Gullivers Travels

By Jonathan SwiftAn Overview

Gulliver’s Travels is a parody of the genre of “travel narrative”During the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these tales of

voyages of exploration and colonial adventure were extremely popular:

Christopher ColumbusAmerigo Vespucci (for whom “America” is named)Sir Walter RaleighCaptain John Smith

More’s Utopia also parodies the genre, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest invokes the genre

Travel narratives are often sometimes “utopian”—Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels also parodies More’s Utopia

Jonathan Swift

Lemuel Gulliver’s four voyages can be seen as a satirical exploration of the human condition: What does it mean to be a human being?

The name “Gulliver” may suggest that he is “gullible”

Gulliver’s first voyage, to Lilliput:Gulliver encounters a land of tiny people. According to Stuart Sherman, editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature Vol. 1c:

The diminutive citizens of Lilliput represent human small-mindedness and petty ambitions. Filled with self-importance, they Lilliputians arecruel, treacherous, malicious and destructive.

(Longman Anthology, p. 2531)

Lilliputs are little, literally and morallySchism over which side of an egg to eatSuspicions and rivalries end in the Lilliputs spurning Gulliver.Government officials gain jobs by creeping and leaping (i.e. sucking up or being opportunistic.)

Lilliputs

Gulliver’s second voyage, to Brobdingnag, a land of giants:

In Brobdingnag Gulliver is reduced to the size of a Lilliputian. According to Stuart Sherman:

He is humbled by his own helplessness and, finding the huge bodiesof the Brobdingnagians grotesque, he realizes how repulsive the Lilliputians must have found him. When Gulliver gives the wise king of Brobdingnag an account of the political affairs of England—which manifest hypocrisy, avarice and hatred—the enlightened monarch concludes that most of the country’s inhabitants must be “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the face of the Earth.” (Longman Anthology, p. 2531)

• Gulliver becomes a Lilliputian in Brogdignag• King is wise—sees through shallowness of

people, especially G. and his descriptions of Europe

• Gunpowder– King horrified that G. describes destruction in

familiar manner insensitively– Gunpowder makes it possible to not face your

enemy– More bang for your buck

Brobdignags

Gulliver’s Travels : Book IV

Gulliver’s crew mutinies and puts him ashore on an unknown island

The island turns out to be inhabited by the “Houyhnhnms”--creatures who look like horses but are more civilized and intelligent than humans, in Gulliver’s view

The island also has “Yahoos”—creatures who look like humans but are sub-human in intelligence, savage and disgusting

• B/c science (led by Newton) is systematizing the world, the Enlightenment brings with it a new conception of God as a watchmaker. He creates the world, winds it up like a watch, and sets it in motion.

• Very different than a providential God who intercedes in peoples’ lives

• Lilliputs are fascinated with Gulliver’s watch and King of Brogdignag wonders if Gulliver is a toy-like contraption

• Are we just mechanisms/wound up clocks?

The Watchmaker God

• Satire throws a monkey-wrench in the works.

• Knowledge should be related to moral life, not just objective science.

• This is the crux of Swift’s satire in Book III.

Swift’s answer: hopefully not

• Laputians are like astronomer in Rasselas: their heads are literally in the clouds

• Flappers are needed to keep them alive b/c they ignore the exigencies of the real world

• Women prefer to be treated poorly than to be ignored

Laputa and Lagado: philosophical speculation and practical science

• Flying island:Balnibarbi::ruler:ruled• England:Ireland• George III:America• Countrywide (mortgage

industry):homebuyers• These relationships are defined by

haughtiness, power, detachment and ruthlessness.

Flying Island

Sherman concludes:

Throughout Gulliver’s Travels that which is admirable is held up to expose corruption in the reader’s world, and that which is deplorable is identified with the institutions and practices of contemporary Europe, particularly Britain. . . . With brilliantly modulated ironic self-awareness, Swift’s painful comedy of exposure to the truth of human frailty demonstrates that there is no room for the distortions of human pride in a world where our practices are so evidently at variance with our principles. Swift advances no program of social reform, but provokes a new recognition—literally, a re-thinking—of our own humanity. (Longman Anthology, p. 2531)