British Literature and Culture from the beginnings to the 18th century

Name:
1st year, 10th group, Chinese English

THE LESSON TAUGHT BY POLITICAL SYSTEMS IN GULLIVERS

TRAVELS

The author of the classic Gullivers Travels , Jonathan Swift was a major figure of English literature.
Also a satirist, cleric and political pamphleteer, Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland on November 30, 1667,
seven months after the death of his father.
Swift's greatest satire, Gulliver's Travels, is considered one of the most important works in the
history of world literature. Published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts; by
Lemuel Gulliver in 1726, Gulliver's Travels depicts one man's journeys to several strange and unusual lands.
The general theme of Gulliver's Travels is a satirical examination of human nature, man's potential for
depravity, and the dangers of the misuse of reason.
Gullivers Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical,
constantly attacking British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries.
Gulliver's Travels was published anonymously, but Swift's authorship was widely suspected.
Alternately considered an attack on humanity or a clear-eyed assessment of human strengths and
weaknesses, the novel is a complex study of human nature and of the moral, philosophical, and scientific
thought of Swift's time which has resisted any single definition of meaning for nearly three centuries.
Written in the form of a travel journal, Gulliver's Travels is the fictional account of four
extraordinary voyages made by Lemuel Gulliver, a physician who signs on to serve as a ship's surgeon when
he is unable to provide his family with a sufficient income in London. After being shipwrecked Gulliver first
arrives at Lilliput, an island whose inhabitants are just six inches tall and where the pettiness of the political
system is mirrored in the diminutive size of its citizens. Gulliver is referred to as the "Man-Mountain" by the
Lilliputians and is eventually pressed into service by the King in a nonsensical war with the neighboring
island of Blefuscu.
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Name:
1st year, 10th group, Chinese English

British Literature and Culture from the beginnings to the 18th century

Gulliver finally escapes Lilliput and returns briefly to England before a second voyage takes him to
Brobdingnag. There he finds himself dwarfed by inhabitants who are sixty feet tall. Gulliver's comparatively
tiny size now makes him wholly dependent on the protection and solicitude of others, and he is imperiled by
dangerous encounters with huge rats and a curious toddler. Gulliver, however, incurs the disdain of the
kindly and virtuous Brobdingnagian rulers when his gunpowder display, intended to impress his hosts as an
exemplary product of European civilization, proves disastrous. An address Gulliver delivers to the
Brobdingnagians describing English political practices of the day is also met with much scorn. Housed in a
miniature box, Gulliver abruptly departs Brobdingnag when a giant eagle flies off with him and drops him in
the ocean.
He soon embarks on his third voyage to the flying island of Laputa, a mysterious land inhabited by
scientists, magicians, and sorcerers who engage in abstract theorizing and conduct ill-advised experiments
based on flawed calculations. Here Gulliver also visits Glubbdubdrib where it is possible to summon the
dead and to converse with such figures as Aristotle and Julius Caesar. He also travels to Luggnagg, where he
encounters the Struldbrugs, a group of people who are given immortality, yet are condemned to live out their
eternal existence trapped in feeble and decrepit bodies.
Once again Gulliver returns to England before a final journey, to the land of the Houyhnhnms, who
are a superior race of intelligent horses. But the region is also home to the Yahoos, a vile and depraved race
of ape-like creatures. Gulliver is eventually exiled from Houyhnhnm society when the horses gently insist
that Gulliver must return to live among his own kind. After this fourth and final voyage, he returns to
England, where he has great difficulty adjusting to everyday life. All people everywhere remind him of the
Yahoos.
Each of the four voyages in Gulliver's Travels serves as a vehicle for Swift to expose and excoriate
some aspect of human folly. The first voyage has been interpreted as an allegorical satire of the political
events of the early eighteenth century, a commentary on the moral state of England, a general satire on the
pettiness of human desires for wealth and power, and a depiction of the effects of unwarranted pride and
self-promotion. The war with the tiny neighboring island of Blefuscu represents England's rivalry with
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Name:
1st year, 10th group, Chinese English

British Literature and Culture from the beginnings to the 18th century

France. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver's diminutive status serves as a reminder of how perspective and viewpoint
alter one's condition and claims to power in society. The imperfect, yet highly moral Brobdingnagians
represent, according to many critics, Swift's conception of ethical rulers. The voyage to Laputa, the flying
island, is a scathing attack upon science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reveals Swift's
thorough acquaintance with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the leading publication of
the scientific community of his day. The third voyage unequivocally manifests Swift's contempt and disdain
for abstract theory and ideology that is not of practical service to humans. But it is the voyage to the land of
the Houyhnhnms that reveals Swift's ultimate satiric objectman's inability to come to terms with his true
nature. In particular, the Houyhnhnms are interpreted as symbols and examples of a human order that,
although unattainable, deserves to remain an ideal, while the Yahoos are found to be the representatives of
the depths of humanity's potential fall if that ideal is abandoned.
Swift has at least two aims in Gulliver's Travels besides merely telling a good adventure story.
Behind the disguise of his narrative, he is satirizing the pettiness of human nature in general and attacking
the Whigs in particular. By emphasizing the six-inch height of the Lilliputians, he graphically diminishes the
stature of politicians and indeed the stature of all human nature. And in using the fire in the Queen's
chambers, the rope dancers, the bill of particulars drawn against Gulliver, and the inventory of Gulliver's
pockets, he presents a series of allusions that were identifiable to his contemporaries as critical of Whig
politics.
Within the broad scheme of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver seems to be an average man in eighteenthcentury England. He is concerned with family and with his job, yet he is confronted by the pigmies that
politics and political theorizing make of people. Gulliver is utterly incapable of the stupidity of the
Lilliputian politicians, and, therefore, he and the Lilliputians are ever-present contrasts for us. We are always
aware of the difference between the imperfect (but normal) moral life of Gulliver, and the petty and stupid
political life of emperors, prime ministers, and informers.
In the second book of the Travels, Swift reverses the size relationship that he used in Book I. In
Lilliput, Gulliver was a giant; in Brobdingnag, Gulliver is a midget. Swift uses this difference to express a
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Name:
1st year, 10th group, Chinese English

British Literature and Culture from the beginnings to the 18th century

difference in morality. Gulliver was an ordinary man compared to the amoral political midgets in Lilliput.
Now, Gulliver remains an ordinary man, but the Brobdingnagians are moral men. They are not perfect, but
they are consistently moral. Only children and the deformed are intentionally evil.
Swift praises the Brobdingnagians, but he does not intend for us to think that they are perfect
humans. They are superhumans, bound to us by flesh and blood, just bigger morally than we are. Their
virtues are not impossible for us to attain, but because it takes so much maturing to reach the stature of a
moral giant, few humans achieve it.
Swift is using Gulliver's voyages to satirize various aspects of English society. Gulliver's various
conflicts in the lands he visits allow Swift to discuss a number of problems he sees with English society and
the way England is governed.
When Gulliver washes ashore on Lilliput, for example, he soon observes that the Emperor of Lilliput
chooses his ministers not on the basis of their ability to govern but on their ability to walk a tightrope. This
is Swift's thinly-veiled criticism of how George I, the King of England, chooses his ministers--in this case,
not on their ability to walk a tightrope but on their connections within the court and whether or not they will
make decisions based on what King George wants them to do rather than on what is right for the English.
When Gulliver lands in the land of the Houyhnhnms, he discovers a race of horses who are perfectly
rational, unemotional, logical beings, and the uncivilized brutes of this society, the Yahoos, are human
beings. During this experience, Gulliver actually loses his own identity and considers himself a kind of
Houyhnhnm rather than a human being, and when he returns to England, he can barely stand being around
people, preferring horses for company. Swift is satirizing anyone who chooses a philosophy over reality.
In the end, Swift has managed--through the framework of a child's fairy tale--to point out many problems in
English society that need correction, and he has accomplished this without pointing overtly to specific
people within English society.
Gullivers Travels is about a specific set of political conflicts, but if it were nothing more than that it
would long ago have been forgotten. The staying power of the work comes from its depiction of the human
condition and its often despairing, but occasionally hopeful, sketch of the possibilities for humanity to rein
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Name:
1st year, 10th group, Chinese English

British Literature and Culture from the beginnings to the 18th century

in its baser instincts. Gullivers Travels is one of those books that will remain a classic because it portrays
some universal issues that will continue to have effects on peoples lives in the future.
Bibliography
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gulliver/
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/g/gullivers-travels/critical-essays/
http://www.enotes.com/topics/gullivers-travels-jonathan-swift/critical-essays/
http://www.shmoop.com/gullivers-travels/politics-theme.html
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=15658
http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/there-main-conflict-within-book-that-gulliver

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