SOURCE: Mahoney, Robert. “Swift's Modest Proposal and the Rhetoric of Irish Colonial Consumption.” In 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, Vol. 4, edited by Kevin L. Cope, Laura Morrow, and Anna Battigelli, pp. 205-14. New York: AMS Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Mahoney discusses the religious implications of A Modest Proposal, suggesting that Swift is actually alluding to the fear that Ireland's Catholics might “consume” the Protestant colony.

The satire of Swift's Modest Proposal turns on the theme of consumption, with cannibalism as its governing trope. The specifically Irish orientation of that trope however, has not been well accommodated in the emphasis laid on its forensic values or psychological import by longstanding and more recent conventions for reading the work. Yet the cannibalism trope evokes images of consumption with strong historical resonances for the Irish Protestant colonial readership to which the Modest Proposal was originally...