Jessica Islam Lia

Face of the Colonizer in Gullivers Travel: Book I & II

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, is a novel by Irish writer Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and British politics. This text also deals with colonial system and its crucial feature behind the mask of irony and satire. Swifts identity as Irish is also reflected here. The colonial construction of Other is represented through Gulliver. The unusual human being refers to the face of colonizer and their exploitation. In Europe colonized people was like exotic creature for entertainment, just like Gulliver among different types of colonizer. Im going to focus how Swift has unmasked the face of colonizer on Book I and II.

The first voyage finds Gulliver stranded on Lilliput after a shipwreck. Here, he is neatly captured by the famous Lilliputians, "human Creatures not six inches high. Gulliver is a source of fear and awe to them, and participates somewhat helpfully in the Lilliputian war against Blefuscu, a lengthy conflict that has arisen between the big-enders and little-enders (depending upon which
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side of a boiled egg one must crack in order to eat it). Court intrigue and resentments, including the accusation of adultery with a Lilliputian, soon require of him that he escape an assassination attempt.

And in Book II, he returns to England, only to set off again on another voyage. A storm, a longboat journey to fetch water, and abandonment by a terrified crew, leaves him in Brobdingnag where he is captured by giants "as tall as an ordinary Spire-steeple." (65). Gulliver becomes something of a pet, amusing and entertaining the Brobdingnagians with his exploits and size, competing with the royal dwarf and endearing himself to these massive people. While in transit to the Frontiers, a giant eagle captures him in his travel-box (imagine a carrier with holes punctured in the top to transport a small pet) and drops him into the ocean, where he is rescued by more familiarly-sized humans.

Though in contrast to size, character and culture Lilliputian and Brobdingnagians both are different but their behavior toward Gulliver remain same in many ways. In both continents Gulliver become colonized and manipulated. They both use Gulliver rather as a puppet to entertain and to use for their own benefit. To Lilliputian, Gulliver appears as a threat but they find him useful to win over their enemy. Gullivers strength and he himself is a mere object of colonial power here. Gulliver from the beginning tries to please them and show his loyalty and tries to adopt their language, thought and believe. Gulliver blindly follows their law, rules, language and culture. Gulliver is huge the Lilliputians are tiny. Even they have tied him up but he is strong enough to fight them and escape. But Gulliver is already mentally colonized by them. The manipulation is here a hyperbole of British colonial power and tactic.
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The emperor himself in person, did me the honour to be by pros training myself at his majestys feet (25).

This line shows that how much colonized Gulliver is that he, being so big, falls at the feet of a Lilliputian. The irony imposes the fact that no matter how big a colony or a colonized person is the tiniest colonizer can make them enslaved through the manipulation of their politics and exploitations. The Lilliputians enslave him and use him as one-man mercenary army and when Gulliver set their castle on fire they tell him that they will make him blind but he can still be useful for them with his physical strength.

In a broader sense, book II mirror book I: the big man becomes little man. But it is more deeply a reversal of positions between colonizers and colonized. Book I deals with aestheticizing and disarming charms of miniaturization, but book II by politicizing the prettified games of colonial domination, reveals the perspective of the dominated. The experience of public exhibition, for instance becomes painful.

My master to avoid a crowd, would suffer only thirty people at a time to see me.I turned about several times to the company, paid my humble respects, said they were welcome and used some other speeches I had been taught.

They made Gulliver a creature of circus for their entertainment and business. This traveling show goes on for some ten weeks, performing in eighteen large town, in many villages, some private
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families, and finally in the metropolis of Lorbulgrud. Even after Gulliver is rescued by the queen, who buys him, he graduates only to the status of a clever canary.

The Brobdingangians see Gulliver as a clever creature and he is used as a sexual toy by the ladies.

This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen through a magnifying glass where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and course, and ill colored."

Though the giant people are white they are ugly because of their size. It imposes the idea that English people and their whiteness is not so beautiful in a closer look. It also refers to the colonialism the closer one looks, the more ugly it looks.

When Gulliver can make his escape he is already torn and tired of fitting in between two different types of perspectives and adopting the ruling class point of view.

"When I came to my own house, for which I was forced to enquire, one of the servants opening the door, I bent down to go in (like a goose under a gate) for fear of striking my head. My wife
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ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my mouth. My daughter kneeled to ask me blessing, but I could not see her till she arose, having been so long used to stand with my head an eyes erect to above sixty foot; and then I went to take her up with one hand, by the waist. I looked down upon the servants and one or two friends who were in the house, as if they had been pygmies, and I a giant." After being colonized twice by two different sizes of colonizers and being their toy Gulliver adopts a self hatred and agony inside him. Swift is showing the personal view of colonized person who always obey to the ruling class, act as a puppet by their wish, give himself up to fit in the Eurocentric society and somehow at the end of the day he become a stranger to himself and hate himself for who he is by born.

Jessica Islam Lia

Work cited:

Three times round the globe: Gulliver and colonial discourse by Clement Hawes Site: Gulliver's Travels.(n.d).In Encyclopedia Wikipedia online. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels