Harshit

Roll No.- 1605

Paper- British literature: 18th century

Professor- Mr. Prem Kumar Vijayan

Satire and Perspective in Gulliver’s Travels

Introduction-

“In no art form is the complexity of human existence so obviously scanted as in satire”

– Alvin B Kernan

Gulliver’s travels is a fantasy travelogue, dramatizing while also ironizing the 18 th-

century English society’s follies, focusing on many issues and themes through a

narrator whose journeys seem so fictional yet realistic at the same time by a mix of

themes like comic ignorance, coprophilia, etc. The novel embodies the most orthodox

form of satire with an autobiographical narrative, ironizing the conflicting dogmas that

existed in 18th European politics, philosophy, society, and history. The novel truly

embodies “the struggle between different ideologies” (1, pg. 1) mocking all absolutes

and pledging its loyalty to no one.

Written by one of the greatest satirists in history, Gulliver’s travels is heavily influenced

by Jonathan Swift’s identity as an Irish man, making the satire in the novel focused

towards the ruling classes of England and the colonist mindset which demanded
complete subordination from Ireland and the thought process of the colonizer. Swift’s

satire has much to with the contemporary political situation of 18 th century England

where continuous enslavement of Ireland through many laws that were passed in the

early 18th century by the English parliament. For example- An act passed in the

parliament of Great Britain in 1719 gave it the right to pass laws for the kingdom of

Ireland, making Ireland subordinate to the British parliament indefinitely, taking away

Irish people’s right to self-determination. Another act passed in 1704 made it illegal for

Catholics to buy land in Ireland, this act was devastating for the Irish people as the

majority of Irish people were Catholics. Both these laws snatched the political rights

and land rights from the Irish people.

The 18th century was a golden period for England as it had won many wars with Spain,

France, and Italy which made it the sole superpower in terms of military strength for a

whole decade. England had also won new territories in North America, solidifying

people’s faith in colonialism. Because of all these events, English nationalism was on

the rise while colonized were suffering everywhere. Due to all these reasons, Swift’s

criticism of English society was indeed a mockery of the English nationalist agenda

which was based on colonialism. The English gentry which followed this nationalist

agenda was as narrow-minded as the natives of fictional kingdoms from Gulliver’s

voyages.

With the rising popularity of travelogues in England, an agenda to remold the common

perspective of the English subject of the English society was being enacted. The
brutality and irrationality of colonization were being either justified or rationalized in

these travelogues through incorporating narrowminded pseudo-politics and the pseudo-

science of the 18th century England. This is why Gulliver’s travels is a satire to the

rotten perspective of the English travelers that demonized the other races.

A great effort was being made to distinguish the colonizer from the colonized as also

suggested by Clement Hawes in his paper which says “aggression and unfairness

towards the colonized were being justified by the thematics of absolute ‘otherness” (5).

Swift very skillfully incorporates these social trends promoted by the regime in his

novel while also dismantling the regime’s vanities through the ironic tragedy of

Gulliver.

Satire on the English society in Gulliver’s voyages

Many scholars have suggested that the satire in Gulliver’s travels is ‘problematic’ as

“satire usually make a clear cut distinction between good or evil”(1, pg 535), as seen in

the initial two volumes, but with the eventual mental breakdown of its unusual

protagonist in the subsequent volumes, the ironic element becomes ambiguous and as

Bentman has suggested, the satire starts to “challenge the single vision imposed by the

critics of classic satire”. His satire shows the struggle of many competing theories and

ideologies, “all guaranteeing the full comprehension of all aspects of human nature but

failing because of its complexities” (1, pg 535)

The satire in Gulliver's travels is unorthodox, complex, and contradictory. From the

distinction in physical size to the traditions and mindsets of the people Gulliver comes

across, they all mirror the Folies of the European society while also “dismantling the

mindset of the colonizer” (5). The novel while following the fantasy genre is

strategically politically charged, almost all volumes of the novel either criticizing the

monarchy or depicting the vain struggle between Whigs and Tories. To make the ironic

narrative realistic while still pertaining to the world of fairytale, Swift takes great pains

to make the reader believe that Gulliver’s experiences across the fictional nations of

Lilliput, Brobdingnag, etc. are real events, this is why subjects intimate to the human

body like of food, clothes, genitalia, and even excreta are vividly described, giving the

narrative a sense of realness which doesn’t mask any ugliness, a practice that is a taboo

for the fairytale genre.

"Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, most mighty Emperor of

Lilliput, delight and terror of the universe… proposes to the man-mountain, the

following articles, which, by a solemn oath, he shall be obliged to perform." (1.3.9)”

In the 18th century, England was a great powerhouse of Europe, having just won the

Spanish war of succession, England has acquired new colonies in North America. A

new wave of nationalism had erupted and England was celebrating its superior literary,

political, military, and technological achievements and this is why the English society

had become quite arrogant, scorning all foreign cultures because of their supposed

‘inferiority’. This corrupt mindset has been readily presented by swift in the novel;
indeed the colonizer was an omnipotent existence, powerful in front of the natives of

African and American tribes as Gulliver is in front of Lilliputians but swift’s portrayal

of the colonizer in the novel is dynamic, reflected by Gulliver’s omnipotence but also

by Lilliputian’s ignorance and powerlessness. Gulliver's large stature and omnipotence

are but a façade just like the contract Lilliputian king makes with Gulliver.

“The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines,

and the proposal I had made… A strange effect of narrow principles and views!” (vol iii

ch ix, Gulliver’s travels)

His claim to moral as well as physical superiority is a delusion that breaks down when

he meets the giants of Brobdingnag who are superior to him and English people in

every way. It is an example of swift speaking through Gulliver and conveying his own

pacifist opinion towards bloody wars which were glorified by the nationalists. Gulliver

is made to realize his inferiority by reflecting on things like mass murder in wars, things

he considers high valued. It is not the first time swift indirectly criticizes England, here

he is calling the European kings as having Narrow principles and views, not

Brobdingnagian king.

Satire on Science and politics in Gulliver’s Travels

Swift’s views on science, reason, and politics are complex as explicitly seen in the third

volume of the novel, Gulliver’s voyage to Laputa. Because of the vibes of

“conservative antiscientific sentiment”(R.G. Olson) in this volume, many readers have

labeled the whole novel as a criticism of Francis Bacon's ‘new science’ promoted by the

royal society because of how the grand academy of Lagado and its scientists are

imagined, their vain and irrational experiments like trying to extract sunlight from a

cucumber or reversing excrement into food reflecting the ‘problematic science’ based

on hypothesis and experiments, but this is half the truth as although the volume

explicitly targets the irrational science that goes against the enlightenment ideas, the

novel also mocks the traditional science for its greatest folly, “its scientific explanations

being devoid of certainty and failing to explain the ways of nature and its laws.”(3)

Swift shows in his novel that both traditional and new science had abandoned the

pursuit of rationality and utility in scientific pursuits, suggesting that one engaged in

glossing over the complex machinery of nature while the other, consciously or

unconsciously, pursuing only “theoretical concerns with heavy reliance on abstract

mathematics.”

The criticism of traditional science is seen through the floating island of Laputa. As also

suggested by Douglas Lane Patey, the novel never explains how the island of Laputa

floats in the air, “satirizing the non-explaining nature of traditional science which

glosses over reason and also why the island cannot ‘rise above the heights of four

meters’, the limits of the island reflecting the limits of vague and subjective science”(3)

The Laputans who don’t even know how magnetism, the phenomenon which keeps the

island of Laputa afloat works, are experimenting about things they are completely

clueless about, this is a satire for the new science that stands on uncertain grounds of
the traditional authority, not trying to unravel the mysteries of already known things but

engaging in a wild goose chase.

Swift’s attack on the royal society of England through metaphors and allegories is not

arbitrary; the royal society was the leading institution in modern science in the 18 th

century and was heavily influenced by Newton, a person with whom Swift had many

political, moral, and personal disagreements with. Newton belonged to the political

faction of the ruling Whigs while Swift tended towards the Tories, “Swift didn’t like

Newton’s royal academy being allocated huge resources while people in Ireland were

starving, and swift also didn’t like Newton for playing a key role in debasing the

halfpence, which was to be used in Ireland”. All the experiments that are described

being inducted by the scientists of Lagado were actually performed in the royal

academy, clearing showing the wasteful nature of so-called ‘scientists’ of the royal

society.

Satirizing the people who look up to this royal society, we see how when the people of

Balnibarbi try to utilize the unconventional science that they had learned from Laputa,

the results are devastating but they still keep going. It seems as though the only thing

that keeps them faithful in Laputan science immerges from their blind belief that it is

superior, enabling them to completely disregard that nothing good has been achieved

from it.
“They were indeed excellent in two sciences… but, at the same time, so abstracted and

involved in speculation, that I never met with such disagreeable companions.” (vol iii,

ch iv)

These lines are an example of swift speaking through Gulliver, telling the reader his

own thoughts directly to the reader towards the scientists who didn’t consider chemistry

and biology as a field of science but only concentrating on mathematics and politics as

worth studying. This is why Gulliver could only “hold a logical conversation with

women, tradesmen, and court-pages” (vol iii, ch iv), this being a satire to “new science's

rejection of insignificant speech” (3, pg.813) and other fields of sciences.

It is not until the third novel when it becomes certain that Swift is recklessly mocking

the English people and the British crown’s authority itself. Most of the names that are

used in the volume relate to real places, for example- “the kingdom of Tribnia is an

anagram of Britain, its residents call it Langden which is an anagram for England.

Laputa is created in the image of England, oppressing Balnibarbi by its colonial

dominion over it, which is representative of Ireland. The name Laputa is also a great

mockery of the English empire, meaning ‘the whore’ in Spanish.”( Daniel Cook, The

Conversation)

Gulliver's Character and the irony

The character of Lemuel Gulliver is very controversial among critics, from the way he

interacts with his family after his voyages to the way he integrates himself in foreign
cultures of Brobdingnag, and Houhnhnmland, etc. his fickle identity of a middle-class

marine seems to erode because of the weird experiences he gets on his voyages and this

is why many critics say that, for swift, Gulliver is nothing more than a “convenient

character he can use for his satire”(1).

Gulliver, even though being just a stock character of the English society, is a

problematic narrator. In the whole satiric narrative of the play, his uncertain

perspective, sometimes of an English marine and sometimes of swift’s own, is what

makes the satire of the play contradictory. He claims that he is an honest man and will

be “chiefly studious to truth” (vol. ii, ch. i) but later openly violates his promise to the

reader. Embarrassed by the pettiness of his countrymen, he hides the political

corruption of England from the Brobdingnagian king, he also hides some of his

personal belongings including a pair of spectacles when he is asked to hand over

everything he owns in Lilliput(his spectacles being a metaphor for his perspective of a

proud Englishman which he refuses to hand over) and also disguises himself as a

dutchman to save himself from the Japanese pirates. His carelessness with his words

makes him an unreliable narrator.

Swift uses Gulliver to exaggerate the effects of colonialism on a colonized individual,

prophesizing the ultimate end of the colonizer. Bentman has even said that swift has

prophesized a dystopian future when “a whole army of dehumanized Gullivers will sail

back to Houhnhnmland in canoes made from the skins of all yahoodom.”(1)

“My daughter kneeled to ask my blessing, but I could not see her till she arose, having

been so long used to stand with my head and eyes erect to above sixty feet… I looked

down upon the servants, and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they had

been pigmies and I a giant.” (vol ii, ch iv)

These lines are the perfect example of “change in perspective producing a change in

perception.”(4) When Gulliver, a white man becomes aware of a race that is superior to

his own in both physical strength and moral dignity, his pride starts shaking which in

turn affects his identity and perspective, the shock being representative of the egoistic

view of the English society towards other cultures. To not fall into insanity from the

weight of this knowledge, Gulliver’s fickle mind adopts the Brobdingnagian’s

perspective, satirizing the colonial subject that endeavors to duplicate his masters’

mindset, even if that mindset is toxic to his own kind. When Gulliver returns from

Brobdingnag, he starts to shout whenever he tries to speak and from his perspective,

everyone appears small, this can be suggestive of Gulliver’s unconscious arrogance

which makes him look down and shout on everyone. Losing his perspective and

forgetting himself after every time he returns from a voyage are the early signs of his

complete fall into insanity, which happens after his voyage to Houhnhnmland.

Gulliver’s fickle perspective is problematic because, as many critics have said, “for the

reader, it becomes hard to decide what to believe and what to not.”(1) The complete

trust that should exist between the narrator and the reader crumbles but this

phenomenon is not too bad, the unreliability of the protagonist amplifies the satiric tone
of the novel, in fact, Houlette has even suggested that there was never a complete trust

between the narrator and the reader, or else “we would have freed our horses and

reformed our ways. But we do not.” (1) Swift has made Gulliver into a tragic character

who is unaware of the absurdity of his own character.

He goes even further and says that “Gulliver is unreliable in that he has no perspective

himself” (1). This statement seems questionable as although Gulliver doesn’t have a

strong personality and the weird phenomenon of him taking on other perspectives now

and then might reinforce this argument, Gulliver, at least in the beginning of the novel,

has a perspective which he embodies from swift’s own perspective as seen when

Gulliver refuses to enslave the people of Blefuscu when ordered by the Lilliputian king,

adhering to swift’s disdain towards slavery. The very fact that he goes insane at the end

of the novel is a result of the conflict between his original perspective and the other

perspectives in his mind, leading to the victory of an imperfect Houyhnhnm perspective

which turns Gulliver into an anti-yahoo, who, unlike a real Houyhnhnm, completely

detesting humans. “Because of this incomplete satire of the English society in the novel,

many critics question swift’s ability to write good satire.” (1, pg 538)

Gulliver by no chance is a normal protagonist in the novel. Gulliver’s coprophilic

tendencies are concerning in the novel, his emphasis on his body and, in general, on

excrement are signs that he is a closet-pervert and was never a mentally stable

character, to begin with. The experiences with life and death through his journeys have

deepened the scar on his brain, making him write about things in his travelogue that will
surely make a normal 18th-century English man question his sanity. The chances of him

lying about all these events become more plausible, making him a genius whose

delusional stories can reflect so much truth about society’s follies.

Houyhnhnm race as a satire

The Houyhnhnms, embodiment of all the desirable characters in humans, according to

the 18th-century European perspective, are the horses that are more human than humans

themselves. They represent the unconscious ideals that the Europeans were striving to

achieve during the enlightenment era; the Houyhnhnms being completely rational

creatures devoid of emotions or abstract subjectivity, not mourning the dead, not

believing in a monarchy, and celebrating individual liberty but through a European lens,

meaning that the liberty was confined for their breed.

“Principally I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John,

Peter, Thomas, and so forth” (Jonathan Swift)

From the above line, one can look at Houyhnhnms from a different perspective, they

can be interpreted as a manifestation of swift’s anti-human views but his like for the

individual.

The voyage to Houyhnhnmland being Gulliver’s last voyage is significant as it is an

allegory to the evolution of the human society that the European scholars desired and

admired, this also makes Gulliver going insane at the end of the novel significant,
telling us something about these “unrealistic ideals that are asking too much from

humans”(1), compromising morals, the sanity of the society to uphold logic.

Houyhnhnms being described as the perfect beings is in itself a mockery of the idea of

an ideology or mindset having the capacity to make an ideal society, the society which

doesn’t mourn the dead and exchanges children to have an ideal family which has

children of both sexes, forget perfect, cannot even be called a healthy and sane society.

Conclusion-

While Gulliver’s character is of a normal English marine, he is also uniquely made for

accommodating the satire in his journeys, making the novel and him unique enough to

be called a masterpiece while the subject being common enough for a normal person to

understand. Gulliver’s travels tells how perspective plays a great roll in the creation of

the mindset of a white European colonizer, through the races of Lilliput, Brobdingnag,

and Houyhnhnm, he exposes the othering technique of colonialism and through the

tragic end of Gulliver, swift dismantles this perspective and prophesies the end of this

ideology while exposing its shortcomings through irony and telling how it has the

potential to destroy itself.

Bibliography-

1. Bentman, Raymond. “Satiric Structure and Tone in the Conclusion of Gulliver's

Travels.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 11, no. 3, 1971, pp. 535–

548. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/449912. Accessed 12 May 2020.

2. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. Book Land, 2014.

3. Patey, Douglas Lane. “Swift's Satire on ‘Science’ and the Structure of Gulliver's

Travels.” ELH, vol. 58, no. 4, 1991, pp. 809–839. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/2873283. Accessed 12 May 2020.

4. HOULETTE, FORREST. “NOTES ON ‘GULLIVER'S TRAVELS’: USING

PRAGMATICS TO TEACH SATIRE.” CEA Critic, vol. 46, no. 1/2, 1983, pp. 12–

19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44376914. Accessed 12 May 2020.

5. Hawes, Clement. “Three Times Round the Globe: Gulliver and Colonial

Discourse.” Cultural Critique, no. 18, 1991, pp. 187–214. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/1354099. Accessed 12 May 2020.

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Enlightenment, 7 Dec. 2016,

scientificenlightenment4726.wordpress.com/2016/12/06/jonathan-swift-and-the-

depiction-of-science/.

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Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 10 May 2020,

www.britannica.com/place/United-Kingdom/18th-century-Britain-1714-1815.

8. “Gulliver's Travels Wasn't Meant to Be a Children's Book And More Things You

Didn't Know About the Literary Classic.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 28

Nov. 2017, www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/eight-surprising-things-its-time-

you-knew-about-gullivers-travels-180967328/.

9. Lambert, Tim. “A BRIEF HISTORY OF IRELAND IN THE 18TH CENTURY.” A

History of Ireland in the 18th Century, www.localhistories.org/ireland18th.html.