Swiftly Going Mad

I have been reading, this past week, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I thoroughly enjoy a good satire, and Swift certainly writes some of the best.

It becomes increasingly difficult, however, to tell what it is that Swift satirizes as the reader

progresses through the pages.

There are moments when he ridicules the other peoples he visits so thoroughly, that it is entirely too easy to forget that he is using humor, and so must not be taken in an over serious fashion.

For example, many of his descriptions of women, which some of my classmates choose to see as proof positive of Swift's misogyny (at worst) or his dismissal of women (at best) are, in my reading of the text, representative of the cultural concepts and ideologies regarding women. Swift merely portrays the flaws of vanity and silliness that exist in some women, and that are assumed by 18th Century society as a whole to be inherent truths, and exaggerates these ideas.

I find it amusing when the mistake of equating the voice of the narrator with the voice of the author is consistently made by "experienced" English majors and wonder if they even remember that the narrator is not named Swift, but Gulliver.

The Travels become even more complicated to sort through with Part 4, the section that recounts Gulliver's stay with the Houyhnhnms, and his unpleasant experiences with the grotesque and entirely too human Yahoos.

Dr. Givan asked us to note what is not perfect about the Houyhnhnms, particularly because this is the book that is often interpreted as possessing Swift's idea of the Ideal culture. The main mistake, again, is forgetting that the text is a satire, and Swift is not likely to present an Ideal when he has spent the entire text creating imaginary worlds for the purpose of pointing out flaws.

It is my perception, and also a conclusion that the class reached together, that the Houyhnhnms represent the cold reason of the 18th century. Peace and prosperity resulted in the complete reliance on reason, but empathy and basic compassion were severely lacking. In essence, the Houyhnhnms represented loss of humanity in favor of reason. The 18th century's obsessions with reason and science are portrayed at their most extreme in the Houyhnhnms. The lack of war and barbarism is appealing, but at what cost? Feeling no love for spouses or children, feeling no real emotion whatsoever.

Humanity may be flawed and stupid and make mistakes as a result of our emotions, but the human capacity for love is what makes us human. The cold reason of the Houyhnhnms was not Swift's ideal, but perhaps his version of hell instead.