  irony is a statement that says more than, less than, or the opposite of what is literally meant.  Identify at least one example of irony that fits into one of the three modes in the definition as indicate why you find it a good example.