Two Letters -- Enlightenment Essay

The periods of literature embody man’s continual search for that which is real.  During the Enlightenment, real things were factual things.  Things which could be spelled out and enumerated; things which held strong through testing and sharpening.  Here there are two letters: Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of mental Subordination.  Both letters represent core Enlightenment ideas while concurrently mocking the Enlightenment movement and concept.  These pieces, which both advocate the time’s possibilities and scorn its shortcomings, embody the heart of the Enlightenment.

A Modest Proposal satirizes the Enlightenment tendency to discount morality as a viable source of knowledge.  “It is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty” (Lawall 344).  There was virtually no probability of locating one person in the year 1729, in England, who would ever consider marketing children as a food delicacy.  But why not?  If morals are utterly disregarded, all Swift’s arguments make absolute sense.  At the end of the letter he specifically enumerates seven advantages of his proposal.  For the good of our country, for the good of our stomachs, for the good of our religion, for the good of the ‘breeder’ parents, for the good of the children themselves: put into action this modest proposal.  At the same time as he screams against the boorish nature of so-called enlightened truth, though, he epitomizes the Enlightenment virtue of thoughtfully considering all ideas.  Even if a respected mind claims support from other respected minds, one must not accept any teaching without close scrutiny.

  Mary Robinson’s letter mocks the thin quality of two Enlightenment jewels: natural rights and justice.  She writes that “woman is denied the first privilege of nature, the power of SELF-DEFENSE,” and, “Man is not to be deprived...but WOMAN is to be robbed” (Lawall 285).  Enlightened thinkers battle for the natural, born, innate rights of every human being, but seem not to consider women as whole human beings.  Men run high and fast with the call for justice, but would crush a woman underfoot without one warble of the voice.  “She is expected to act like a philosopher, though she is not allowed to think like one.  If she pleads the weakness of her sex, her plea is not admitted; if she professes an equal portion of mental strength with man, she is condemned for arrogance” (Lawall 287).  Robinson attacks Enlightenment scholars on the audacity of this incredible double standard.  Yet the ideas she urges are clearly of the Enlightenment: women as equals with men was a radical, counter-history thought if ever one existed.  If truth can only be found through the careful testing of every idea, then even the notion of equal mental capabilities between the sexes must be considered.                

“But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal; which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real” (Lawall 346).  Here Swift mocks the Enlightenment’s rejection of the old.  Though the rejection is not absolute.  Scholars form and foster new ideas, but cling to the old ways which benefit them.  Man has innate natural rights: a new idea.  Although, throughout history, only landlords were treated fully as men, so it seems only they are privileged to these natural rights.  Swifts connects the poor to the rich exactly as Robinson connects women to men: you say ‘truth for all humanity,’ but who is all humanity?  The new initiated by the Enlightenment was a good new, but much of the old’s worst easily stayed firm in society.

The final apex of good rarely sees daylight, because it poses threat to those in power.  Strange how those with bounty are so loathe not only to part with some bounty, but even to permit others’ pursuit of decent quality of life.  Swift states, “let no man talk to me of these and like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempts to put them in practice” (Lawall 346).  Robinson more directly reveals this assumed threat: “Man says, ‘you shall be initiated in all the arts of pleasing; but you shall, in vain, hope that we will contribute to your happiness one iota beyond the principle which constitutes our own’” (Lawall 288).
These are the true Enlightenment thinkers: those who wrote against mediocre enlightenment.  When someone puts a cap on ideas and who can have them, then that someone loses credence as any kind of scholar.  Swift and Robinson, through attacking what claimed itself enlightened,  proved themselves authentically enlightened.  That is why they are still around.  That is why they are still read.