Gulliver's Travels
is a misanthropic anatomy of human nature; a
sardonic looking-glass. It asks its readers to refute it, to deny that it has
not adequately characterized human nature and society. Each of the four books
has a different theme, but all are attempts to deflate human pride. Book I,
written between 1721 and 1725, may reflect the concerns of Swift's own day, and
of his own life--it may be a politico-sociological treatise in the form of a
satire; a protest against Imperialism and Colonialism; an attack on the corrupt
Whig oligarchy which had displaced the Swift's Tories in London--a defence of
Tory policies, an attack on the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, and on the
expensive and bloody trade wars which had accompanied the twelve years of Whig
government--but it is also, on a deeper level, a satire on the universal human
tendency to abuse political power and authority, to manipulate others and
deceive ourselves. It is at once a folk-myth, a children's story, and a
misanthrope's gift to mankind: in Lilliput, which is, quite literally, a
microcosm, the vices and follies not merely of
The satire in Book IV is darker and more savage: as an
evaluation of the human condition, it frightened the wits out of most of the
most eminent Victorians, and remains profoundly disturbing today. It suggests
that the aspects of our lives of which we are most proud are merely slightly
more complex versions of the activities which, when they are engaged in by
Yahoos, we recognize as being foul, brutal, and disgusting. In contrasting the
Houhbynhynms with the Yahoos, Swift concerns himself, too, with the dichotomy,
inherent in all human beings, between reason and unreason; between sanity and
madness. He implies that though Man is neither a rational intellect nor, wholly,
a passionate beast, neither a Houhynhynm nor a Yahoo, he inclines to the
bestial. In this final book Swift seems to despair: for Gulliver, overwhelmed,
as perhaps Swift himself was, by a black, misanthropic, despairing vision of
reality, the only middle ground left between the dreamy utopia, the ironically
"ideal" society of the Houhynhynms, and the abyss of Yahooism seems to be a
stable in