A TALE OF TUB

Characters in A Tale of Tub by Jonathan

Swift
CHARACTERS

Peter
Peter, one of three brothers whose father, on his deathbed, wills each of them a new
coat that is guaranteed to last a lifetime, given the proper care.
The father provides detailed instructions for such care and enjoins his sons Peter,
Martin, and Jack to live together peaceably under one roof. Peter goes in search of giant
sand dragons with his brothers and develops an increasingly enlarged sense of self-
importance.
When their father’s coats no longer reflect the current fashion, the brothers, under
Peter’s leadership, adjust the coats accordingly.A relentless quest for knowledge, power,
and possessions sends Peter in pursuit of experimental science and frenzied finance. He
buys a “Large Continent,” which he resells numerous times. He discovers a sovereign
remedy for worms and engages in other quackery.
Dedicated to pride, projects, and knavery, Peter eventually turns into a madman. In his
delusions, he calls himself Lord, Emperor, Father, and even God Almighty. His need to
make all people subservient soon affects his relationship with his brothers, whom he
rules as a despot.They finally rebel and begin their separate existence when Peter, in his
rage, turns them out. Allegorically, he represents the pope or the Catholic church.

Jack
Jack, Peter’s brother. After his break with Peter, he begins to evince the extremist zeal
of the dissenter or reformer. He and Martin wish to rediscover and honor their father’s
will. In trying to rid himself of Peter’s influence, Jack tries to remake his father’s coat,
but his hysterical rage makes him tear it to pieces. Sensing their incompatibility, Jack
and Martin separate.

Jack’s fanatical dissent soon yields to madness, the madness of jealousy, conceit,
rebellion, and anarchy. By rejecting Peter, Jack is forced to establish his own tradition of
authority. He founds the sect of A Eolists, a theology of radical nonconformity that holds
wind or spirit to be the origin of all things. Filled with this wind of inspiration, Jack is
driven to ridiculous excess. A copy of his father’swill turns into an object of superstitious
veneration.

He introduces a new deity known as Babel by some and as Chaos by others. Its shrine is
visited by many pilgrims. He covers roguish tricks with shows of devotion. He is strongly
averse to music and painting. Jack’s nonconformity and dissent are clearly as
destructive as Peter’s papistry.

Both rationalism and emotionalism, as well as both authoritarianism and individualism,

turn into religious egotism that perverts and corrupts the simple wishes of the father.
Jack allegorically represents John Calvin.

Martin
Martin, the third brother, who provides the satiric norm and is as such the least
developed and the least interesting of the three. His moderation in all things and sweet
reasonableness do not incite the reader’s interest,as does the psychopathology of Peter
and Jack. Representing Martin Luther and the Church of England, Martin lacks the vitality
that animates the radical cause and paranoia of his brothers. The difference is most
noticeable in the way he divests his coat of the ornaments that Peter had persuaded his
brothers to add. His reformation of the coat proceeds cautiously and discerningly.

In contrast, Jack in his impassioned zeal rips not only the decorations but the garment
itself, until there is little left of it. When Martin eventually settles in the north, he kindles
the wrath of Peter when the people begin to shift their allegiance and financial support
from one brother to the other. Bloody battles erupt and the relationship among the three
brothers is strained further, until permanent alienation ensues.

A Tale of Tub by Jonathan Swift

SUMMARY
A Tale of a Tub is Swift’s wildest adventure in satirical humor. Speaking through a diabolical
persona of his own  making, he pillories the corruptions of churches and schools.
The title refers to the large tub that sailors would throw overboard to divert a whale from
ramming their boat. In Swift’s satire, the whale is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), a political
monster born of Descartes’s mathematical philosophy.
Institutional Christianity is the ship that might be sunk in such an onslaught, and its timbers
have already been loosened by schismatic factions. The book is an  allegory of church history.
A father wills suits of clothes to his three sons, with directions that the suits never be altered.
Brothers Peter, Martin, and Jack represent Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan sects, respectively.
Peter upgrades hisgarments with gold lace, shoulder knots, and such trappings. Martin removes
the false ornamentation from his without tearing the cloth. Jack zealously rips his  garment to
shreds to get rid of all ornament.
This basic allegory is richly embellished with outlandish digressions, parodies, puns, quibbles,
unstructured foolery, and displays of odd erudition. The diabolical narrative takes every
opportunity to prick the pretensions of pedants, religious  dissenters, and perfectionists whose
projects try to remake human society along rational lines.
Swift thought that human reason is rather weak, blown flat in fact by the merest gust of desire,
and so people should behave themselves and be governed by institutions such as the Church of
England. Yet his diabolical narrator weakens this myth of order and reason by showing how
vulnerable the mysteries of religion are to skeptical scrutiny.Dressed in his sanctimonious
vestments, Peter looks ridiculous issuing papal bulls on the superstitious  doctrine that bread
can be turned into mutton.
The excesses of religious enthusiasts are reduced to absurdity in Jack’s rantings and in a
scatological satire on a sect of Æolists, who believe that wind is the essence of all things,  the
original cause and first principle of the universe.
In their most ridiculous rite, Æolists seat themselves atop  barrels that catch the wind and blow
inspiration into their posteriors by means of a secret funnel. Sacred sermons are delivered by
their priests in oracular belches, or bursts of internal wind.
This maniacal conception reemerges in the famous Digression on Madness. There, the modern
upsurges in religion, politics, and science are diagnosed as a form of madness, caused when the
brain is intoxicated by vapors arising from the lower faculties. This vapor is to the brain what
tickling is to the touch. Real perceptions are disordered in a happy confusion. Thus, happiness
for moderns amounts to “a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived.”

In the madhouse world of A Tale of a Tub, the modern man cut off from classical culture is lucky
to be a fool among knaves, like the book’s demoniac narrator.