The times in which Jonathan Swift wrote were certainly grim enough to inspire writing about what a utopian society might resemble, or what it might take to make society better. As a priest in Ireland, Swift was certainly in a position to see the plight of the Irish poor. The indifference of the British government to this plight was the motivation for one of the first major rhetorical pieces to use sarcasm as a device; his essay “A Modest Proposal” gave Irish anger a voice that continues to resonate today (Spratt). The suggestion of that “proposal,” which was to sell the infants of the Irish poor to meat consumers in England, was written with the structure of a scientific treatise but with the rhetoric of a blistering sermon. In Gulliver's Travels, Swift's narrator visits four different societies, each of which is quite different from the others, and each of which possesses traits that were analogous to the British Empire of the day. When considering the ideal form of a social structure, one crucial element of that is the relationship that the individual has with society at large. Even the travels of Lemuel Gulliver do little but to establish that this relationship is problematic at best; the overwhelming impression that one forms of this relationship from the novel is that the individual is ultimately doomed to alienation from society at large, unless he is willing to assimilate and lose his convictions and other signs of individuality.
One sign of this alienation is that Gulliver is always essentially different from the members of the societies whom he visits. He is a giant who is unable to fit in Lilliput; he is a doll-sized toy in Brobdingnag. The Laputians appear to be the most similar to Gulliver physically, but he cannot identify with any of the philosophical oddities that appear to govern this society. With the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver has the widest degree of alienation of all, because he prefers community with an entirely different species. However, his dissatisfaction with what is going on at home keeps sending him to sea. England is not a particularly hospitable homeland for Gulliver to inhabit; his surgical practice never turns much of a profit, and his father’s estate does not produce enough income to support him. Each time he goes back to England, even though he has a wife and children, he quickly takes off again. There are no overt complaints about his home life, but the character he becomes at the end of the novel, living in the stable and refusing to spend any time with his family, shows a deep isolation in this bitter, antisocial man. There are some who see elements of this novel as a ridicule of the communal life; however, it also makes fun of individualism with the portrait of Gulliver at the end of the story. There may be no way for the individual to find full comfort in society.
In Lilliput, all of the individuals in society live under the rule of the monarch; when Gulliver lands on the island, even though he is certainly large enough to destroy the entire civilization, he agrees to live under the king’s rule as well. As an individual of prodigious size, Gulliver finds it difficult to fit in with his society. The Lilliputians have no idea what to do with Gulliver. At times, they “surmise that Gulliver’s watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting” (Swift). To this end, they go to unbelievable lengths to make sure that Gulliver has enough to eat, by taking up an immense tax from the people, in terms of livestock and produce. Even though, one guesses, Gulliver could have gone out into the sea and captured more than enough fish to feed the populace on a regular basis, his provision becomes a problem for the government. On the other hand, though, Gulliver becomes ensconced in a love triangle that is at least as ridiculous as the conflict between Lilliput and nearby Blefuscu. And so there are people in Lilliput who view him as a deity, others who view him as a nuisance, and still others who view him as a threat to their own personal happiness. It is true that the Lilliputians are silly; the king inspires “awe among the tiny Lilliputians because he was taller than his brethren by the breadth of a human fingernail” (Swift). On the other hand, Gulliver is just as silly, undertaking to put out a fire in the palace by urinating on it instead of taking some strides to the sea, filling a vessel with water, and dousing it in that way. Gulliver’s difficulties make it hard for him to fit in here.
In Brobdingnag, the problem is reversed, in an unexpected manner. The king of Brobdingnag does ridicule the mores of British society; after all, when Gulliver has finished describing the workings of the United Kingdom, the king calls the British as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth” (Swift). However, it is worth noting here that Gulliver is the source of the information about England; given his own disaffection with his homeland, the quality of his recounting may easily be suspected of some bias. Also, while the Brobdingnagians spend a great deal of time ridiculing the British way of running society, little attention is given to society in this land of giants. In Lilliput, there had been the dispute of egg-breaking that had given the reader insight to the level of priorities. In Brobdingnag, there is no such analogy (Fitzgerald). As a result, it is hard to figure out just what it is about Brobdingnag, other than size, that makes it better than Gulliver’s England. One possibility is that there was nothing at all, but that Gulliver was too irritated with his own homeland to let it off the proverbial hook.
The land of the Houyhnhnms provides the most detailed information for analyzing the proper relationship between the individual and society. This is the society that Gulliver praises most freely; they practice a very strict method of family planning; each couple of Houyhnhnms must have a pair of children, one male and one female; couples with two male foals must trade with a family with two male foals. This does approach the ideal of rational simplicity and wisdom that was associated with classical utopia. However, the Houyhnhnms are simply creepy to behold during the story, even though Gulliver’s description makes them seem the height of perfection. Their personalities are not distinct one from another; indeed, the individualism is so restricted that none of the creatures even have their own proper names. There are some simple physical differences that allow Gulliver to differentiate among some of them, but their characters are so similar in their devotion to the rational and the good that it becomes impossible to tell them apart. They have fused themselves absolutely with their society, having left their own individuality behind. The Yahoos are the closest analog to humanity in this land, but their behavior is so primitive and boorish that the satire reaches the limits of effectiveness. This is the complete opposite of Gulliver himself, who does not seem to have any sense of belonging to any society; his existence is that of a lonely individual continually floating the seas. When Gulliver has to leave the land of the Houyhnhnms, there is more grief than at any of his other departures; this could be just a simple expression of his desire to shed his human identity. Alas, that was not meant to be.
The struggle that the individual faces in fitting in with society is a poignant theme at work in Gulliver’s Travels. While it would be a mistake to assume that Lemuel Gulliver is the voice of Swift himself, it is also easy to see that Swift was deeply disappointed in the society that surrounded him. His use of satire to express that disappointment is what made him an angry man, and a powerful rhetorician.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, Keri. “What Not to Do: Learning by Example in The Republic and Gulliver’s Travels. Unpublished thesis, 2010. https://digital.library.txstate.edu/bitstream/handle/10877/3168/fulltext.pdf?sequence=1
Spratt, Danielle. “Guliver’s Economized Body: Colonial Projects and the Lusus Naturae in the Travels.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 41: 137-159.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. http://www.literaturepage.com/read/gulliverstravels.html
