Love. Compare and Contrast reasoning between the three - Essay Example

Reason number Reason The most important faculty of man, in the works of the age of the Enlightenment, which occurred during the eighteenth century in England, was the faculty of reason. There were however, writers who lived during this very age and chose to parody the importance that was accorded to reason. Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope are two such authors who satirized the madness behind the reason of seventeenth and eighteenth century England. A Modest Proposal is a work that seeks to present to its readers a way in which the impoverished Irish peasantry could revive its fortunes- by butchering its babies.

The essay satirizes the lack of attention that the Irish received at the hands of the British crown and parliament. By making absurd suggestions in a manner that relies only on arguments of reason and not of feeling, Swift manages to show how dangerous it was for people to rely too much on their faculty of reason. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift paints the picture of such a society while talking of Laputa and also of the land of the Houyhnhnms. These places, even though they followed the dictates of reason to an extreme were not happy in a very human way.

They operated mechanically and this is something that Sift criticizes in most of his work. The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope too satirizes the lack of reason in the activities of an age that was supposed to be characterized by it. The silly activities of the men and women, and Belinda in particular, of this age seemed to be helped along by creatures of the supernatural in attaining the levels of absurdity that they did, according to Pope. The reasoning in these works are similar in that they seek to satirize the ways in which society works and also employs imaginary creatures for that purpose.

They are dissimilar in the tone that they take, however, as Swift’s tales take on a darker tone. Swift’s protagonist rejects the ideal world when he encounters it. Works CitedSwift, Jonathan. A Modest Proposal. http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html Accessed on 25th February, 2012.Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Penguin, 2010.Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. New York: Dover, 1968.