Lecture 10 Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels A Modest Proposal

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Lecture 10 Jonathan SwiftGullivers
TravelsA Modest Proposal
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Part One Jonathan Swift

• 1.1. His Life
• Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin. His father,
  Jonathan Swift Sr., a lawyer and an English civil
  servant, died seven month's before his son was
  born. Abigail Erick, Swift's mother, was left
  without private income to support her family.
  Swift was taken or "stolen" to England by his
  nurse, and at the age of four he was sent back to
  Ireland. Swift's mother returned to England, and
  she left her son to her wealthy brother-in-law,
  Uncle Godwin.
• Swift studied at Kilkenny Grammar School
  (1674-82), Trinity College in Dublin (1682-89),
  receiving his B.A. in 1686 and M.A. in 1692. At
  school Swift was not a very good student and his
  teachers noted his headstrong behavior. When the
  anti-Catholic Revolution of the year 1688 aroused
  reaction in Ireland, Swift moved to England to
  the household of Sir William Temple at Moor Park,
  Surrey - Lady Temple was a relative of Swift's
  mother. He worked there as a secretary (1689-95,
  1696-99), but did not like his position as a
  servant in the household.

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• In 1695 Swift was ordained in the Church of
  Ireland (Anglican), Dublin. While in staying in
  Moor Park, Swift also was the teacher of a young
  girl, Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella. When
  she grew up she became an important person in his
  life. Stella moved to Ireland to live near him
  and followed him on his travels to London. Their
  relationship was a constant source of gossips.
  According to some speculations, they were married
  in 1716. Stella died in 1728 and Swift kept a
  lock of her hair among his papers for the rest of
  his life.
• After William Temple's death in 1699, Swift
  returned to Ireland. He made several trips to
  London and gained fame with his essays.
  Throughout the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14),
  Swift was one of the central characters in the
  literary and political life of London. From 1695
  to 1696 Swift was the vicar of Kilroot. There he
  met Jane Wairing, with whom he had an affair. For
  Swift's disappointment, she did not consider him
  a suitable marriage partner. Between the years
  1707 and 1709 Swift was an emissary for the Irish
  clergy in London. Swift contributed to the
  'Bickerstaff Papers' and to the Tattler in
  1708-09. He was a cofounder of the Scriblerus
  Club, which included such member as Pope, Gay,
  Congreve, and Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford.

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• In 1710 Swift tried to open a political career
  among Whigs but changed his party and took over
  the Tory journal The Examiner. With the accession
  of George I, the Tories lost political power.
  Swift withdrew to Ireland. Hester Vanhomrigh,
  whom Swift had met in 1708, and whom he had
  tutored, followed him to Ireland after her mother
  had died. She was 22 years younger than Swift,
  who nicknamed her Vanessa. In the poem 'Cadenus
  and Vanessa' from 1713 Swift wrote about the
  affair "Each girl, when pleased with what is
  taught, / Will have the teacher in her thought."
  In 1723 Swift broke off the relationship she
  never recovered form his rejection.
• From 1713 to 1742 Swift was the dean of St.
  Patrick's Cathedral. It is thought that Swift
  suffered from Ménière's disease or Alzheimer's
  disease. Many considered him insane - however,
  from the beginning of his twentieth year he had
  suffered from deafness. Swift had predicted his
  mental decay when he was about 50 and had
  remarked to the poet Edward Young when they were
  gazing at the withered crown of a tree "I shall
  be like that tree, I shall die from the top."
• Jonathan Swift died in Dublin on October 19,
  1745. He left behind a great mass of poetry and
  prose, chiefly in the form of pamphlets. William
  Makepeace Thackeray once said of the author "So
  great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him
  is like thinking of an empire falling."

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• 1.2. His other major works
• 1.2.1 "A Tale of a Tub"
• written in the form of a parable An old man
  died and left a coat, i.e., the Christian
  doctrine, to each of his three sons, Peter,
  Martin and Jack, with minute directions for its
  care and use. These three sons stand for Roman
  Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. They evade
  their fathers will, interpret it each in his own
  way, and change the fashion of their garment.
  This is a satire upon all religious sects. The
  Roman Catholic Church and Puritans are terribly
  satirized while the Church of England is
  professed to be justified. But the Church of
  England looks just as ridiculous as any other
  church, for nothing is left to her but a thin
  cloak under which to hide her hypocrisy.

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• 1.2.2. "The Battle of the Books
• an unfinished work, mainly an attack on
  pedantry in the literary world of the time. The
  reader is told the story of the Bee and the
  Spider A bee becomes entangled in a spiders
  web. The two insects quarrel and Aesop is called
  in as arbitrator. The bee, who is to be taken as
  typifying the ancient writers, goes straight to
  nature, gathering his support from the flowers of
  the field and the garden, without any damage to
  them.
• The spider, like the modern authors, boasts
  of not being obliged to any other creature hut of
  drawing and spinning out all from himself. The
  ancients, going through every corner of nature,
  have produced honey and wax and furnished mankind
  with the two noblest things, which are sweetness
  and light." In the great battle between ancient
  and modern books that follows, the moderns appeal
  for and to the malignant deity Criticism, who
  lives in a den at the top of snowy mountains.
  With Criticism are Ignorance, Pride, Noise and
  Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness,
  Pedantry and Ill-manners. Then the work ends
  being in several places imperfect, we cannot
  learn to which side the victory fell.

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• Part Two Gullivers Travels
• 2.1. The story of Gullivers Travels
• In the first part Gulliver describes his
  shipwreck in Lilliput where the tallest people
  were six inches high.
• The emperor haltered himself to be the delight
  and terror of the universe, but it appeared quite
  absurd to Gulliver who was twelve times as tall
  as he. In his account of the two parties in the
  country, distinguished by the use of high and low
  heels, Swift satirizes the Tories and the Whigs
  in England. Religious disputes were laughed at in
  an account of a problem which divided the
  Lilliputians Should eggs be broken at the big
  end or the little end?" Then follows an ironical
  comment "This, however, is thought to be a mere
  strain upon the text, for the words are these,
  that all true believers shall break their eggs at
  the convenient end. And which is the convenient
  end seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to
  every mans conscience, or at least in the power
  of the Chief Magistrate to determine. "This part
  is full of references to current politics.

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• In the second part, the voyage to Brobdingnag is
  described. Gulliver now found himself a dwarf
  among men sixty feet in height. The King, who
  regarded Europe as if it were an anthill, said,
  "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives
  to be the most pernicious race of little odious
  vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon
  the surface of the earth." And Gulliver, after
  living among such a great race, could not but
  feel tempted to laugh at the strutting and bowing
  of English lords and ladies as much as the King
  did at him.
• The third part is a satire on philosophers and
  projectors, who were given to dwelling in the
  air, like the inhabitants of the Flying Island.
  In the Island of Sorcerors, Gulliver was able to
  call up famous men of ancient times and question
  them. Then be found the world to have been misled
  by prostitute writers into ascribing the greatest
  exploits in war to cowards, the wisest counsels
  to fools, and sincerity to flatteners. He saw,
  too, by looking at an old yeoman, how the race
  had greatly deteriorated through vice and
  corruption.

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• In the last part, Gullivers satire is of the
  bitterest. Gulliver was now in a country where
  horses were possessed of reason, and were the
  governing class, while the Yahoos, though in the
  shape of men, were brute beasts with such vices
  as stealing and lying, In endeavouring to
  persuade the homes that he was not a Yahoo,
  Gulliver was made to show how little a man was
  re- moved from the brute. Gullivers account of
  the warfare among the English lords, given with
  no little pride, caused only disgust from the
  horses. He praised the life and virtues of the
  horses while he was disgusted with the Yahoos,
  whose relations reminded him of those existing in
  English society to such a degree that he
  shuddered at the prospect of returning to
  England. So, when he returned home, his family
  filled him with such disgust that he swooned when
  his wife kissed him.

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• 2.2. Swifts Style
• Swift is one of the greatest masters of English
  prose. His language is simple, clear and
  vigorous. He said, "Proper words in proper
  places, makes the true definition of a style.
  Keeping his object steadily before him, he drives
  straight on to the end. There are no ornaments in
  his writing, but it comes home to the reader.
• In simple, direct and precise prose, Swift is
  almost unsurpassed in English literature. It is a
  great education in English to read Swifts prose.
• Swift is a master satirist, and his irony is
  deadly. But his satire is masked by an outward
  gravity, and an apparent calmness conceals his
  bitter irony. This makes his satire all the more
  powerful, as shown in his Modest Proposal."

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2.3. Analysis of Major Characters

• Lemuel Gulliver
• Although Gulliver is a bold adventurer who visits
  a multitude of strange lands, it is difficult to
  regard him as truly heroic. Even well before his
  slide into misanthropy at the end of the book, he
  simply does not show the stuff of which grand
  heroes are made. He is not cowardlyon the
  contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences
  of nearly being devoured by a giant rat, taken
  captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway
  shores, sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old
  girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows.
  Additionally, the isolation from humanity that he
  endures for sixteen years must be hard to bear,
  though Gulliver rarely talks about such matters.
  Yet despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout
  his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness.
  This impression could be due to the fact that he
  rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or
  experiences great passions of any sort. But other
  literary adventurers, like Odysseus in Homers
  Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly
  open about their emotions.

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• What seems most lacking in Gulliver is not
  courage or feelings, but drive. One modern critic
  has described Gulliver as possessing the smallest
  will in all of Western literature he is simply
  devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would
  make his wandering into a quest. Odysseuss goal
  is to get home again, Aeneass goal in Virgils
  Aeneid is to found Rome, but Gullivers goal on
  his sea voyage is uncertain. He says that he
  needs to make some money after the failure of his
  business, but he rarely mentions finances
  throughout the work and indeed almost never even
  mentions home. He has no awareness of any
  greatness in what he is doing or what he is
  working toward. In short, he has no aspirations.
  When he leaves home on his travels for the first
  time, he gives no impression that he regards
  himself as undertaking a great endeavor or
  embarking on a thrilling new challenge.
• We may also note Gullivers lack of ingenuity and
  savvy. Other great travelers, such as Odysseus,
  get themselves out of dangerous situations by
  exercising their wit and ability to trick others.
  Gulliver seems too dull for any battles of wit
  and too unimaginative to think up tricks, and
  thus he ends up being passive in most of the
  situations in which he finds himself. He is held
  captive several times throughout his voyages, but
  he is never once released through his own
  stratagems, relying instead on chance factors for
  his liberation. Once presented with a way out, he
  works hard to escape, as when he repairs the boat
  he finds that delivers him from Blefuscu, but he
  is never actively ingenious in attaining freedom.
  This example summarizes quite well Gullivers
  intelligence, which is factual and practical
  rather than imaginative or introspective.

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• Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For
  example, he misses the obvious ways in which the
  Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept
  at navigational calculations and the humdrum
  details of seafaring, he is far less able to
  reflect on himself or his nation in any
  profoundly critical way. Traveling to such
  different countries and returning to England in
  between each voyage, he seems poised to make some
  great anthropological speculations about cultural
  differences around the world, about how societies
  are similar despite their variations or different
  despite their similarities. But, frustratingly,
  Gulliver gives us nothing of the sort. He
  provides us only with literal facts and narrative
  events, never with any generalizing or
  philosophizing. He is a self-hating,
  self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his
  misanthropy quite loudly, but even this attitude
  is difficult to accept as the moral of the story.
  Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify
  but, rather, part of the array of personalities
  and behaviors about which we must make judgments.

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• The Queen of Brobdingnag
• The Brobdingnagian queen is hardly a
  well-developed character in this novel, but she
  is important in one sense she is one of the very
  few females in Gullivers Travels who is given
  much notice. Gullivers own wife is scarcely even
  mentioned, even at what one would expect to be
  the touching moment of homecoming at the end of
  the fourth voyage. Gulliver seems little more
  than indifferent to his wife. The farmers
  daughter in Brobdingnag wins some of Gullivers
  attention but chiefly because she cares for him
  so tenderly. Gulliver is courteous to the empress
  of Lilliput but presumably mainly because she is
  royalty. The queen of Brobdingnag, however,
  arouses some deeper feelings in Gulliver that go
  beyond her royal status. He compliments her
  effusively, as he does no other female personage
  in the work, calling her infinitely witty and
  humorous. He describes in proud detail the manner
  in which he is permitted to kiss the tip of her
  little finger. For her part, the queen seems
  earnest in her concern about Gullivers welfare.
  When her court dwarf insults him, she gives the
  dwarf away to another household as punishment.
  The interaction between Gulliver and the queen
  hints that Gulliver is indeed capable of
  emotional connections.

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• Lord Munodi
• Lord Munodi is a minor character, but he plays
  the important role of showing the possibility of
  individual dissent within a brainwashed
  community. While the inhabitants of Lagado pursue
  their attempts to extract sunbeams from cucumbers
  and to eliminate all verbs and adjectives from
  their language, Munodi is a rare example of
  practical intelligence. Having tried
  unsuccessfully to convince his fellows of their
  misguided public policies, he has given up and is
  content to practice what he preaches on his own
  estates. In his kindness to strangers, Munodi is
  also a counterexample to the contemptuous
  treatment that the other Laputians and Lagadans
  show Gulliver. He takes his guest on a tour of
  the kingdom, explains the advantages of his own
  estates without boasting, and is, in general, a
  figure of great common sense and humanity amid
  theoretical delusions and impractical
  fantasizing. As a figure isolated from his
  community, Munodi is similar to Gulliver, though
  Gulliver is unaware of his alienation while
  Munodi suffers acutely from his. Indeed, in
  Munodi we glimpse what Gulliver could be if he
  were wiser a figure able to think critically
  about life and society.

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• Don Pedro de Mendez
• Don Pedro is a minor character in terms of plot,
  but he plays an important symbolic role at the
  end of the novel. He treats the half-deranged
  Gulliver with great patience, even tenderness,
  when he allows him to travel on his ship as far
  as Lisbon, offering to give him his own finest
  suit of clothes to replace the seamans tatters,
  and giving him twenty pounds for his journey home
  to England. Don Pedro never judges Gulliver,
  despite Gullivers abominably antisocial behavior
  on the trip back. Ironically, though Don Pedro
  shows the same kind of generosity and
  understanding that Gullivers Houyhnhnm master
  earlier shows him, Gulliver still considers Don
  Pedro a repulsive Yahoo. Were Gulliver able to
  escape his own delusions, he might be able to see
  the Houyhnhnm-like reasonableness and kindness in
  Don Pedros behavior. Don Pedro is thus the
  touchstone through which we see that Gulliver is
  no longer a reliable and objective commentator on
  the reality he sees but, rather, a skewed
  observer of a reality colored by private
  delusions.

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• Mary Burton Gulliver
• Gullivers wife is mentioned only briefly at the
  beginning of the novel and appears only for an
  instant at the conclusion. Gulliver never thinks
  about Mary on his travels and never feels guilty
  about his lack of attention to her. A dozen far
  more trivial characters get much greater
  attention than she receives. She is, in this
  respect, the opposite of Odysseuss wife Penelope
  in the Odyssey, who is never far from her
  husbands thoughts and is the final destination
  of his journey. Marys neglected presence in
  Gullivers narrative gives her a certain claim to
  importance. It suggests that despite Gullivers
  curiosity about new lands and exotic races, he is
  virtually indifferent to those people closest to
  him. His lack of interest in his wife bespeaks
  his underdeveloped inner life. Gulliver is a man
  of skill and knowledge in certain practical
  matters, but he is disadvantaged in
  self-reflection, personal interactions, and
  perhaps overall wisdom.

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2.4. Themes

• 2.4.1. Might Versus Right
• Gullivers Travels implicitly poses the question
  of whether physical power or moral righteousness
  should be the governing factor in social life.
  Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical
  might both as one who has it, as a giant in
  Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudian
  navy by virtue of his immense size, and as one
  who does not have it, as a miniature visitor to
  Brobdingnag where he is harassed by the hugeness
  of everything from insects to household pets. His
  first encounter with another society is one of
  entrapment, when he is physically tied down by
  the Lilliputians later, in Brobdingnag, he is
  enslaved by a farmer. He also observes physical
  force used against others, as with the
  Houyhnhnms chaining up of the Yahoos.

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• But alongside the use of physical force, there
  are also many claims to power based on moral
  correctness. The whole point of the egg
  controversy that has set Lilliput against
  Blefuscu is not merely a cultural difference but,
  instead, a religious and moral issue related to
  the proper interpretation of a passage in their
  holy book. This difference of opinion seems to
  justify, in their eyes at least, the warfare it
  has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical force
  against the Yahoos is justified for the
  Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority
  they are cleaner, better behaved, and more
  rational. But overall, the novel tends to show
  that claims to rule on the basis of moral
  righteousness are often just as arbitrary as, and
  sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical
  subjugation. The Laputans keep the lower land of
  Balnibarbi in check through force because they
  believe themselves to be more rational, even
  though we might see them as absurd and
  unpleasant. Similarly, the ruling elite of
  Balnibarbi believes itself to be in the right in
  driving Lord Munodi from power, although we
  perceive that Munodi is the rational party.
  Claims to moral superiority are, in the end, as
  hard to justify as the random use of physical
  force to dominate others.

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• 2.4.2.The Individual Versus Society
• Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent
  lands, Gullivers Travels explores the idea of
  utopiaan imaginary model of the ideal community.
  The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going
  back at least as far as the description in
  Platos Republic of a city-state governed by the
  wise and expressed most famously in English by
  Thomas Mores Utopia. Swift nods to both works in
  his own narrative, though his attitude toward
  utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the
  main aspects he points out about famous
  historical utopias is the tendency to privilege
  the collective group over the individual. The
  children of Platos Republic are raised
  communally, with no knowledge of their biological
  parents, in the understanding that this system
  enhances social fairness. Swift has the
  Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring
  collectively, but its results are not exactly
  utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies,
  jealousies, and backstabbing.

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• The Houyhnhnms also practice strict family
  planning, dictating that the parents of two
  females should exchange a child with a family of
  two males, so that the male-to-female ratio is
  perfectly maintained. Indeed, they come closer to
  the utopian ideal than the Lilliputians in their
  wisdom and rational simplicity. But there is
  something unsettling about the Houyhnhnms
  indistinct personalities and about how they are
  the only social group that Gulliver encounters
  who do not have proper names. Despite minor
  physical differences, they are all so good and
  rational that they are more or less
  interchangeable, without individual identities.
  In their absolute fusion with their society and
  lack of individuality, they are in a sense the
  exact opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any
  sense of belonging to his native society and
  exists only as an individual eternally wandering
  the seas. Gullivers intense grief when forced to
  leave the Houyhnhnms may have something to do
  with his longing for union with a community in
  which he can lose his human identity. In any
  case, such a union is impossible for him, since
  he is not a horse, and all the other societies he
  visits make him feel alienated as well.

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• Gullivers Travels could in fact be described as
  one of the first novels of modern alienation,
  focusing on an individuals repeated failures to
  integrate into societies to which he does not
  belong. England itself is not much of a homeland
  for Gulliver, and, with his surgeons business
  unprofitable and his fathers estate insufficient
  to support him, he may be right to feel alienated
  from it. He never speaks fondly or nostalgically
  about England, and every time he returns home, he
  is quick to leave again. Gulliver never complains
  explicitly about feeling lonely, but the
  embittered and antisocial misanthrope we see at
  the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly
  isolated individual. Thus, if Swifts satire
  mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also
  mock the excesses of individualism in its
  portrait of a miserable and lonely Gulliver
  talking to his horses at home in England.

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• 2.4.3. The Limits of Human Understanding
• The idea that humans are not meant to know
  everything and that all understanding has a
  natural limit is important in Gullivers Travels.
  Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in
  particular for attack his portrait of the
  disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show
  blatant contempt for those who are not sunk in
  private theorizing, is a clear satire against
  those who pride themselves on knowledge above all
  else. Practical knowledge is also satirized when
  it does not produce results, as in the academy of
  Balnibarbi, where the experiments for extracting
  sunbeams from cucumbers amount to nothing. Swift
  insists that there is a realm of understanding
  into which humans are simply not supposed to
  venture. Thus his depictions of rational
  societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland,
  emphasize not these peoples knowledge or
  understanding of abstract ideas but their ability
  to live their lives in a wise and steady way.

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• The Brobdingnagian king knows shockingly little
  about the abstractions of political science, yet
  his country seems prosperous and well governed.
  Similarly, the Houyhnhnms know little about
  arcane subjects like astronomy, though they know
  how long a month is by observing the moon, since
  that knowledge has a practical effect on their
  well-being. Aspiring to higher fields of
  knowledge would be meaningless to them and would
  interfere with their happiness. In such contexts,
  it appears that living a happy and well-ordered
  life seems to be the very thing for which Swift
  thinks knowledge is useful.
• Swift also emphasizes the importance of
  self-understanding. Gulliver is initially
  remarkably lacking in self-reflection and
  self-awareness. He makes no mention of his
  emotions, passions, dreams, or aspirations, and
  he shows no interest in describing his own
  psychology to us. Accordingly, he may strike us
  as frustratingly hollow or empty, though it is
  likely that his personal emptiness is part of the
  overall meaning of the novel. By the end, he has
  come close to a kind of twisted self-knowledge in
  his deranged belief that he is a Yahoo. His
  revulsion with the human condition, shown in his
  shabby treatment of the generous Don Pedro,
  extends to himself as well, so that he ends the
  novel in a thinly disguised state of self-hatred.
  Swift may thus be saying that self-knowledge has
  its necessary limits just as theoretical
  knowledge does, and that if we look too closely
  at ourselves we might not be able to carry on
  living happily.

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2.5. Symbols

• 2.5.1. Lilliputians
• The Lilliputians symbolize humankinds wildly
  excessive pride in its own puny existence. Swift
  fully intends the irony of representing the
  tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the
  most vainglorious and smug, both collectively and
  individually. There is surely no character more
  odious in all of Gullivers travels than the
  noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting and
  conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere else, and
  more of the pettiness of small minds who imagine
  themselves to be grand. Gulliver is a naïve
  consumer of the Lilliputians grandiose
  imaginings he is flattered by the attention of
  their royal family and cowed by their threats of
  punishment, forgetting that they have no real
  physical power over him. Their formally worded
  condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is
  a model of pompous and self-important verbiage,
  but it works quite effectively on the naïve
  Gulliver.

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• The Lilliputians show off not only to Gulliver
  but to themselves as well. There is no mention of
  armies proudly marching in any of the other
  societies Gulliver visitsonly in Lilliput and
  neighboring Blefuscu are the six-inch inhabitants
  possessed of the need to show off their patriotic
  glories with such displays. When the Lilliputian
  emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of
  makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass
  under, it is a pathetic reminder that their grand
  paradein full view of Gullivers nether
  regionsis supremely silly, a basically absurd
  way to boost the collective ego of the nation.
  Indeed, the war with Blefuscu is itself an
  absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since
  the cause is not a material concern like disputed
  territory but, rather, the proper interpretation
  of scripture by the emperors forebears and the
  hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement.
  All in all, the Lilliputians symbolize misplaced
  human pride, and point out Gullivers inability
  to diagnose it correctly.

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• 2.5.2.Brobdingnagians
• The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private,
  personal, and physical side of humans when
  examined up close and in great detail. The
  philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to
  overlook the routines of everyday life and the
  sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but
  in Brobdingnag such facts become very important
  for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and
  death. An eighteenth-century philosopher could
  afford to ignore the fly buzzing around his head
  or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his
  shrunken state Gulliver is forced to pay great
  attention to such things. He is forced take the
  domestic sphere seriously as well. In other lands
  it is difficult for Gulliver, being such an
  outsider, to get glimpses of family relations or
  private affairs, but in Brobdingnag he is treated
  as a doll or a plaything, and thus is made privy
  to the urination of housemaids and the sexual
  lives of women. The Brobdingnagians do not
  symbolize a solely negative human characteristic,
  as the Laputans do. They are not merely
  ridiculoussome aspects of them are disgusting,
  like their gigantic stench and the excrement left
  by their insects, but others are noble, like the
  queens goodwill toward Gulliver and the kings
  commonsense views of politics. More than anything
  else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension
  of human existence visible at close range, under
  close scrutiny.

28

• 2.5.3. Laputans
• The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical
  knowledge that has no relation to human life and
  no use in the actual world. As a profound
  cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the
  newfangled ideas springing up around him at the
  dawn of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a
  period of great intellectual experimentation and
  theorization. He much preferred the traditional
  knowledge that had been tested over centuries.
  Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that
  has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous
  side of Enlightenment intellectualism. Even down
  below in Balnibarbi, where the local academy is
  more inclined to practical application, knowledge
  is not made socially useful as Swift demands.
  Indeed, theoretical knowledge there has proven
  positively disastrous, resulting in the ruin of
  agriculture and architecture and the
  impoverishment of the population. Even up above,
  the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not
  improved the lot of the Laputans. They have few
  material worries, dependent as they are upon the
  Balnibarbians below. But they are tormented by
  worries about the trajectories of comets and
  other astronomical speculations their theories
  have not made them wise, but neurotic and
  disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize
  reason itself but rather the pursuit of a form of
  knowledge that is not directly related to the
  improvement of human life.

29

• 2.5.4. Houyhnhnms
• The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational
  existence, a life governed by sense and
  moderation of which philosophers since Plato have
  long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes of Platos
  Republic in the Houyhnhnms rejection of light
  entertainment and vain displays of luxury, their
  appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as
  the criterion for proper action, and their
  communal approach to family planning. As in
  Platos ideal community, the Houyhnhnms have no
  need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not
  use force but only strong exhortation. Their
  subjugation of the Yahoos appears more necessary
  than cruel and perhaps the best way to deal with
  an unfortunate blot on their otherwise ideal
  society. In these ways and others, the Houyhnhnms
  seem like model citizens, and Gullivers intense
  grief when he is forced to leave them suggests
  that they have made an impact on him greater than
  that of any other society he has visited. His
  derangement on Don Pedros ship, in which he
  snubs the generous man as a Yahoo-like creature,
  implies that he strongly identifies with the
  Houyhnhnms.

30

• But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take
  the Houyhnhnms as ideals of human existence. They
  have no names in the narrative nor any need for
  names, since they are virtually interchangeable,
  with little individual identity. Their lives seem
  harmonious and happy, although quite lacking in
  vigor, challenge, and excitement. Indeed, this
  apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to make
  them horses rather than human types like every
  other group in the novel. He may be hinting, to
  those more insightful than Gulliver, that the
  Houyhnhnms should not be considered human ideals
  at all. In any case, they symbolize a standard of
  rational existence to be either espoused or
  rejected by both Gulliver and us.

31

• 2.5.5 England
• As the site of his fathers disappointingly
  small estate and Gullivers failing business,
  England seems to symbolize deficiency or
  insufficiency, at least in the financial sense
  that matters most to Gulliver. England is passed
  over very quickly in the first paragraph of
  Chapter I, as if to show that it is simply there
  as the starting point to be left quickly behind.
  Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or
  patriotic feelings about England, and he rarely
  mentions his homeland on his travels. In this
  sense, Gullivers Travels is quite unlike other
  travel narratives like the Odyssey, in which
  Odysseus misses his homeland and laments his
  wanderings. England is where Gullivers wife and
  family live, but they too are hardly mentioned.
  Yet Swift chooses to have Gulliver return home
  after each of his four journeys instead of having
  him continue on one long trip to four different
  places, so that England is kept constantly in the
  picture and given a steady, unspoken importance.
  By the end of the fourth journey, England is
  brought more explicitly into the fabric of
  Gullivers Travels when Gulliver, in his neurotic
  state, starts confusing Houyhnhnmland with his
  homeland, referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The
  distinction between native and foreign thus
  unravelsthe Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just
  races populating a faraway land but rather types
  that Gulliver projects upon those around him. The
  possibility thus arises that all the races
  Gulliver encounters could be versions of the
  English and that his travels merely allow him to
  see various aspects of human nature more clearly.

32

• Part Three A Modest Proposal
• A Modest Proposal for preventing the children
  of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on
  their parents or country, and for making them
  beneficial to the publick.
• by Dr. Jonathan Swift. 1729
• It is a melancholy object to those, who walk
  through this great town, or travel in the
  country, when they see the streets, the roads and
  cabin-doors crowded with beggars of the female
  sex, followed by three, four, or six children,
  all in rags, and importuning every passenger for
  an alms. These mothers instead of being able to
  work for their honest livelihood, are forced to
  employ all their time in strolling to beg
  sustenance for their helpless infants who, as
  they grow up, either turn thieves for want of
  work, or leave their dear native country, to
  fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell
  themselves to the Barbados.

33

• I think it is agreed by all parties, that this
  prodigious number of children in the arms, or on
  the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and
  frequently of their fathers, is in the present
  deplorable state of the kingdom, a very great
  additional grievance and therefore whoever could
  find out a fair, cheap and easy method of making
  these children sound and useful members of the
  common-wealth, would deserve so well of the
  publick, as to have his statue set up for a
  preserver of the nation.
• But my intention is very far from being confined
  to provide only for the children of professed
  beggars it is of a much greater extent, and
  shall take in the whole number of infants at a
  certain age, who are born of parents in effect as
  little able to support them, as those who demand
  our charity in the streets.
• As to my own part, having turned my thoughts for
  many years, upon this important subject, and
  maturely weighed the several schemes of our
  projectors, I have always found them grossly
  mistaken in their computation. It is true, a
  child just dropt from its dam, may be supported
  by her milk, for a solar year, with little other
  nourishment at most not above the value of two
  shillings, which the mother may certainly get, or
  the value in scraps, by her lawful occupation of
  begging and it is exactly at one year old that I
  propose to provide for them in such a manner, as,
  instead of being a charge upon their parents, or
  the parish, or wanting food and raiment for the
  rest of their lives, they shall, on the contrary,
  contribute to the feeding, and partly to the
  cloathing of many thousands.

34

• The number of souls in this kingdom being usually
  reckoned one million and a half, of these I
  calculate there may be about two hundred thousand
  couple whose wives are breeders from which
  number I subtract thirty thousand couple, who are
  able to maintain their own children, (although I
  apprehend there cannot be so many, under the
  present distresses of the kingdom) but this being
  granted, there will remain an hundred and seventy
  thousand breeders. I again subtract fifty
  thousand, for those women who miscarry, or whose
  children die by accident or disease within the
  year. There only remain an hundred and twenty
  thousand children of poor parents annually born.
  The question therefore is, How this number shall
  be reared, and provided for? which, as I have
  already said, under the present situation of
  affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods
  hitherto proposed. For we can neither employ them
  in handicraft or agriculture we neither build
  houses, (I mean in the country) nor cultivate
  land they can very seldom pick up a livelihood
  by stealing till they arrive at six years old
  except where they are of towardly parts, although
  I confess they learn the rudiments much earlier
  during which time they can however be properly
  looked upon only as probationers As I have been
  informed by a principal gentleman in the county
  of Cavan, who protested to me, that he never knew
  above one or two instances under the age of six,
  even in a part of the kingdom so renowned for the
  quickest proficiency in that art.

35

• I do therefore humbly offer it to publick
  consideration, that of the hundred and twenty
  thousand children, already computed, twenty
  thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only
  one fourth part to be males which is more than
  we allow to sheep, black cattle, or swine, and my
  reason is, that these children are seldom the
  fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much
  regarded by our savages, therefore, one male will
  be sufficient to serve four females. That the
  remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be
  offered in sale to the persons of quality and
  fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the
  mother to let them suck plentifully in the last
  month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a
  good table. A child will make two dishes at an
  entertainment for friends, and when the family
  dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a
  reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little
  pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the
  fourth day, especially in winter.
• I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just
  born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year,
  if tolerably nursed, encreaseth to 28 pounds.
• I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and
  therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they
  have already devoured most of the parents, seem
  to have the best title to the children.

36

• For first, as I have already observed, it would
  greatly lessen the number of Papists, with whom
  we are yearly over-run, being the principal
  breeders of the nation, as well as our most
  dangerous enemies, and who stay at home on
  purpose with a design to deliver the kingdom to
  the Pretender, hoping to take their advantage by
  the absence of so many good Protestants, who have
  chosen rather to leave their country, than stay
  at home and pay tithes against their conscience
  to an Episcopal curate.
• Secondly, The poorer tenants will have something
  valuable of their own, which by law may be made
  liable to a distress, and help to pay their
  landlord's rent, their corn and cattle being
  already seized, and money a thing unknown.
• Thirdly, Whereas the maintenance of an hundred
  thousand children, from two years old, and
  upwards, cannot be computed at less than ten
  shillings a piece per annum, the nation's stock
  will be thereby encreased fifty thousand pounds
  per annum, besides the profit of a new dish,
  introduced to the tables of all gentlemen of
  fortune in the kingdom, who have any refinement
  in taste. And the money will circulate among our
  selves, the goods being entirely of our own
  growth and manufacture.

37

• Fourthly, The constant breeders, besides the gain
  of eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale
  of their children, will be rid of the charge of
  maintaining them after the first year.
• Fifthly, This food would likewise bring great
  custom to taverns, where the vintners will
  certainly be so prudent as to procure the best
  receipts for dressing it to perfection and
  consequently have their houses frequented by all
  the fine gentlemen, who justly value themselves
  upon their knowledge in good eating and a
  skilful cook, who understands how to oblige his
  guests, will contrive to make it as expensive as
  they please.
• Sixthly, This would be a great inducement to
  marriage, which all wise nations have either
  encouraged by rewards, or enforced by laws and
  penalties. It would encrease the care and
  tenderness of mothers towards their children,
  when they were sure of a settlement for life to
  the poor babes, provided in some sort by the
  publick, to their annual profit instead of
  expence. We should soon see an honest emulation
  among the married women, which of them could
  bring the fattest child to the market. Men would
  become as fond of their wives, during the time of
  their pregnancy, as they are now of their mares
  in foal, their cows in calf, or sow when they are
  ready to farrow nor offer to beat or kick them
  (as is too frequent a practice) for fear of a
  miscarriage.

38

• But, as to my self, having been wearied out for
  many years with offering vain, idle, visionary
  thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of
  success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal,
  which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something
  solid and real, of no expence and little trouble,
  full in our own power, and whereby we can incur
  no danger in disobliging England. For this kind
  of commodity will not bear exportation, and flesh
  being of too tender a consistence, to admit a
  long continuance in salt, although perhaps I
  could name a country, which would be glad to eat
  up our whole nation without it.
• I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I
  have not the least personal interest in
  endeavouring to promote this necessary work,
  having no other motive than the publick good of
  my country, by advancing our trade, providing for
  infants, relieving the poor, and giving some
  pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by
  which I can propose to get a single penny the
  youngest being nine years old, and my wife past
  child-bearing.

39
3.1. Summary

• The full title of Swift's pamphlet is "A Modest
  Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor
  People from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or
  the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to
  the Publick." The tract is an ironically
  conceived attempt to "find out a fair, cheap, and
  easy Method" for converting the starving children
  of Ireland into "sound and useful members of the
  Commonwealth." Across the country poor children,
  predominantly Catholics, are living in squalor
  because their families are too poor to keep them
  fed and clothed.

40

• The author argues, by hard-edged economic
  reasoning as well as from a self-righteous moral
  stance, for a way to turn this problem into its
  own solution. His proposal, in effect, is to
  fatten up these undernourished children and feed
  them to Ireland's rich land-owners. Children of
  the poor could be sold into a meat market at the
  age of one, he argues, thus combating
  overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families
  the expense of child-bearing while providing them
  with a little extra income, improving the
  culinary experience of the wealthy, and
  contributing to the overall economic well-being
  of the nation.
• The author offers statistical support for his
  assertions and gives specific data about the
  number of children to be sold, their weight and
  price, and the projected consumption patterns. He
  suggests some recipes for preparing this
  delicious new meat, and he feels sure that
  innovative cooks will be quick to generate more.
  He also anticipates that the practice of selling
  and eating children will have positive effects on
  family morality husbands will treat their wives
  with more respect, and parents will value their
  children in ways hitherto unknown. His conclusion
  is that the implementation of this project will
  do more to solve Ireland's complex social,
  political, and economic problems than any other
  measure that has been proposed.

41
3.2. Analysis

• In A Modest Proposal, Swift vents his mounting
  aggravation at the ineptitude of Ireland's
  politicians, the hypocrisy of the wealthy, the
  tyranny of the English, and the squalor and
  degradation in which he sees so many Irish people
  living. While A Modest Proposal bemoans the bleak
  situation of an Ireland almost totally subject to
  England's exploitation, it also expresses Swift's
  utter disgust at the Irish people's seeming
  inability to mobilize on their own behalf.
  Without excusing any party, the essay shows that
  not only the English but also the Irish
  themselves--and not only the Irish politicians
  but also the masses--are responsible for the
  nation's lamentable state. His compassion for the
  misery of the Irish people is a severe one, and
  he includes a critique of their incompetence in
  dealing with their own problems.

42

• Political pamphleteering was a fashionable
  pastime in Swift's day, which saw vast numbers of
  tracts and essays advancing political opinions
  and proposing remedies for Ireland's economic and
  social ills. Swift's tract parodies the style and
  method of these, and the grim irony of his own
  solution reveals his personal despair at the
  failure of all this paper journalism to achieve
  any actual progress. His piece protests the utter
  inefficacy of Irish political leadership, and it
  also attacks the orientation of so many
  contemporary reformers toward economic
  utilitarianism. While Swift himself was an astute
  economic thinker, he often expressed contempt for
  the application of supposedly scientific
  management ideas to humanitarian concerns.
• The main rhetorical challenge of this bitingly
  ironic essay is capturing the attention of an
  audience whose indifference has been well tested.
  Swift makes his point negatively, stringing
  together an appalling set of morally untenable
  positions in order to cast blame and aspersions
  far and wide. The essay progresses through a
  series of surprises that first shocks the reader
  and then causes her to think critically not only
  about policies, but also about motivations and
  values.