Gulliver's Travels
- Created by: fwelsh
- Created on: 06-04-17 15:45
View mindmap
- Gulliver's Travels
- Juvenalian Satire
- harsh and filled with bitter criticisms
- It was an indictment, and it was most popular among those who were
indicted — that is, politicians, scientists, philosophers, and
Englishmen in general.
- However, lest one think that Swift's satire is merely the weapon of
exaggeration, it is important to note that exaggeration is only one
facet of his satiric method. Swift uses mock seriousness and
understatement; he parodies and burlesques; he presents a virtue and
then turns it into a vice.
- At birth, for instance, Lilliputian children were "wisely" taken from their parents and given to the State to rear.
- Mankind, as he has a Brobdingnagian remark, is "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
- The island of Laputa, the island of pseudo-science, is literally (in Spanish) the land of "the whore." Science, which learned people of his generation were venerating as a goddess, Swift labeled a whore, and devoted a whole hook to illustrating the ridiculous behavior of her converts.
- In addition, Swift mocks blind devotion. Gulliver, leaving the
Houyhnhnms, says that he "took a second leave of my master, but as I was
going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honor to
raise it gently to my mouth."
- In Book IV, Gulliver has come to idealize the horses. They embody pure reason, but they are not human. Literally, of course, we know they are not, but figuratively they seem an ideal for humans — until Swift exposes them as dull, unfeeling creatures, thoroughly unhuman. They take no pleasure in sex, nor do they ever overflow with either joy or melancholy. They are bloodless.
- However, lest one think that Swift's satire is merely the weapon of
exaggeration, it is important to note that exaggeration is only one
facet of his satiric method. Swift uses mock seriousness and
understatement; he parodies and burlesques; he presents a virtue and
then turns it into a vice.
- To Swift, Man is a mixture of sense and nonsense; he had accomplished much but had fallen far short of what he could have been and what he could have done.
- It was an indictment, and it was most popular among those who were
indicted — that is, politicians, scientists, philosophers, and
Englishmen in general.
- People, he believed, were generally ridiculous and petty, greedy and proud
- harsh and filled with bitter criticisms
- Swift and the Enlightenment
- Swift was certainly not one of the optimists typical of his century. He did not believe that the Age of Science was the triumph that a great majority of his countrymen believed it to be. Science and reason needed limits, and they needed a good measure of humanism. They did not require absolute devotion.
- Politically, he began his career as a Whig, but by 1709 the Whig rapprochement with the Dissenters had disturbed him greatly, and when a Tory ministry replaced the Whigs in 1710, and seemed to be inclined to favor the Church of England, he allowed himself to be recruited by the Tory Prime Minister, Robert Harley (who had already enlisted Daniel Defoe in their cause, and who promised Swift that Queen Ann would reward him for his endeavors) and rapidly became the chief Tory pamphleteer in the strugggle between the two parties for public favor. He refused, however, to accept the traditional Tory belief in the divine right of kings, and continued to insist that ultimate political power in England derived from the people, and manifested itself in a carefully maintained alliance between King and Parliament which protected individual liberties and avoided tyranny.
- NOT A NOVEL!
- political allegory
- travel writing
- http://enlightenment-revolution.org/index.php/Swift,_Jonathan
- political allegory
- Juvenalian Satire
Comments
No comments have yet been made