Thursday, July 14, 2016

How would Jonathan Swift's "Market Women's Cries" poem be analyzed under the Marxist criticism theory?

Jonathan Swift's "Market Women's Cries" is about female market traders who cry out for customers to buy their produce of apples, onions, and herring. The women need customers; otherwise, their families will go hungry, or they will themselves perish.
Karl Marx proposed that, in the Capitalist economic model, the working classes were exploited by the wealthy upper classes. Marx said, in fact, that the working classes were treated like horses, meaning that they were given just enough food to be able to work but no more.
Therefore, from a Marxist perspective, one might say that this poem is an example of how the working classes are not given their fair share. Indeed, the market women seem to live hand-to-mouth and hope simply to earn enough money in one day to keep themselves and their families alive until the next. The first speaker says that she wishes her children were "in Heaven," implying that they are suffering terribly in this life, probably from hunger, malnutrition, and poor living conditions. The third speaker says that she needs customers to buy her produce so that she can buy "some bread," without which, she says, she "soon shall be dead."

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