Gulliver's Travels

ASSIGNMENT

PAPER-2

Q. Colonialism in Gulliver’s Travels:

A:  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 eighteenth-century 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.

The object of the book is to vex the world. Swift had written to pope that his chief object was to vex the world rather than divert it. What he meant was that he wanted to arouse among his readers a feeling of dissatisfaction with themselves and their fellows for their vices and follies and thus to stimulate them to amend them and shortcomings of mankind. While the book does succeed in vexing and even disturbing and shocking its readers, there is also much in it to divert and amuse them. The satire is often cruel and in part IV it is almost horrifying. But there is planty of pure fun and comedy in the book also.

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 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.

In Books I and II, Swift directs his satire more toward individual targets than firing broadside at abstract concepts. In Book I, he is primarily concerned with Whig politics and politicians rather than with the abstract politician; in Book II, he elects to reprove immoral Englishmen rather than abstract immorality. In Book III, Swift's target is somewhat abstract — pride in reason — but he also singles out and censures a group of his contemporaries whom he believed to be particularly depraved in their exaltation of reason. He attacks his old enemies, the Moderns, and their satellites, the Deists and rationalists. In opposition to their credos, Swift believed that people were capable of reasoning, but that they were far from being fully rational. For the record, it should probably be mentioned that Swift was not alone in denouncing this clique of people. The objects of Swift's indignation had also aroused the rage of Pope, Arbuthnot, Dryden, and most of the orthodox theologians of the Augustan Age.

From the start the Lilliputians arouse our interest and win our   liking. The pigmies of Lilliput ingeniously capture the giant whom chance has caste on their shore. They humanly solve the problem of feeding him. Their pretty land and their fascinating little city capture our fancy.But in the end they prove to be proud, envious, rapacious, treacherous, cruel, revengeful, jealous and hypocritical. Their social and political system have to become corrupt. They are governed by an emperor who aims at destroying the neighbouring kingdom. The courtiers and ministers pigmies here are chosen not for their fitness but fot their skill in walking on the tight rope and leaping over sticks or creeping under them. The pigmies of Lilliput are an example of the disproportion of man like Gulliver himself. Their vices, their appetites, their ambition and their passions are too big for their small stature. They appear to Gulliver to be venomous and petty even as Gulliver and his kind must appear to some higher order of being.

His voyage to the land and is descriptions are representing the England. The land is the miniature of the Motherland of the Gulliver i.e. England. Refusal of ‘female’ is the refusal of mother Land here. The reason why reader can'’ find female protagonist.

Political satire in part 1of the book in that we find Swift satirizing the manner in which political offices were distributed. Dancing on a tight rope symbolizes Walpole’s skill in parliamentary tactics and political intrigues. Swift here seems to be satirizing the activities of that Whig committee.       

Swift is here mocking at the English King’s conferment of distinctions on political favourites and supporters. Gulliver’s account of the conspiracy against him and his impending impeachment is Swift’s satirical description of court intrigues which were a feature of political life. Swift here gives us amusing glimpses of what went on at the court of George 1.when sir Robert Walpole was the most influential of the politicians. Swift’s satire becomes more amusing when Gulliver speaks of the conflict between the Big-Endian and the Little-Endians in Lilliput. In this account Swift is ridiculing the conflicts between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants. He is making fun of hair-splitting theological disputes. Swift also pokes fun at the political parties in England the two factions being distinguished by their high heels and low heels respectively.

In part II, the satire becomes general. Here Gulliver first gives us his reaction to the coarseness and Brobdingnag who are giants I structure. We also get a brief satire on the great scholars of this new country. The philosophers, however agree about one point that Gulliver could not have been produced according to the regular laws of nature, and that he is a freak product.  The king mocks at the human race of which Gulliver is a representative, a face which as compared to the people of Brobdingnag, consists of insects. Swift is here ridiculing human pride and pretension. Human beings who have such lofty ideas about themselves are no better than insects in the eyes of the King of Brobdingnag.

The description of the crowd of beggars whom Gulliver happens to see is intended as a satire on the beggars who actually existed. The sight is indeed, horrible and disgusting. most hateful sight is that of the lice crawling on their clothes. This description reinforces Swift’s view of the ugliness and foulness of the human body .The bitterest satire in part II of the book comes when the king comments on Gulliver’s account of the English parliament .the English courts of justice, and other institution in England. The kings view is that Gulliver’s country seems to him a series of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments etc. all these are a result of hypocrisy, pertidy, cruelty

The king concludes the people of Gulliver’s country are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Swift’s own cynical views about mankind in general. King reacts with scorn and disgust to Gulliver’s account. According to the King, only common sense, reason, and justice and not books are needed to run government. The satire in the part III is not so bitter as in the closing chapters of part II.

Part III is light hearted making fun of the people whose sole interest are music and geometry and who do not even have the time to make love to their wives. Swift here ridicules scientists, academics, planners, intellectuals, in fact all people who proceed according to theory and are useless when it comes to actual practice. In Laputa, Swift also satirizes the English system of administration Swift satirizes historians and literary critics through Gulliver’s interviews with the ghosts of the famous dead. In the portrayal of the Struld-brags. Swift satirizes the human longing for immortality.

Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels contains some of the most corrosive and offensive satire on mankind. In this part the Yahoos are intended to represent human beings. Gulliver describes them as abominable. The Houyhnhnms are  noble and Beneyolentanimals. A bitter criticism of the human race to represent the Houyhnhnms as being superior mentally and morally to the yahoos. The Yahoos are brutal, unteachable, and mischievous. The Houyhnhnms on the contrary are morally so good that there is no word in their language for lying or falsehood.

The account which Gulliver gives of the political life in his country is really a bitter criticism of the evils that prevail not only in England but in all countries of the world. The vast numbers of the people of his country, Gulliver says, live by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, forging, whoring and so on. Indeed, this is not just but denunciation and invective.

By contrast the Houyhnhnms are excellent beings whose grand principle is to cultivate reason and be wholly governed by it. Swift’s purpose here is to horses certain qualities which would normally be expected in human beings but which are actually lacking in human beings. The main quality is reason or the rational quality which human beings , according to Swift do not value enough.

Gulliver’s reaction to what he has seen in the land of the Houyhnhnms fills him with so much admiration for them and with so much hatred and disgust for the race that he has no desire even to return to his family. This reaction shows that Gulliver has become a complete cynic and misamthrope. Gulliver concludes his account with a severe condemnation of human pride so that pride may be regarded as yet another target of Swift’s satire in this book.

Swift shows himself as a great satirist in this book by giving us comic satire and corrosive satire by his successful exposure, sometimes witty and sometimes indignant of human irrationality by his claver use of irony and by other devices to makes us acutely conscious of the defects of mankind.

Swift’s vision of mankind is too dark and pessimistic and that his counset is the counsel of despair, Swift’s scornful and incisive satire on humanity.