Assignment : paper no : 102 Literature of the Neo-classical period.
Assignment : Paper no :102
Literature of the neo-classical period.
This blog is part of an Assignment of sem 1 ,paper no :102, Literature of the Neo-classical periods,Assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Department of English ,MKBU.In this Assignment I am dealing with the topic of "A Tale of a Tub" as a religious allegory.
∆ Personal Information:
Name : Maya Batiya
Roll no : 32
Enrollment no :5108230003
Course : M.A.sem-1
Paper no :102
Paper code :22393
Paper name : Literature of the neo-classical period.
Topic : A Tale of a Tub as a religious allegory.
Submitted : Smt.S.B.Gardi, Department of English MKBU.
Email:mayajbatiya2003@gmail.com
# A Tale of a Tub as a religious allegory.
∆ Introduction :
Jonathan Swift wrote A Tale of a Tub (published in 1704) not only to expound upon the hypocrisy of religion in early 18th century England, but to explore ideas about critics, oration, ancient and modern philosophies, digressions, and the nature of writing itself. These themes are all underscored with a satirical tone that takes religion, authors, and critics to task. The title refers to the tub that sailors used to toss out to distract whales from tipping their ships. The ship represents the status quo of the English government and its religious structure, while the whale is a symbol for the new ideas and controversies attempting to rock the ship: The government must keep dissent like Swift’s at bay.
∆ About Jonathan Swift :
Jonathan Swift, (born November 30, 1667, Dublin, Ireland—died October 19, 1745, Dublin), Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729).
∆ Early life and education:
Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration (1660) and become steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin. In 1664 he married Abigail Erick, who was the daughter of an English clergyman. In the spring of 1667 Jonathan the elder died suddenly, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and an unborn son to the care of his brothers. The younger Jonathan Swift thus grew up fatherless and dependent on the generosity of his uncles. His education was not neglected, however, and at the age of six he was sent to Kilkenny School, then the best in Ireland. In 1682 he entered Trinity College in Dublin, where he was granted his bachelor of arts degree in February 1686 speciali gratia (“by special favour”), his degree being a device often used when a student’s record failed, in some minor respect, to conform to the regulations.
Swift continued in residence at Trinity College as a candidate for his master of arts degree until February 1689. But the Roman Catholic disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift to seek security in England, and he soon became a member of the household of a distant relative of his mother named Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, Surrey. Swift was to remain at Moor Park intermittently until Temple’s death in 1699.
∆ The Title and Structure:
The first thing that's puzzling about A Tale of A Tub is its title. The preface explains that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking their ship. The whale that this tub is thrown out for most obviously represents Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Swift's tub is intended to distract Hobbes and other critics of the church and government from picking holes in their weak points.
The Tale, with its two appendages ('The Battle of the Books' and 'The Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit') is Swift's first important prose work. It was written during the 1690s, when Swift was living with his patron Sir William Temple, and it was published in 1704. Most modern scholars read the revised fifth edition published in 1710. Like Swift's other major prose - including Gulliver's Travelsand A Modest Proposal - A Tale of a Tub was published anonymously. But unlike with those later works, Swift was obsessively concerned with preserving the anonymity of his authorship of the Tale. His authorship of the Tale was never publicly acknowledged in his lifetime, nor did it appear in authorised editions of his collected works.
But although Swift vigorously maintained the fiction of anonymity in relation to A Tale of a Tub, never at any point did he try to suppress the book as a whole; he only tried to obscure his direct connection with it. But despite the fact that he was desperate that no one should ever know that he wrote A Tale of a Tub, he also seems to have been extraordinarily proud of his satire. The one comment that we have on record from Swift about the Tale comes from a letter transcribed for the Earl of Orrery:
'There is no doubt but that he was Author of the Tale of the Tub. He never
owned it: but as he one day made his Relation Mrs Whiteway read it to him,
he made use of This expression. 'Good God! What a flow of imagination had
I, when I wrote this.'
There is a strange paradox here: Swift wanted to disavow his connection with the work, yet at the same time he wanted the genius evident in the satire to be recognised as his.
∆ Religious Orthodoxy:
Swift says in the 'Apology' that was added to the 1710 edition that A Tale of a Tub was partly intended to attack the religious groups that he saw as threatening the hegemony of the Anglican church. In the Tale, Swift uses the analogy of the three brothers - Martin, Peter and Jack - to represent, respectively, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, and the Low Church, or Dissenters. In doing so, he is trying to demonstrate that the spiritual practices of the Catholic Church and dissenting sects were based on a false interpretation of the true Word, the Bible. However, the sweep of Swift's irony in the book, and, the destabilising and confusing nature of its changes in satiric personae meant that many of his contemporaries read the Tale as an attack all religion.
For a young Anglican churchman intent on a speedy ascension through the ranks of the church, this was a very damaging charge. Swift's decision to publish the apology in the revised edition of 1710 likely is related to his anxiety about his career at this time, and the Tale's potential to compromise his position. Late 1710, was perhaps the most exciting and promising time in Swift's career; he was being courted by the rising Tory leader Robert Harley to join the Tory cause, and power and importance seemed imminent. Swift was to believe for the rest of his life that his failure to secure the ecclesiastical promotions that he wanted was due to influential (including royal) disapproval of the perceived irreligious tendencies of A Tale of a Tub.
∆ Parody and Allegory:
In addition to the 'digressions' that form a satire on modern learning and print culture, A Tale of a Tub's more obvious satire is that on abuses in religion. The satire works through the allegory of the three brothers: Martin, Peter, and Jack. Martin symbolises the Anglican Church (from Martin Luther); Peter symbolizes the Roman Catholic Church; and Jack (from John Calvin) symbolises the Dissenters. Their father leaves each brother a coat as a legacy, with strict orders that the coats are on no account to be altered. The sons gradually disobey his injunction, finding excuses for adding shoulder knots or gold lace, according to the prevailing fashion. Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter (the Reformation), and then with each other (the split between Anglicanism and Puritanism), and then separate. As we might expect, Martin is by far the most moderate of the three, and his speech in section six is by the sanest thing anyone has to say in the Tale.
Both parody and allegory work by implicitly, or explicitly, comparing one sort of book with another. As a broad generalisation, they are concerned with intertextual relationships, and how you can use one text to invoke or critique another. But the distinction is that allegory teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise truth, while parody teaches its readers to see beyond appearance to recognise error.
In the case of the allegorical story of the three brothers, the ultimate pre-text is the Bible: the father's last recorded words take the form of a will, a dead letter, defining and confining the ways in which the sons are to live their lives:
'You will find in my Will (here it is) full Instructions in every Particular
concerning the Wearing and Management of your Coats; wherein you must be
very exact, to avoid the Penalties I have appointed for every transgression
or Neglect, upon which your future Fortunes will entirely depend'.
The later subversion of the will provides us with an allegory of misreading. The abuse of the living coats (the Church) provides an allegory of desire and corruption. The brothers abuse and misinterpret the will as a way of figuring misuse and misinterpretation of the Bible. The attack on Jack, representing Dissenters, is particularly biting: it targets the sectarian groups who exalted the individual worshipper or small congregation with their claims to inner light and private conscience, unchecked by tradition and institutional authority.
In the case of the satire on writing and scholarship, as we have seen in the first half of this lecture, texts like Dryden's Virgil and scholarship of Bentley that are being undermined. They are works whose claim to authority is spurious, and whose authors fail to pay homage to the only true originals of classical civilisation.
In this reading of The Tale of a Tub, then, there seem to be clear distinctions between parody of lesser forms and allegory of higher forms, which roughly corresponds to the twin foci of Swift's work. Both the parody and the allegory are concerned with discerning true and false models of textual authority.
∆ 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.
A Tale of a Tub takes its own winding, unique course to set up an allegory for the state of religion in the early 18th century. The reader learns about Swift’s satirical view of religion, as well as about the nature of critique, tangential thought, and writing itself.
Thank you...😊
Words : 1759
Images: 3
∆ Reference :
“Jonathan Swift.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 15 Oct. 2023, www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Swift.
“Jonathan Swift and ‘A Tale of a Tub.’” Great Writers Inspire, writersinspire.org/content/jonathan-swift-tale-tub.
Accessed 21 Nov. 2023.
