Irish Satire and Black Comedy

In my last blog post I was able to use the tools I learned in my Intro to Psych class and apply them here in my college seminar, The French Woman, with respect to Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf's tendencies to use fabrication as a mechanism to cope with the more grim memories of their pasts. I have always found crossovers between seemingly unrelated courses quite interesting. In fact, recognizing crossovers between courses, however minute they might be, is a way to avoid the feeling that a particular course is "wasting" your time because it might not be directly pertinent to the perfect life plan you have carefully calculated. I myself am on a seemingly unrelated track in my undergraduate education as an English and Pre-Med major, a combination that typically sparks quite a few questions in conversation. But I am the eternal optimist that is thoroughly convinced that any course you take is pertinent to your plan. In the final research paper for my African Politics first year of studies seminar I connected the health problems from female genital mutilation, child marriages, and incredibly young motherhood as a possible cause of the lack of political participation from women in African countries like Niger (where FGM and child marriage rates are incredibly high). Where many of my classmates were complaining about the assignment, I was diving into a pool of new information about health from a vantage point that I would have never considered before that course.
Listening to Tori's incredibly interesting presentation about the life of George Bernard Shaw, I realized how similar he is to Jonathan Swift--a fellow Irish/British writer--whom I am studying in my English course this semester (Brit Lit II) as well as in my undergraduate research that I have just started. Swift lived in a completely different era from 1667-1745 while Shaw lived from 1856-1950. The two were originally born in Ireland but relocated to England. Shaw sought better education and Swift sought a better political atmosphere. Both were very outspoken politically during their time in London. Shaw was an ardent socialist and Swift allied with the Tories as he found them sympathetic to the Irish clergy and more capable of ending the war with France, albeit secretive and at times illegal. Eventually the Whigs came into power and Swift was forced into what he considered exile in Ireland to "live like a rat in a whole." But it was in Ireland that Swift came into his own in famous political satire like A Modest Proposal and Gulliver's Travels. Swift's satire mainly dealt with the atrocities committed by the British government towards the Irish as well as the basic incompetence of   the British government. The satirist became a voice for the voiceless and a champion of Irish patriotism. While Shaw never returned to Ireland, as a socialist he too sought equality between the ruling class and the working class. The two authors lived and worked in vastly different historical periods, but seem to share commonalities of championing the underbelly of society. Shaw's most famous works revolve around women rising from peasant to posh and the interesting dynamics between class and gender (St. Joan and Pygmalion).
The two authors did not approach these serious political and social topics very seriously. Rather, they exposed the inherent dark humor in the inequalities they were surrounded by. Swift proposes that the poor Irish should sell their children as food for the wealthy so they can ease their economic burden and benefit the public at the same time in A Modest Proposal. This satirical approach is attractive and in some senses more affective than a dramatic approach. Swift's humor proves how incredibly heartless the English were to the poor within their own country and especially to the Irish. The story of Joan of Arc is typically a serious one, as evident in The Passion of Joan of Arc film. But Shaw decided to take a more humorous route in his play St. Joan and it was coined "a tragedy without villains" since all characters involved were simply acting on their beliefs. At the end of the play Joan laments that the world will never be ready to accept the saints. While St. Joan is not quite as satirical as A Modest Proposal, it discusses similar themes of inequality. While Joan laments that the world is never ready to have a saint among it (it took almost 500 years to canonize Joan), Shaw seems to lament the slow pace of social change and compares himself to Joan as a fellow radical fighting for equality.