February 15, 2024 • 20 mins
Gulliver’s Travels remains one of the finest satires in the English language, delighting in the mockery of everything from government to religion and —despite the passing of nearly three centuries-remaining just as fun, funny and relevant today.
Our guest-speakers are chief editors of the 2023 Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels Dr. Daniel Cook and Dr. Nicholas Seager. Daniel is an Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee whose teaching and research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Nick is Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. His research interests are Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.
Recommended Readings:
Johnathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
The adventures of Lemuel Gulliver's are the stuff
of legend.
First he is shipwrecked in astrange land and finds himself a
prisoner of the tinyinhabitants of Lidiput.
He then washes up in thecountry of Brobdingnag, where
the people are giants ofextraordinary proportions.
Further exploits see himstranded with the scientists and
philosophers of Laputa andmeeting a race of talking horses
(00:41):
who rule over bestial humans.
Gulliver's Travels remains oneof the funniest satires in
English language, delighting inthe mockery of everything from
government to religion and,despite the passing of nearly
three centuries, remaining justas fun, funny and relevant today
.
Thank you for tuning in to theGlobal Novel.
I'm Claire Hennessey.
(01:02):
With me today are chief editorsof the 2023 Cambridge Companion
to Gulliver's Travels, drDaniel Cook and Dr Nicholas
Seeger.
Daniel is an associate dean andreader in English literature at
the University of Dundee, whoseteaching and research interests
include 18th and 19th centuryliterature.
Nick is lecturer in Englishliterature at Keele University,
uk.
(01:22):
His research interests arerestoration and 18th century
literature.
Welcome to the show, daniel andNick.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Great to be here.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, indeed, thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, to begin with, what do you think Jonathan
Swift's intentions were inwriting Oliver's Travels?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Great question.
It's always a difficultquestion with a satirist,
especially such an experiencedsatirist as Swift.
You know he's mockingeverything and everyone.
Very famously, he said heclaimed that he wanted to vex
the world rather than divert it.
With this book in particular,he wanted to challenge our
(02:02):
assumptions assumptions, ourcherished uh institutions, if
you like.
Nothing is off limits.
He attacks everything andeveryone.
But at the same time, though, Iwould kind of quibble with what
swift says, because this bookis very diverting, it's very
entertaining, it's very funny,it's full of farce, it's full of
humor.
It's also got its very seriousintellectual side as well, but
(02:24):
that's why it's such a brilliantbook.
It's full of humor.
It's also got its very seriousintellectual side as well.
That's why it's such abrilliant book yeah, I'd agree.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I'd say that, um, it's easy to overlook that
gulliver's travels is a supremework of the imagination.
Um, as you said, claire, umswift imagines these worlds in
which um gulliver is either um a12th of the size of the
inhabitants or 12 times largerthan them, and then he goes on
to all kinds of strange andwonderful worlds and encounters
(02:51):
rational animals.
So it's a great work of theimagination, it's a great
adventure story and that's why Ithink it's had such an enduring
appeal, especially amongstyounger readers.
So God of War gets into allkinds of escapades due to
physical differences or otherkinds of ways in which he's made
vulnerable in these strange newworlds.
(03:13):
But he did also.
But Swift did also have someserious points.
He wanted to challenge thepremise that humans were
entirely rational creatures, theidea that the world revolved
around humanity in some respects, and it's important for
(03:33):
de-centering people from theworld in which Gulliver operates
.
And I don't think we shouldalso entirely overlook the fact
that Swift probably you askabout intentions.
Swift knew that this would bepopular.
He knew that this would be afantastically successful book
because it is so readable andenjoyable and it was a huge
commercial hit at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Right.
Well, how was it received?
We know that Swift knew thebook would incite much
controversy, so he published itanonymously, right?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well there's.
I won't get the quotation quiteright, but Swift's friend, John
Gay, told him that it was beingread everywhere, from the
nursery to the cabinet council,and that's remained true largely
today.
So the one thing to say aboutthe reception is that it was
very, very popular.
It was an expensive book forits time.
(04:25):
It was in two volumes.
It was eight shillings sixpence, which is quite a lot of money.
Not a lot of people couldafford it, and so it was
popularised through abridgmentsand through serialisations.
People were dead keen on it, soin some sense it was a huge
success.
In other respects, as you'vesaid, it was also a very
controversial work.
(04:47):
There is a lot of satire inGulliver's Travels which seems
to be directed againstparticular people, and Swift and
his friends were worried abouthow that would go down.
In some respects it's writtenin a way to be quite guarded
against that, both in the sensethat it was published, as you
said, anonymously, and he tookgreat pains to cover his tracks
(05:08):
and get back to Ireland asquickly as possible after having
delivered the manuscript inLondon, or at least having it
delivered by his friends inLondon.
And he also took pains to makesure that people couldn't read
it as a narrow, particular kindof topical work, that it had a
(05:29):
series of bigger, more universalthemes.
That said, in the wake ofSwift's death, some of the
people who write about himstraight afterwards, including
his own cousin, find parts ofGodulliver's Travels quite hard
to defend, especially thetendency towards the kind of
(05:49):
misanthropy in Gulliver'sTravels which remains debated to
this day.
But certainly there is a kindof moralistic backlash against
Gulliver's Travels that sitsalongside its huge popularity
and the relish that peopleclearly had for it.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I think Nick puts it really well and I think even
nowadays we kind of strugglewith books that are popular
straight away.
It was a bestseller, it was outof print within weeks of
publication and a very expensivebook as well Two volumes, as
Nick says.
I think critics, particularlywith great literary works, kind
(06:25):
of struggle with what to do witha popular text.
Um, and as Nick says, it wasabridged very quickly, it was.
It was bolderized very quickly,um, pirated very quickly,
translated into multiplelanguages fairly rapidly.
But what I find fascinatingabout the sort of origin stories
of Gulliver's Travels, as itwere, is it's kind of unlikely
(06:48):
here to many ways.
It doesn't have JonathanSwift's name attached to it, so
by then he's a very famous, veryprominent satirist.
So it would be very easy topublish this work as a work by
Swift, notwithstanding thecontroversy surrounding it.
There are some quite aggressivegestures in the book, as it were
(07:11):
.
There are even hints of attackon the late Queen Anne, for
example.
There's a lot of libelous stuffhere and it's published as
Travels into Several RemoteNations of the World.
It's not a very glamorous title, so it's unlikely hit in many
ways, but I think, as Nick saidearlier, because of its
(07:35):
fantastical elements, its veryclear satirical drive, it cannot
help but be the success that itwas amongst critics and general
readers.
It feels like a slight sort ofunderdog story in many ways.
It isn't sort of heralded asthis sort of great beacon of
literature at the time, but itjust shows that it stands the
(07:57):
test of time and again.
That's slightly unusual forsatirical works.
Satirical works tend to be sofocused on the politicians that
swift was attacking, criticizing, exposing, for the hypocrisy
were dead or they were out ofoffice, they were out of power.
(08:20):
But there's just somethingquite universal about this kind
of story.
So it's very particular butalso very, uh, universal as well
.
I think everyone sort ofrecognizes themselves or people
that they know, or people,people in the public eye, in
this text.
So it's got a lot going for it,despite the very sort of quite
frifty, quite banal title pagein many ways.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You know, what I truly love about the Cambridge
Companion is its feminist andpost-colonial reading of the
satire.
Critics have frequentlycharacterized the narrative as
misogynistic and stressed itsnegative representation of
female physicality.
What can we learn from LizBellamy's essay collected in
this book that truly offers anew reading with this
(09:08):
perspective of body and gender.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yes.
So Liz Bellamy's got afantastic essay in this
collection.
It's fantastic because shetakes stock of fairly
long-standing debates about theperceived misogyny of the text.
And Liz, quite rightly, isclear that there is clearly
misogynistic language in thetext.
The question is is Swift beingironic?
(09:33):
That's a standard satiricdefense, and so on.
We certainly have veryproblematic depictions of the
female body.
It's rendered quite monstrousin Brumlingnag, the Land of
Giants, where we have these sortof large, hairy, unattractive,
unassuming female bodies hairy,unattractive, unassuming female
(09:56):
bodies.
There's also a sense that someof the characters have cancerous
breasts and so on and thebreasts are rendered sort of
ludicrously large and there'ssomething about sort of the
grotesque female body, if youlike.
But Liz and another critic havesort of begun to realise that
Gulliver himself is gendered andhis view of the monstrous
(10:18):
female body is, at least in part, a critique of his own
monstrous masculinity, that hehas these preconceived notions
about female beauty and so on.
So at quite a literal level,his view of their monstrosity
says more about him than it doeswomen, if you like.
It's also worth pointing out.
(10:39):
I think that we've touched uponhow this book talks about
religion in quite complicatedways.
This book is also full ofcommentary on modern science,
particularly for what, for Swissgeneration, was a fairly new
invention, which is themicroscope, and there is a sense
that the female body isrendered in such a monstrous way
(11:01):
, because this is Swiftcritiquing or inviting us to be
quite wary of microscopy.
You can suddenly see God'screations in all of it in such a
close way and, metaphoricallyand literally, it will horrify
(11:23):
our perceptions, and so on.
So it's misogynistic insofar ashe's using the female body as a
means to critique modern science, the science of the Royal
Society and so on.
Or you could say, as Liz doesin her fantastic essay in this
collection this isn't just aboutfemale bodies, it's about male
bodies as well, and we tend toignore the latter.
(11:45):
I think that's why this isgoing to be such an influential
essay, because it takes stock ofthe debates but just pushes it
into that new direction which Ithink is so exciting.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Daniel's exactly right that the book is full of
very problematic representationsof female behaviour and female
bodies.
So in Lilliput the women arecaught, are a bunch of
troublemakers, scandal mongers,you know, thrown to infidelity
(12:17):
and all of those sorts of thingscausing men to fall out and so
on and so forth Classic kind ofmisogynistic sort of portrayal.
Then we get into Brobdicknagand Gulliver describes with this
kind of disarming candour thebodies that he experiences.
But so much of that kind ofgrotesquery, which is a kind of
(12:39):
traditional form of satiricalprose that he kind of adopts and
extends from the French 17thcentury writer Rabelais.
So much of it centres on thefemale form in particular, and
especially kind of sexualisedfemale bodies that are not
attractive but instead aredisgusting, either because
they're smelly or becausethey're hairy or because, um,
(13:03):
you know that he can see tooclosely, really, and it's
absolutely right to say thatswift might be wrestling with
philosophical debates about kindof perception and proximity.
Um, logically speaking, um, Imean to give another example
that when he finds, after he'sbeen in Brobdingnag for a while,
that when he meets people ofhis own size, he's shouting at
(13:25):
them all the time, because heneeds to shout in Brobdingnag in
order to be heard.
So the idea is that he has thiskind of hypersensitivity to the
smells and the sights inBrobdingnag, but so often it
does centre on the female form,which is this kind of sight of,
of monstrosity.
I suppose a really interestingmoment in light of what liz
(13:45):
writes is in the final part ofgulliver's travels, um, and it's
it's a rightly notorious umepisode where um gulliver um is
amongst these reasonable andrational horses and there's a
society of sort of humanoid,kind of bestial humanoid figures
(14:06):
called yahoos, which are sortof presided over by the Wynnims
to some degree, but which areultimately just kind of
intractable.
They're not domesticatableanimals in any kind of way,
shape or form, but they arebasically human, and Gulliver is
trying to take every measure hecan to prove that he's not one
(14:27):
of these things, but one day,when he strips off and has a
wash in a swim in LA, he'sassaulted by an amorous yaku,
which is kind of the horrifyingdegree of what swift is
imagining, you know, an 11 yearold girl, um, and in some
respects it kind of extends thatsort of attack on libidinous
(14:50):
femininity to some degree.
The product of it, ultimately,though, is to confirm in
gulliver's own mind that he isthis thing called a yaku, and so
the, I suppose, misogynybecomes a kind of self-hatred.
So, as Liz gets that sopowerfully, it is also about
(15:11):
vulnerable masculine bodies Inall kinds of ways.
When Gulliver is in positions ofvulnerability, his is a body
that is feminised as well.
He's made a pet or a playthingor a toy or a doll, in Rob
Dignac in particular, whereanother young girl who he
(15:32):
describes as his sort of nurseLundelklitsch, looks after him.
And again it's this kind ofslightly uneasy, not just in
terms of gender relations butalso in terms of age, because
the dynamic there is kind ofcuriously parental, filial, but
also somewhat sexual.
And when the young women atcourt in Brodnick, like the
(15:55):
maids of honour, get hold ofGulliver, he has lots of of
descriptions that you know I'mtrying to kind of choose my
language a little bit carefullyhere, but he's effectively used
as a kind of sexual toy in allkinds of ways.
So yeah, it's a great chapterfor me about the ways in which
(16:15):
bodies are gendered inGulliver's travels.
In general we cannot skirt orshy away from the misogyny, but
it's kind of part of a biggerkind of set of questions about
humanity, I suppose and aboutthe physical experience of
occupying a human body.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Right.
As you both have highlightedGulliver's role as a traveler
and observer, reflecting theintersection between literature
and science from feministperspective, could you also
share more on how thisintersection between literature
and science is sketched againstthe backdrop of Britain's
colonial ambitions and thepursuit of knowledge during the
(16:59):
early 18th century?
Speaker 3 (17:01):
I suppose God of Earth Travels is written at a
point in time where we're kindof at the end of what we might
think of as an age of discovery,where all kinds of new worlds
are still being discovered, ofcourse and I use discovered in a
kind of, you know, cautioussense, because of course these
(17:21):
worlds are not discovered to thepeople who were originally
there, but from a sort ofEurocentric point of view it's
perceived to be a kind of an ageof discovery, an age of
enlightenment, an age whereEuropean sailors were going out
and finding out more about theworld and of course the accounts
that were coming back home weretinged with that sort of um,
(17:41):
eurocentrism, um.
So what we have, and I thinkwhat we have exposed in
gulliver's travels, is a kind ofa rhetoric of discovery and a
rhetoric of interculturalencounter that parades as this
sort of objective and empiricalkind of account of things.
You know, I landed here.
It was this sort of temperature, it was in this latitude, it
(18:05):
was an island about this big I.
I went up the shore, I, itseems very factual, very driven
by, um, the kinds of writingbeing encouraged by what's
referred to as the new science,this 17th century scientific
revolution um, with the, theroyal society founded in the
1660s at its head, encouragingthis kind of way of describing
(18:30):
the world, this kind ofobjective, fact-oriented,
descriptive kind of approach tothe world.
On the one hand um meetingpalpable, fantastical, crazy
stuff um, you know, he meets umgiants, he meets miniature
people, he meets um kind oftalking horses, he sees flying
(18:52):
islands and all the rest of it,so that it's kind of in some
respects we can understandGulliver's travels as sending up
this kind of combinationbetween a sort of scientific way
of apprehending reality and thesort of imperial mindset that
that promotes as well.
(19:13):
So in all kinds of ways, whenGulliver encounters people in
foreign worlds, the descriptionsare racialised in all kinds of
ways.
So he's drawing on travel books, he's drawing on earlier works
that do describe peoples fromother cultures, and a lot of
that filters into Gulliver'stravels as well.
But in some respects as well,gulliver becomes this
(19:38):
spokesperson for a kind ofnarrow-minded I'd say not just
British but English kind ofsuperiority which is constantly
sent up until it's utterlydismantled, and he ends the
entire book by A wishing thatthe Wynims would actually sail
(20:01):
over to Europe and start takingover.
He kind of wants this kind ofcounter-colonialism and also he
has this long diatribe againstthe colonial mindset, against
the idea of swooping intoanother country and taking over.
So the book is not innocent oftrends within early modern and
(20:23):
18th century imperialism, but itcan certainly be read in all
kinds of ways.
There's a backlash againstthose.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
If you have enjoyed this episode so far and desire
to listen to the entire episodewhere Daniel and Nick talk about
Swift's criticism of politicsand religion in the satire, as
well as genre and narrativetechniques, be sure to subscribe
at theglobalnovelcom slashsubscribe.
Thank you so much for listening.
The adventures of Lemuel Gulliver's are the stuff
of legend.
First he is shipwrecked in astrange land and finds himself a
prisoner of the tinyinhabitants of Lidiput.
He then washes up in thecountry of Brobdingnag, where
the people are giants ofextraordinary proportions.
Further exploits see himstranded with the scientists and
philosophers of Laputa andmeeting a race of talking horses
(00:41):
who rule over bestial humans.
Gulliver's Travels remains oneof the funniest satires in
English language, delighting inthe mockery of everything from
government to religion and,despite the passing of nearly
three centuries, remaining justas fun, funny and relevant today
.
Thank you for tuning in to theGlobal Novel.
I'm Claire Hennessey.
(01:02):
With me today are chief editorsof the 2023 Cambridge Companion
to Gulliver's Travels, drDaniel Cook and Dr Nicholas
Seeger.
Daniel is an associate dean andreader in English literature at
the University of Dundee, whoseteaching and research interests
include 18th and 19th centuryliterature.
Nick is lecturer in Englishliterature at Keele University,
uk.
(01:22):
His research interests arerestoration and 18th century
literature.
Welcome to the show, daniel andNick.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Great to be here.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, indeed, thanks.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, to begin with, what do you think Jonathan
Swift's intentions were inwriting Oliver's Travels?
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Great question.
It's always a difficultquestion with a satirist,
especially such an experiencedsatirist as Swift.
You know he's mockingeverything and everyone.
Very famously, he said heclaimed that he wanted to vex
the world rather than divert it.
With this book in particular,he wanted to challenge our
(02:02):
assumptions assumptions, ourcherished uh institutions, if
you like.
Nothing is off limits.
He attacks everything andeveryone.
But at the same time, though, Iwould kind of quibble with what
swift says, because this bookis very diverting, it's very
entertaining, it's very funny,it's full of farce, it's full of
humor.
It's also got its very seriousintellectual side as well, but
(02:24):
that's why it's such a brilliantbook.
It's full of humor.
It's also got its very seriousintellectual side as well.
That's why it's such abrilliant book yeah, I'd agree.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I'd say that, um, it's easy to overlook that
gulliver's travels is a supremework of the imagination.
Um, as you said, claire, umswift imagines these worlds in
which um gulliver is either um a12th of the size of the
inhabitants or 12 times largerthan them, and then he goes on
to all kinds of strange andwonderful worlds and encounters
(02:51):
rational animals.
So it's a great work of theimagination, it's a great
adventure story and that's why Ithink it's had such an enduring
appeal, especially amongstyounger readers.
So God of War gets into allkinds of escapades due to
physical differences or otherkinds of ways in which he's made
vulnerable in these strange newworlds.
(03:13):
But he did also.
But Swift did also have someserious points.
He wanted to challenge thepremise that humans were
entirely rational creatures, theidea that the world revolved
around humanity in some respects, and it's important for
(03:33):
de-centering people from theworld in which Gulliver operates
.
And I don't think we shouldalso entirely overlook the fact
that Swift probably you askabout intentions.
Swift knew that this would bepopular.
He knew that this would be afantastically successful book
because it is so readable andenjoyable and it was a huge
commercial hit at the time.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
Right.
Well, how was it received?
We know that Swift knew thebook would incite much
controversy, so he published itanonymously, right?
Speaker 3 (04:03):
Well there's.
I won't get the quotation quiteright, but Swift's friend, John
Gay, told him that it was beingread everywhere, from the
nursery to the cabinet council,and that's remained true largely
today.
So the one thing to say aboutthe reception is that it was
very, very popular.
It was an expensive book forits time.
(04:25):
It was in two volumes.
It was eight shillings sixpence, which is quite a lot of money.
Not a lot of people couldafford it, and so it was
popularised through abridgmentsand through serialisations.
People were dead keen on it, soin some sense it was a huge
success.
In other respects, as you'vesaid, it was also a very
controversial work.
(04:47):
There is a lot of satire inGulliver's Travels which seems
to be directed againstparticular people, and Swift and
his friends were worried abouthow that would go down.
In some respects it's writtenin a way to be quite guarded
against that, both in the sensethat it was published, as you
said, anonymously, and he tookgreat pains to cover his tracks
(05:08):
and get back to Ireland asquickly as possible after having
delivered the manuscript inLondon, or at least having it
delivered by his friends inLondon.
And he also took pains to makesure that people couldn't read
it as a narrow, particular kindof topical work, that it had a
(05:29):
series of bigger, more universalthemes.
That said, in the wake ofSwift's death, some of the
people who write about himstraight afterwards, including
his own cousin, find parts ofGodulliver's Travels quite hard
to defend, especially thetendency towards the kind of
(05:49):
misanthropy in Gulliver'sTravels which remains debated to
this day.
But certainly there is a kindof moralistic backlash against
Gulliver's Travels that sitsalongside its huge popularity
and the relish that peopleclearly had for it.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
I think Nick puts it really well and I think even
nowadays we kind of strugglewith books that are popular
straight away.
It was a bestseller, it was outof print within weeks of
publication and a very expensivebook as well Two volumes, as
Nick says.
I think critics, particularlywith great literary works, kind
(06:25):
of struggle with what to do witha popular text.
Um, and as Nick says, it wasabridged very quickly, it was.
It was bolderized very quickly,um, pirated very quickly,
translated into multiplelanguages fairly rapidly.
But what I find fascinatingabout the sort of origin stories
of Gulliver's Travels, as itwere, is it's kind of unlikely
(06:48):
here to many ways.
It doesn't have JonathanSwift's name attached to it, so
by then he's a very famous, veryprominent satirist.
So it would be very easy topublish this work as a work by
Swift, notwithstanding thecontroversy surrounding it.
There are some quite aggressivegestures in the book, as it were
(07:11):
.
There are even hints of attackon the late Queen Anne, for
example.
There's a lot of libelous stuffhere and it's published as
Travels into Several RemoteNations of the World.
It's not a very glamorous title, so it's unlikely hit in many
ways, but I think, as Nick saidearlier, because of its
(07:35):
fantastical elements, its veryclear satirical drive, it cannot
help but be the success that itwas amongst critics and general
readers.
It feels like a slight sort ofunderdog story in many ways.
It isn't sort of heralded asthis sort of great beacon of
literature at the time, but itjust shows that it stands the
(07:57):
test of time and again.
That's slightly unusual forsatirical works.
Satirical works tend to be sofocused on the politicians that
swift was attacking, criticizing, exposing, for the hypocrisy
were dead or they were out ofoffice, they were out of power.
(08:20):
But there's just somethingquite universal about this kind
of story.
So it's very particular butalso very, uh, universal as well
.
I think everyone sort ofrecognizes themselves or people
that they know, or people,people in the public eye, in
this text.
So it's got a lot going for it,despite the very sort of quite
frifty, quite banal title pagein many ways.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
You know, what I truly love about the Cambridge
Companion is its feminist andpost-colonial reading of the
satire.
Critics have frequentlycharacterized the narrative as
misogynistic and stressed itsnegative representation of
female physicality.
What can we learn from LizBellamy's essay collected in
this book that truly offers anew reading with this
(09:08):
perspective of body and gender.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yes.
So Liz Bellamy's got afantastic essay in this
collection.
It's fantastic because shetakes stock of fairly
long-standing debates about theperceived misogyny of the text.
And Liz, quite rightly, isclear that there is clearly
misogynistic language in thetext.
The question is is Swift beingironic?
(09:33):
That's a standard satiricdefense, and so on.
We certainly have veryproblematic depictions of the
female body.
It's rendered quite monstrousin Brumlingnag, the Land of
Giants, where we have these sortof large, hairy, unattractive,
unassuming female bodies hairy,unattractive, unassuming female
(09:56):
bodies.
There's also a sense that someof the characters have cancerous
breasts and so on and thebreasts are rendered sort of
ludicrously large and there'ssomething about sort of the
grotesque female body, if youlike.
But Liz and another critic havesort of begun to realise that
Gulliver himself is gendered andhis view of the monstrous
(10:18):
female body is, at least in part, a critique of his own
monstrous masculinity, that hehas these preconceived notions
about female beauty and so on.
So at quite a literal level,his view of their monstrosity
says more about him than it doeswomen, if you like.
It's also worth pointing out.
(10:39):
I think that we've touched uponhow this book talks about
religion in quite complicatedways.
This book is also full ofcommentary on modern science,
particularly for what, for Swissgeneration, was a fairly new
invention, which is themicroscope, and there is a sense
that the female body isrendered in such a monstrous way
(11:01):
, because this is Swiftcritiquing or inviting us to be
quite wary of microscopy.
You can suddenly see God'screations in all of it in such a
close way and, metaphoricallyand literally, it will horrify
(11:23):
our perceptions, and so on.
So it's misogynistic insofar ashe's using the female body as a
means to critique modern science, the science of the Royal
Society and so on.
Or you could say, as Liz doesin her fantastic essay in this
collection this isn't just aboutfemale bodies, it's about male
bodies as well, and we tend toignore the latter.
(11:45):
I think that's why this isgoing to be such an influential
essay, because it takes stock ofthe debates but just pushes it
into that new direction which Ithink is so exciting.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Daniel's exactly right that the book is full of
very problematic representationsof female behaviour and female
bodies.
So in Lilliput the women arecaught, are a bunch of
troublemakers, scandal mongers,you know, thrown to infidelity
(12:17):
and all of those sorts of thingscausing men to fall out and so
on and so forth Classic kind ofmisogynistic sort of portrayal.
Then we get into Brobdicknagand Gulliver describes with this
kind of disarming candour thebodies that he experiences.
But so much of that kind ofgrotesquery, which is a kind of
(12:39):
traditional form of satiricalprose that he kind of adopts and
extends from the French 17thcentury writer Rabelais.
So much of it centres on thefemale form in particular, and
especially kind of sexualisedfemale bodies that are not
attractive but instead aredisgusting, either because
they're smelly or becausethey're hairy or because, um,
(13:03):
you know that he can see tooclosely, really, and it's
absolutely right to say thatswift might be wrestling with
philosophical debates about kindof perception and proximity.
Um, logically speaking, um, Imean to give another example
that when he finds, after he'sbeen in Brobdingnag for a while,
that when he meets people ofhis own size, he's shouting at
(13:25):
them all the time, because heneeds to shout in Brobdingnag in
order to be heard.
So the idea is that he has thiskind of hypersensitivity to the
smells and the sights inBrobdingnag, but so often it
does centre on the female form,which is this kind of sight of,
of monstrosity.
I suppose a really interestingmoment in light of what liz
(13:45):
writes is in the final part ofgulliver's travels, um, and it's
it's a rightly notorious umepisode where um gulliver um is
amongst these reasonable andrational horses and there's a
society of sort of humanoid,kind of bestial humanoid figures
(14:06):
called yahoos, which are sortof presided over by the Wynnims
to some degree, but which areultimately just kind of
intractable.
They're not domesticatableanimals in any kind of way,
shape or form, but they arebasically human, and Gulliver is
trying to take every measure hecan to prove that he's not one
(14:27):
of these things, but one day,when he strips off and has a
wash in a swim in LA, he'sassaulted by an amorous yaku,
which is kind of the horrifyingdegree of what swift is
imagining, you know, an 11 yearold girl, um, and in some
respects it kind of extends thatsort of attack on libidinous
(14:50):
femininity to some degree.
The product of it, ultimately,though, is to confirm in
gulliver's own mind that he isthis thing called a yaku, and so
the, I suppose, misogynybecomes a kind of self-hatred.
So, as Liz gets that sopowerfully, it is also about
(15:11):
vulnerable masculine bodies Inall kinds of ways.
When Gulliver is in positions ofvulnerability, his is a body
that is feminised as well.
He's made a pet or a playthingor a toy or a doll, in Rob
Dignac in particular, whereanother young girl who he
(15:32):
describes as his sort of nurseLundelklitsch, looks after him.
And again it's this kind ofslightly uneasy, not just in
terms of gender relations butalso in terms of age, because
the dynamic there is kind ofcuriously parental, filial, but
also somewhat sexual.
And when the young women atcourt in Brodnick, like the
(15:55):
maids of honour, get hold ofGulliver, he has lots of of
descriptions that you know I'mtrying to kind of choose my
language a little bit carefullyhere, but he's effectively used
as a kind of sexual toy in allkinds of ways.
So yeah, it's a great chapterfor me about the ways in which
(16:15):
bodies are gendered inGulliver's travels.
In general we cannot skirt orshy away from the misogyny, but
it's kind of part of a biggerkind of set of questions about
humanity, I suppose and aboutthe physical experience of
occupying a human body.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Right.
As you both have highlightedGulliver's role as a traveler
and observer, reflecting theintersection between literature
and science from feministperspective, could you also
share more on how thisintersection between literature
and science is sketched againstthe backdrop of Britain's
colonial ambitions and thepursuit of knowledge during the
(16:59):
early 18th century?
Speaker 3 (17:01):
I suppose God of Earth Travels is written at a
point in time where we're kindof at the end of what we might
think of as an age of discovery,where all kinds of new worlds
are still being discovered, ofcourse and I use discovered in a
kind of, you know, cautioussense, because of course these
(17:21):
worlds are not discovered to thepeople who were originally
there, but from a sort ofEurocentric point of view it's
perceived to be a kind of an ageof discovery, an age of
enlightenment, an age whereEuropean sailors were going out
and finding out more about theworld and of course the accounts
that were coming back home weretinged with that sort of um,
(17:41):
eurocentrism, um.
So what we have, and I thinkwhat we have exposed in
gulliver's travels, is a kind ofa rhetoric of discovery and a
rhetoric of interculturalencounter that parades as this
sort of objective and empiricalkind of account of things.
You know, I landed here.
It was this sort of temperature, it was in this latitude, it
(18:05):
was an island about this big I.
I went up the shore, I, itseems very factual, very driven
by, um, the kinds of writingbeing encouraged by what's
referred to as the new science,this 17th century scientific
revolution um, with the, theroyal society founded in the
1660s at its head, encouragingthis kind of way of describing
(18:30):
the world, this kind ofobjective, fact-oriented,
descriptive kind of approach tothe world.
On the one hand um meetingpalpable, fantastical, crazy
stuff um, you know, he meets umgiants, he meets miniature
people, he meets um kind oftalking horses, he sees flying
(18:52):
islands and all the rest of it,so that it's kind of in some
respects we can understandGulliver's travels as sending up
this kind of combinationbetween a sort of scientific way
of apprehending reality and thesort of imperial mindset that
that promotes as well.
(19:13):
So in all kinds of ways, whenGulliver encounters people in
foreign worlds, the descriptionsare racialised in all kinds of
ways.
So he's drawing on travel books, he's drawing on earlier works
that do describe peoples fromother cultures, and a lot of
that filters into Gulliver'stravels as well.
But in some respects as well,gulliver becomes this
(19:38):
spokesperson for a kind ofnarrow-minded I'd say not just
British but English kind ofsuperiority which is constantly
sent up until it's utterlydismantled, and he ends the
entire book by A wishing thatthe Wynims would actually sail
(20:01):
over to Europe and start takingover.
He kind of wants this kind ofcounter-colonialism and also he
has this long diatribe againstthe colonial mindset, against
the idea of swooping intoanother country and taking over.
So the book is not innocent oftrends within early modern and
(20:23):
18th century imperialism, but itcan certainly be read in all
kinds of ways.
There's a backlash againstthose.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
If you have enjoyed this episode so far and desire
to listen to the entire episodewhere Daniel and Nick talk about
Swift's criticism of politicsand religion in the satire, as
well as genre and narrativetechniques, be sure to subscribe
at theglobalnovelcom slashsubscribe.
Thank you so much for listening.
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