Abstract
Gulliver’s Travels reveals a feature that is characteristic to some extent of much of Swift’s writing. This is its preoccupation with images of filth, disease, deformity, decay and defilement. Although Swift’s interest in these images has seemed compulsive to many readers of Gulliver’s Travels, they can be shown to serve a rational end. They are certainly intended to evoke a response that is, in part, affective; their aim is to arouse an aversion to what Swift finds most abhorrent in contemporary life. But they need to be understood not only in the emotional realm but in rational terms as well. No narrowly conceived historical or biographical approach can hope to comprehend them fully. They must be related to the basic structures of his satire in the narrative.
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Notes
The classical statement of this position can be found in Deane Swift, An Essay upon the Life, Writings, and Character of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London, 1781), rpt. in A Casebook on Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, ed. Milton P. Foster (New York: Crowell, 1961) pp. 74–6.
Among modern interpretations of Swift from this perspective, one might cite T. O. Wedel, ‘On the Philosophical Background of Gulliver’s Travels’, SP, XXIII (1926) 434–50;
and Louis A. Landa, ‘Jonathan Swift’, English Institute Essays: 1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946) pp. 20–35
The most extreme attempts to examine Gulliver’s Travels from a Christian point of view are Martin Kallich’s The Other Side of the Egg: Religious Satire in Gulliver’s Travels (Bridgeport, Conn.: Conference on British Studies, 1970);
and L. J. Morrissey’s Gulliver’s Progress (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978)
This argument can be traced back to John Boyle, fifth Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London: 1752), rpt. in A Casebook on Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms, pp. 71–3;
and William Makepeace Thackeray, English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, eds. J. W. Cunliffe and H. A. Watt (Chicago and New York: Scott Foresman, 1911) pp. 50–8.
Influential modern versions of this perspective are those of Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Doran, 1911) pp. 99–114;
and John Middleton Murry, Jonathan Swift: a Critical Biography (New York: Noonday Press, 1955) pp. 432–8
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, [etc.]: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) p. 41.
Peter Steele remarks in passing that Mary Douglas’s study ‘might furnish us with matter for a great deal of speculation’ in connection with Swift, Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) p. 27.
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York, [etc.]: Harper & Row, 1967) p. 27.
F. R. Leavis, ‘Swift’s Negative Irony’, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), rpt. in Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Robert A. Greenberg (New York: Norton, 1970) p. 422.
Jean Alexander, ‘Yeats and the Rhetoric of Defilement’, REL, VI (1965) 44–57, locates Swift in a tradition of defilement that includes Spenser, Milton, Marvell, and Baudelaire, but while her approach shifts the focus from an expressive to a rhetorical perspective, it still confirms the conventional view, i.e. Swift’s intention ‘is to inspire disgust for the human body and acts of the body.
Gulliver’s Travels, 1726 (rev. edn, 1959), ed. Herbert Davis, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 14 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–68) xi, 29.
William Dampier, A New Voyage Around the World (London, 1703);
Edward Cooke, A Voyage to the South Sea, and Around the World (London, 1712)
and Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World (London, 1712), all rpt. in Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagle (New York: Norton, 1975) pp. 245–53
R. W. Frantz, The English Traveller and the Movement of Ideas, 1660–1732 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967) pp. 67–8, distinguishes broadly between the narrative of detached observation and the ‘narrative of authentic adventure’.
For an example of the former, see Paul Fussell, Jr., ‘The Frailty of Lemuel Gulliver’, in Essays in Literary History, eds Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1960) pp. 113–25.
For examples of the latter, see Hugo M. Reichard, ‘Gulliver the Pretender’, PLL, I (1965) 316–22;
Jon S. Lawry, ‘Dr. Lemuel Gulliver and “the Thing which was not”’, JEGP, LXVII (1968) 212–34;
and Robert M. Philmus, ‘Swift, Gulliver and the Thing which was not’, ELH, XXXVIII (1971) 62–79
See, e. g. John H. Sutherland, ‘A Reconsideration of Gulliver’s Third Voyage’, SP, LIV (1957) 45–52;
and Edmund Reiss, ‘The Importance of Swift’s Glubbdubdrib Episode’, JEGP, LIX (1960) 223–8
Swift: Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London, [etc.]: Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 86.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, II (London: Cape, 1973) p. 383.
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© 1987 Charles H. Hinnant
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Hinnant, C.H. (1987). Introduction. In: Purity and Defilement in Gulliver’s Travels. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18889-5_1
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