Assignment 2 Literature of Neo- Classical Period

This Blog is Written as part of  Study Assignments Given To Sem- 1 Students of Department Of English, MKBU

Name: Ghanshyam Katariya

Paper 102:  Literature of the Neo- Classical Period 

Subject Code: 22393 

Topic Name: ‘A Tale of a Tub’ as Religious Allegory

Batch: M.A. Sem-1 (2022-24)

Roll No: 8

Enrolment No: 4069206420220017

Email Address: gkatariya67@gmail.com

Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, MKBU

What is an Allegory

An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for example, a fable or a myth, that seems to be about one thing but is actually about another. Or, to put it differently, it is a story with two (or more) meanings: a superficial, literal meaning, and a deeper, figurative one. The  important advantage of the allegory is that it can be approached on more than one level, meaning that people can enjoy an allegory on many levels and see in it as much or as little as they are prepared to see—or, indeed, whatever they want to see, bending the allegory to the curve, or twist, of their minds. 

An allegory is a device used in literature, rhetoric and art to signify a meaning that is not literal. When a device, a character or a symbol is considered allegory, it may be symbolic of a concept, like reason or fortune, it might symbolise a type of person, like the “Everyman,” or a worldview. 

Introduction of Author

Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Protestant Anglo-Irish parents: his ancestors had been Royalists, and all his life he would be a High-Churchman. In 1673, at the age of six, Swift began his education at Kilkenny Grammar School, which was, at the time, the best in Ireland. Between 1682 and 1686 he attended, and graduated from, Trinity College in Dublin, though he was not, apparently, an exemplary student.

 In England, in 1689, he became secretary to Sir William Temple, a diplomat and man of letters, at Moor Park in Surrey. There Swift read extensively in his patron's library, and met Esther Johnson, who would become his "Stella," and it was there, too, that he began to suffer from Meniere's Disease, a disturbance of the inner ear which produces nausea and vertigo, and which was little understood in Swift's day. In 1690, at the advice of his doctors, Swift returned to Ireland, but the following year he was back with Temple in England. He visited Oxford in 1691: in 1692, with Temple's assistance, he received an M. A. degree from that University, and published his first poem: on reading it, John Dryden, a distant relation, is said to have remarked "Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet."

Between 1696 and 1699 Swift composed most of his first great work, A Tale of a Tub, a prose satire on the religious extremes represented by Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, and in 1697 he wrote The Battle of the Books, a satire defending Temple's conservative but besieged position in the contemporary literary controversy as to whether the works of the "Ancients", the great authors of classical antiquity were to be preferred to those of the "Moderns." In 1699 Temple died, and Swift travelled to Ireland as chaplain and secretary to the Earl of Berkeley.

In 1707 Swift was sent to London as emissary of Irish clergy seeking remission of tax on Irish clerical incomes. His requests were rejected, however, by the Whig government and by Queen Anne, who suspected him of being irreligious. While in London he met Esther Vanhomrigh, who would become his "Vanessa." During the next few years he went back and forth between Ireland and England, where he was involved, largely as an observer rather than a participant in the highest English political circles.

In 1720 he began work upon Gulliver's Travels, intended, as he says in a letter to Pope, "to vex the world, not to divert it." 1724-25 saw the publication of The Drapier Letters, which gained Swift enormous popularity in Ireland, and the completion of Gulliver's Travels. In 1726 he visited England once again, and stayed with Pope at Twickenham: in the same year Gulliver's Travels was published.

 Swift's final trip to England took place in 1727. Between 1727 and 1736 publication of five volumes of Swift-Pope Miscellanies. "Stella" died in 1728. In the following year A Modest Proposal was published. 1731 saw the publication of Swift's ghastly "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed."

By 1735, when a collected edition of his Works was published in Dublin, his Meniere's Disease became more acute, resulting in periods of dizziness and nausea: at the same time, prematurely, his memory was beginning to deteriorate. During 1738 he slipped gradually into senility, and finally suffered a paralytic stroke: in 1742 guardians were officially appointed to care for his affairs. Swift died on October 19, 1745. 

Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Tale of a Tub’

   It was written during the 1690s, when Swift was living with his patron Sir William Temple, and it was published in 1704. Like Swift's other major prose - including ‘Gulliver's Travels’ and ‘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. 

The story is about three brothers Peter, Martin and Jack. Eager to undertake actions which are against their father‘s will, the three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack, fail to resist the temptation and constantly refine their argumentative abilities, with a view to pursuing their passions, up to the point when their capability reaches the highest level and they manage to concoct a way out of the will, which would allow them to make changes and add various ornaments to their coats.

A Tale of a Tub as Religious Allegory

Jonathan Swift's ‘A Tale of a Tub’ is one of the most amusing and, at the same time, formidable books in our language. The apparently simple allegorical history of Christianity which constitutes the Tale proper is surrounded, almost smothered, by voluminous, wonderfully extravagant digressions and editorial apparatus, while the prose of the putative author, now earnest, now exuberant, exploits innumerable ironic strategies. Yet the work is clearly concerned with the grave and persistent problems of human belief and conduct and is the product of a young Anglican clergyman of much learning, superb talent, and presumed piety-facts which may explain, although they do not entirely excuse, the sustained mirthlessness of most studies of ‘the Tale’. 

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. 

Use of 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 symbolises 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.

For  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'. (Swift)

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. If we think about the brothers and their coats as an allegory of misreading, we can see that the notion of the Bible as sacred pre-text is complicated by the fact that what the brothers can so misread and miscontruct the words of the will that they are able get it to justify whatever they want it to do. 

By the time the brothers have finished, the Will, or the Word that they are authorising their actions with is no longer the true, original, sacred word, but their corrupt and self -serving version of it. The pretext underwriting the allegory of the coats is no longer the Bible, but a distorted misreading of it, a fallen text that must be discredited. 

Works Cited

Burton, Neel. “The Psychology of Allegory and Metaphor.” Psychology Today, 28 April 2021, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/202104/the-psychology-allegory-and-metaphor. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Christensen, Tricia. “What is an Allegory?” Language Humanities, 12 October 2022, https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-is-an-allegory.htm. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Cody, David. “Jonathan Swift: A Brief Biography.” The Victorian Web, https://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/swift/bio.html. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Craven, Kenneth. “Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness: The Information Age in Swift's "A Tale of a Tub."” The Journal of Religion, vol. 75, 1995, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1204964. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Qose, Alma Karasaliu. “Character individualization in Swift’s satire Tale of a Tub.” Diacronia, 2015. 2067-0931.

Swift, Jonathan. “A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift.” Project Gutenberg, 1 December 2003, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4737. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Williams, Abigail, et al. “Jonathan Swift and 'A Tale of a Tub.'” Great Writers Inspire, 4 July 2012, https://writersinspire.org/content/jonathan-swift-tale-tub. Accessed 6 November 2022.

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