As Culture Forms Identity Conformity Shapes Rebellion

Rebellion and Conformity in the Rhetoric of Swift and King

Introduction to the texts

Authorial 'position'

Outsiders

Leaders/literary stylists

Authorial Intent

Satire

Polemic

Authorial Style

Similarities and differences in use of indirect address

Intentions

Concluding Similarities

Jonathan Swift's 1729 "A Modest Proposal" and Martin Luther King's 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" are both works written in protest by authors who were social critics of the contemporary mores of their society. Swift used satire to condemn the callousness exhibited by English society towards the Irish and Irish children. Martin Luther King used direct and forceful polemical prose to attack the conformist ministers of the state of Birmingham where King had come to engage in acts of civil disobedience, in the name of advancing the larger cause of civil rights in America.

Both King and Swift wrote as outsiders to their respective societies. Swift took a negative view, personally and politically, of the treatment of the Irish people by the English populace in 1729. To demonstrate this sense that the Irish were oppressed by famine and British cruelty, Swift suggested a hyperbolic solution, that the Irish eat their own children, thus 'solving' the problem of starvation as well as the presumed problem of overpopulation. I "am not so violently bent upon my own opinion as to reject any offer proposed by wise men, which shall be found equally innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual." (Swift, 1729) By using hyperbole, Swift shows the cruelty of the British oppressor's wrongs, and how mistreatment of the Irish has become such a norm that no one saw its extremity, until it was brought out though the use of satire.

King's verbal techniques strike the contemporary reader as entirely different in their presentation. The activist attempted to move the reader through calm, measured, and forceful truths, underlining how again and again, African-Americans had been denied their political rights throughout American history. His vocabulary was not simply different in comparison to Swift's because King was a 20th century American, rather than a 18th century British essayist. King attempted to move his readers through direct speech, rather than through more indirect techniques of humor. "But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms." (King, 1963)

However, both authors addressed conformists in their words. King addressed a group of well-meaning ministers who protested his actions in Birmingham as moving too fast, and as the work of an outside agitator who did not understand the Birmingham Black community. King wrote in response that he is a human being, regardless of his state of residence, and all Black Americans had been denied their rights for a long time, not merely in Birmingham of King's day and age. King implied, although he did not directly state this fact, that the ministers of Birmingham were well-meaning but conformist and cowardly, and that their actions would not result in political movement forward for Birmingham's Black community. Although King stated directly what he intended to do as a leader -- to free the state through civil disobedience, through such indirect accusations of cowardice and ignorance on the part of the Birmingham clergymen King did exhibit a muted aspect of Swift's indirection in his prose. King's protest in prose against complicity with a tyrannical regime asked the ministers how long Blacks must wait, implying the minister's cowardice and ignorance of American history from slavery to the present, although King's use of his words was far less pointed that Swift's.