Assignment writing: Paper no. 102 (Literature Of The Neo-Classical Period)
This blog is Assignment writing on paper 102 (Literature Of The Neo-Classical Period) assigned by Professor, Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Name: Archana Dave
Paper: Neo - Classical literature
Roll no: 03
Enrollment no: 4069206420220008
Email ID: archanadave1212@gmail.com
Batch: 2022- 24( M.A. Sem - 1)
Submitted to: Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Tale Of A Tub & Symbols
Introduction
One of the most generally accepted readings of Tale of A Tub states that Swift's author surrounds an allegory about the abuse of Scripture with a series of introductions and digressions in which he abuses learning. The reading, moreover, suggests that abuses of both religion and learning result from pride, that the author and his characters are self-indulgent men who try to create a world that will counter their madness. This approach to the Tale is clearly supported by the systematic abuse of language by the author and by Peter and Jack. For in works other than the Tale—especially in "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue" (1712)—Swift indicates that language marks the state of morality. The satirist dramatises this idea in the Tale by having his author abuse secular language as Peter and Jack abuse Scripture. He implies thereby that corrupt English has every connection to the pride that leads to a misunderstanding of Divine Law.
About Jonathan Swift
Swift’s father died months before Jonathan was born, and his mother returned to England shortly after giving birth, leaving Jonathan in the care of his uncle in Dublin. Swift’s extended family had several interesting literary connections: his grandmother, Elizabeth (Dryden) Swift, was the niece of Sir Erasmus Dryden, grandfather of the poet John Dryden. The same grandmother’s aunt, Katherine (Throckmorton) Dryden, was a first cousin of Elizabeth, wife of Sir Walter Raleigh. His great-great grandmother, Margaret (Godwin) Swift, was the sister of Francis Godwin, author of The Man in the Moone, which influenced parts of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. His uncle, Thomas Swift, married a daughter of the poet and playwright Sir William Davenant, a godson of William Shakespeare. Swift’s uncle served as Jonathan’s benefactor, sending him to Trinity College Dublin, where he earned his BA and befriended writer William Congreve. Swift also studied toward his MA before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced Jonathan to move to England, where he would work as a secretary to a diplomat. He would earn an MA from Hart Hall, Oxford University, in 1692, and eventually a Doctor in Divinity degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1702.
Swift’s poetry has a relationship either by interconnections with, or by reactions against, the poetry of his contemporaries and predecessors. He was probably influenced, in particular, by the Restoration writers John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Samuel Butler (who shared Swift’s penchant for octosyllabic verse). He may have picked up pointers from the Renaissance poets John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney. Beside these minor borrowings of his contemporaries, his debts are almost negligible. In the Augustan Age, an era which did not necessarily value originality above other virtues, his poetic contribution was strikingly original.
In reading Swift’s poems, one is first impressed with their apparent spareness of allusion and poetic device. Anyone can tell that a particular poem is powerful or tender or vital or fierce, but literary criticism seems inadequate to explain why. A few recent critics have carefully studied his use of allusion and image, but with only partial success. It still seems justified to conclude that Swift’s straightforward poetic style seldom calls for close analysis, his allusions seldom bring a whole literary past back to life, and his images are not very interesting in themselves. In general, Swift’s verses read faster than John Dryden’s or Alexander Pope’s, with much less ornamentation and masked wit. He apparently intends to sweep the reader along by the logic of the argument to the several conclusions he puts forth. He seems to expect that the reader will appreciate the implications of the argument as a whole, after one full and rapid reading. For Swift’s readers, the couplet will not revolve slowly upon itself, exhibiting intricate patterns and fixing complex relationships between fictional worlds and contemporary life.
The poems are not always as spare in reality as Swift would have his readers believe, but he seems deliberately to induce in them an unwillingness to look closely at the poems for evidence of technical expertise. He does this in part by working rather obviously against some poetic conventions, in part by saying openly that he rejects poetic cant, and in part by presenting himself—in many of his poems—as a perfectly straightforward man, incapable of a poet’s deviousness. By these strategies, he directs attention away from his handling of imagery and metre, even in those instances where he has been technically ingenious. For the most part, however, the impression of spareness is quite correct; and if judged by the sole criterion of technical density, then he would have to be judged an insignificant poet. But technical density is a poetic virtue only as it simulates and accompanies subtlety of thought. One could argue that Swift’s poems create a density of another kind: that “The Day of Judgement,” for example, initiates a subtle process of thought that takes place after, rather than during, the reading of the poem, at a time when the mind is more or less detached from the printed page. One could argue as well that Swift makes up in power what he lacks in density: that the strength of the impression created by his directness gives an impetus to prolonged meditation of a very high quality. On these grounds, valuing Swift for what he really is and does, one must judge him a major figure in poetry as well as prose.Swift suffered a stroke in 1742, leaving him unable to speak. He died three years later, and was buried at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.
Summary
The book is an allegory of church history. A father wills suits of clothes to his three sons, with directions that the suits never be altered. Brothers Peter, Martin, and Jack represent Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan sects, respectively. Peter upgrades his garments with gold lace, shoulder knots, and such trappings. Martin removes the false ornamentation from his without tearing the cloth. Jack zealously rips his garment to shreds to get rid of all ornaments.
This basic allegory is richly embellished with outlandish digressions, parodies, puns, quibbles, unstructured foolery, and displays of odd erudition. The diabolical narrative takes every opportunity to prick the pretensions of pedants, religious dissenters, and perfectionists whose projects try to remake human society along rational lines. Swift thought that human reason is rather weak, blown flat in fact by the merest gust of desire, and so people should behave themselves and be governed by institutions such as the Church of England. Yet his diabolical narrator weakens this myth of order and reason by showing how vulnerable the mysteries of religion are to sceptical scrutiny.
Dressed in his sanctimonious vestments, Peter looks ridiculous issuing papal bulls on the superstitious doctrine that bread can be turned into mutton. The excesses of religious enthusiasts are reduced to absurdity in Jack’s rantings and in a scatological satire on a sect of Æolists, who believe that wind is the essence of all things, the original cause and first principle of the universe. In their most ridiculous rite, Æolists seat themselves atop barrels that catch the wind and blow inspiration into their posteriors by means of a secret funnel. Sacred sermons are delivered by their priests in oracular belches, or bursts of internal wind.
This maniacal conception reemerges in the famous Digression on Madness. There, the modern upsurges in religion, politics, and science are diagnosed as a form of madness, caused when the brain is intoxicated by vapors arising from the lower faculties. This vapor is to the brain what tickling is to the touch. Real perceptions are disordered in a happy confusion. Thus, happiness for moderns amounts to “a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived.” In the madhouse world of A Tale of a Tub, the modern man cut off from classical culture is lucky to be a fool among knaves, like the book’s demoniac narrator.
Symbols
The Three Coats
The individual alterations represent the different ways in which Christianity, in Swift's view, deviated from the practices and beliefs given in the Bible. The "flame-colored satin" that makes up the coats' lining, for instance, represents the concept of purgatory, regarded in the Catholic tradition as a place of purification for souls not yet worthy of heaven but not condemned to hell. To Swift, an Anglican living in post-Reformation England, this was a false doctrine that lacked any demonstrable basis in Scripture. The "Indian figures" embroidered on the coats are the statues and stained-glass images present in many Catholic churches, which Swift (like many other Protestants) saw as incompatible with the Bible's warnings against graven images. By the time the brothers finally realise the error of their ways, their coats (i.e., their practice of Christianity) have become barely recognizable.
Midway through the main narrative, however, Martin and Jack undergo a change of heart when a breach erupts between them and Peter (who claims to be the oldest). By showing how the brothers react to this disagreement, Swift praises or criticises the three main Christian traditions represented in the England of his day. In the pre-Reformation era, the brothers were all prone to the same extravagances, adorning their coats with lace, fringe, and many other ornaments. Peter, who represents Catholicism, sticks to those extravagances and even multiplies them; he deliberately avoids consulting the will to see whether he is going astray. Martin, named after Martin Luther, represents the moderate Protestant tradition. He carefully and diligently strips away the forbidden ornaments from his coat while taking care not to harm the underlying fabric. Where something cannot be removed without damaging the original coat, he reluctantly lets it remain.
Jack, in contrast, rips away every shred of embroidery and fringe, tearing up the original underlying fabric in the process. His brand of reform, which Swift identifies with the Dissenters, is aggressive, destructive, and haphazard. Ultimately, Swift condemns Jack as motivated more by his hatred of Peter (i.e., resentment of the Catholic Church) than by a concern to live a moral life. He is a reactionary anti-Catholic rather than a Christian in his own right. However and significantly, Jack's extremes end up closely resembling Peter's as the rags worn by the one man come to look like the fringed finery worn by the other. Thus, both are satirised.
The Father's Will
The father's will represents the Bible, which Swift regards as Christianity's fundamental instruction manual. Swift's paramount claim in A Tale of a Tub is that the Bible should be consulted for basic, immutable guidance on all Church matters. Practices prohibited by the Bible cannot and should not be embraced by the Church, while practices required by the Bible cannot simply be set aside. In their youth, the three brothers exemplify this kind of Christianity. The more closely the brothers adhere to the prescriptions of the will, the happier they seem to be and the more peaceful their consciences are.
All three brothers start off faithfully following the will, but they are gradually corrupted by outside influences. They stray from its obvious intent and, increasingly, from its directly stated rules, becoming ridiculous and superficial in the process. This behaviour is provoked by a desire to fit in with the rest of the world, as illustrated in the middle of Chapter 2. There, the brothers realise that they will have to get creative if they want to give the appearance of following their father's wishes while actually ignoring them. They use Latinate terms to add an aura of respectability to their dubious behaviour: failing to find permission to change their coats "totidem verbis" ("in so many words"), they start looking "totidem syllabus" ("in so many syllables"). Finally, they declare that their father's will allows them to add shoulder knots "totidem literis" ("in so many letters") because it contains the letters S, H, O, U, L, D, E, and R.
Peter, the most scholarly of the brothers, undergoes great intellectual contortions to avoid the document's clear restrictions. In addition to the "totidem literis" episode above, he declares that certain premises must be added to the will or else "multa absurda sequerentur" ("many absurdities will follow"). (He never specifies what those absurdities might be.) All of Peter's interpretive practices, along with the terms used to describe them, ultimately derive from a Catholic tradition that Swift views as legalistic, insincere, and self-serving.
The consequence of following this interpretive tradition is that both the clergy (Peter) and the congregants (Martin and Jack) grow further and further removed from the actual will. As early as Chapter 2, the brothers have agreed to "lock up" the will "in a strong-box, brought out of Greece or Italy," which symbolises the use of Greek or Latin texts rather than vernacular translations. Here, Swift recalls and criticises the Catholic Church's long history of forbidding vernacular Bibles, thereby preventing many adherents from reading Scripture for themselves. By the time the brothers go their separate ways in Chapter 4, Peter has begun to interpose himself as the will's sole interpreter, deciding its meaning on behalf of the others and pronouncing his decisions ex cathedra (with papal authority; literally, "from the chair").
Clearly, Peter (i.e., the Catholic Church) is not cast in a good light in A Tale of a Tub. That's not to say, however, that Swift viewed all reforms as equally salutary. Martin (moderate Protestantism) and Jack (Dissent) successfully obtain their own copy of the will, which gives them the all-important ability to read it for themselves and judge how well they are following it. In itself, Swift implies, vernacular access to the Bible is a good thing, but a person can still go overboard in relying on Scripture. To this end, Swift ridicules Jack in Chapter 11 for using his father's will as an umbrella, a nightcap, and a bandage—the implication being that the Bible should not be viewed as a universal guide to mundane matters, such as diet and health care. Swift's stance seems to be that the Bible is the ultimate authority on Church doctrine and discipline but that it is foolish to see it as a substitute for all earthly wisdom.
VAPOR/WIND
In the story, vapor represents the true essence of a person. It is what the Aeolist Priests belch out into the air in order to share their ideas with each other. This is how philosophers teach their students. They look on their bodies as vessels, and Swift notes that in this case, that is true, as they are the vessels for this vapor that they emit as knowledge. Everybody has this vapor, which might be called the core of a person—their soul. Using satire, Swift turns this concept on its head by depicting the religious figures as expelling flatulence into the mouths of their followers, thereby “passing” their essence.
THE TUB
The tub represents the diversion that sailors would throw out so that whales would not overturn their ships. Here, Swift suggests that the whale is representative of “Hobbes’s Leviathan, which tosses and plays with all other schemes of religion and government” (20). In this case, the whale is trying to destroy the steady ship of government and religion, and those in power are throwing out a diversion, but the whale keeps coming. Although “A Tale of a Tub” within the text would seem to be a diversion, it is designed as a commentary on the state of religion and government in England.
Conclusion
“A Tale of a Tub” is the most impressive of the three compositions in A Tale of a Tub for its imaginative wit and command of stylistic effects, notably parody. The 11 sections that make up “A Tale of a Tub” alternate between the main allegory about Christian history and ironic digressions on modern scholarship.
Words Count - 3083
References:
https://www.coursehero.com/lit/A-Tale-of-a-Tub/symbols/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jonathan-swift
https://www.enotes.com/topics/tale-tub
Koon, William. “SWIFT ON LANGUAGE: AN APPROACH TO A TALE OF A TUB.” Style, vol. 10, no. 1, 1976, pp. 28–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45108735. Accessed 3 Nov. 2022.
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