Assignment Paper no. 102 ( Literature of the Neo - Classical Period )

• Name :- Payal Bambhaniya

• Batch :- M.A. sem. 1 ( 2022 - 2024 )

• Roll no. :- 16

• Paper no. & Name :- 102 ( Literature of the Neo - Classical Period )

• Assignment Topic:- Thematic Study of 'A Tale of a Tub'

• Subject Code no. :- 22393

• Enrollment no. :- 4069206420220002

• Emai Id :- payalbambhaniya92@gmail.com

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

Introduction:-

A theme is the general message or statement about a subject that all the elements of a story or a poem work together to develop. Without a unifying theme, a story contains only arbitrary events and Characters. Theme is specially essential to give your Characters and events meaning, a meaning that often leads to great spiritual and emotional involvement and released by an audience. Theme functions make a story or poem meaningful. Great themes create great drama. So, In the literature themes are very important.

Jonathan Swift ( 1667 - 1745 ):-

Jonathan Swift was an Anglo - Irish satirist, author, Essayist, political Pamphleteer, poet and Anglican Cleric. He was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. The son of an English Lawyer, he grew up there in the care of his uncle before attending Trinity College at the age of fourteen, where he stayed for seven years, graduating in 1688. In that year he became the secretary for Sir William Temple, an English politician and member of the Whig party. In 1694, he took religious orders in the church of Ireland and then spent a year as a country parson. He had begun to write satires on the political and religious corruption surrounding him, working on A Tale of Tub, which supports the position of the Anglican Church against its critics on the left and the right, and The Battle of the Books, which argues for the supremacy of the classics against Modern thought and literature. He also wrote a number of political pamphlets in favour of the Whig party. His Notable works are below.

• A Modest Proposal
• Gulliver's Travels
• A Tale of a Tub
• The Journal to Stella
• The Lady's Dressing Room

A Tale of Tub :-

A Tale of a Tub was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift, composed between 1694 and 1697 and published in 1704. It is arguably his most difficult satire, and perhaps his best work. The Tale is a prose parody divided into sections of "digression" and a "tale" of three brothers, each representing one of the main branches of Western Christianity. A satire on the Roman catholic and Anglican churches and English Dissenters, it was famously attacked for its profanity and irreligion, starting with William Wotton, who wrote that it made a game of "God and Religion, Truth and moral Honesty, learning and industry to show at the bottom contemptible opinion of every Thing which is called Christianity. The work continued to be regarded as an attack on religion well into the nineteenth century.

The Tale was enormously popular, presenting both a satire of religious excess and a parody of contemporary writing in literature, politics, theology, its comically excessive front matter and series of digressions throughout. The overwhelming parody is of enthusiasm, pride and credulity. At the time it was written, politics and religion were still closely linked in England, and the religious and political aspects of the satire can often hardly be separated. "The work made Swift notorious, and was widely misunderstood, especially by Queen Anne herself who mistook its purpose for profanity.  It effectively disbarred it's author from proper preference in the church of England, but is considered in the church of England, but is considered one of Swift's best allegories, even by himself. Themes of A Tale of Tub are as below.

True Christianity Adheres to the Bible:-

In the narrative portions of A Tale of Tub, Swift Makes a claim about the true practice of Christianity by satirizing the various false alternatives. In altering their coats and deviating from their father's will, the three brothers in the story to various degrees are rejecting the Bible as the overarching guide to church doctrine and discipline. By showing these alterations as both wicked and frivolous, Swift suggests that the brothers are debasing themselves with every step they take away from the authority of scripture. Conversely, Swift prices any effort to mend the coats according to the father's will. This back and forth reveals the differences in the three major branches of contemporary western Christianity as Swift understands them. Peter, the brother who represents the catholic tradition, initiates most of the changes the three brothers make to their coats. 

His main doctrinal error, as presented by Swift, is his insistence that he can exercise a teaching authority on par with the Bible - that his pronouncements can rival, modify, or even displace what is plainly stated in church has long stressed the complementarity of scripture and "Sacred tradition", according the pope a special role in interpreting and reconciling both. As a satirist, thought, Swift somewhat exaggerates the extent to which the papacy saw itself as authorised to negate or alter scripture. For Catholics, sacred tradition supports some practices and doctrines not explicitly given in the Bible, but it authorises nothing that actually clashes with scripture. 

Swift writes more admiringly of Martin, who represents Martin Luther and by extension the mainline Protestant tradition that Luther is credited with founding. The Lutheran tradition holds to a principal known as Sola scripture, meaning that the Bible is the only infallible authority by which Christian doctrines and practices can be justified. Tradition, in the Lutheran view, is strictly subordinate to the Bible; it is not a separate "pillar" of faith as it is in catholic teaching. The church retains a role as the interpreter of the Bible, but significant catholic concepts such as purgatory are dismissed as having no basis in scripture. Since Swift seems to praise the Sola scriptura viewpoint, one might expect him to endorse Jack's reforms even more enthusiastically than Martin's. In chapter 11, Swift argues that there are limits to how much and how exclusively a Christian should rely on scripture. 

He specifically mocks Jack for using his father's will not only as a guide to moral conduct and religious practices, but as a nightcap, an umbrella, a bandage, and even a kind of medicine. The point here seems to be that even the Bible has its limits: it is a moral and religious guide, not one of the encyclopedias or compendia that Swift enjoyed ridiculing. From the established Protestant point of view Swift writes from, the more aggressive reformers were taking Sola scripture too far, treating the Bible as a source of worldly advice - like a cookbook or a medical treatise - and cheapening God's word in the process.

Only Moderation can Fix Excess :-

Beneath the specificity of its religious satire, A Tale of a Tub is a Goldilocks - like cautionary tale about the dangers of immoderate reform. Pater, who represents the catholic Church, doubles down on the errors that he and his brothers introduce into their Christian practice. When Martin and Jack part ways with Peter in chapter 4, they are naturally eager to avoid a way of life that has turned their older brother into a mad tyrant. To them, reform is both a survival mechanism - they don't want to end up like peter - and a moral imperative: they feel guilty for having disobeyed their late father all these years. Yet by showing Martin as wise and cool headed while lampooning Jack as a cultist and lunatic, Swift suggests that reform taken too can be just as bad as no reform at all. 

Martin repairs his coat in a way that suggests that he is aware of both the necessity and the dangers of reform. He undoes the false embroidery stitch by stitch, proceedings as slowly and painstakingly as he deems necessary. As a result, the underlying coat - the pure, ancient religion he is trying to recover after a millennium of corruption - survives intact but slightly modified because he cannot remove all the alterations without destroying the original fabric. Jack, in taking a more extreme and less deliberate path of reform, ends up destroying the thing he claims to be purifying. He gets rid of Peter's excess but introduces his own kind of excess in the process. If, for Swift, an authentically biblical Christianity represents the " straight and narrow", then there are equally hazardous pitfalls on both sides of the path. In Swift's view, neither the complacency of peter nor the reactionary zeal of Jack forms a good basis for a Christian life.

Swift's call for moderation echoes throughout the narative "Digressions" as well, where he ventures critical opinions concerning writing and literary criticism - not to mention government, fashion, and other topics of popular debate. In writing, Swift mocks those who rush headlong into every new fad, producing works that have long - winded prefaces, dozens of dedicates, and a general overgrowth of stylistic flourishes. But Swift satirizes with equal glee those critics who descend on this new, mediocre writing like rats on cheese or wasps on fruit. Since, by his own admission, he is out to amuse more than to instruct, Swift does not delve too far into what a sincere and productive mode of literary criticism might look like. He makes it abundantly clear, however, that the obsessively fault - finding critic is just as bad an offender and deserving of his sharp satire as the inept writer of poetry or fiction.

Conclusion:-

The theme that Swift explores in A Tale of a Tub is True Christianity Adheres to the Bible. In Altering their Father's will, the three brothers - Jack, Martin and Peter in the story to various degrees are rejecting the Bible as the overarching guide and discipline. Each brother represents one of the primary branches of Christianity in the west.

 Thank you for reading this Assignment.

Word count:- 1,639

Image :- 3

References:-

Quintana, Ricardo and Luebering, J.E.. "Jonathan Swift". Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Nov. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Swift. Accessed 3 November 2022.

Course Hero. "A Tale of a Tub Study Guide." Course Hero. 6 Dec. 2019. Web. 3 Nov. 2022. <https://www.coursehero.com/lit/A-Tale-of-a-Tub/>.