A Modest Proposal Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Samuel L. Macey

Critical Essay by Samuel L. Macey

SOURCE: Macey, Samuel L. “The Persona in A Modest Proposal.” Lock Haven Review (10 November 1968): 17-24.

In the following essay, Macey examines Swift's persona as a conduit for satire and as a representative of the author himself.

The subjective Romantic author—Wordsworth in The Prelude, for example—frequently sets himself up for direct examination by the reader. With the neo-classicist, however, objectivity is the goal, and one of the techniques for achieving this is to set someone else up “pinned and wriggling” against the wall, as do Pope for his sylph in The Rape of the Lock and Eliot for J. Alfred Prufrock. In one sense this is the role played by the various personae who appear frequently in eighteenth-century literature. In the case of Swift's creations these personae sometimes take on not only a character of their own—Bickerstaff, the Drapier, Gulliver, the supposed authors of The Tale of a Tub,...
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