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During the beginning of the 18 th century, satire grew; and the most famous writers who wrote satirically were Pope and Swift. This period, often called the "Age of Reason, " was highly influenced by a group of the elite of society, who called themselves the Augustans and were determined to live their lives according to "truth" and "reason. The satire of both Swift and Pope is animated by moral urgency and heightened by tragic sense of doom. Pope saw the issue as a struggle between Darkness and Light, Chaos and Order, Barbarism and Civilization. For Swift the issue was one between right reason and madness- not clinical insanity, but blindness to anything but ones own private illusions, which is an abandonment of practical reality.
Jonathan Swift was the greatest rival to Pope in the field of satire, his genius is so powerful and varied and so mysterious that any summary of his work is bound to be ridiculously over-simplified. Swift was also one of the most devastating critics of the contemporary scene, while the range of the targets he chose makes him one of the most comprehensive. His most contentious and his greatest work, however, was a series of chronicled voyages known as Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver's Travel was published in 1726. Because it can be read as a fantasy novel, a story for children, and a social satire, its tales of dwarves, giants, floating islands and talking horses have long entertained readers from every age group. It has often been issued with long passages omitted, particularly those concerning bodily functions and other distasteful topics.
Even without these passages, however, Gulliver's Travels serves as a biting satire, and Swift ensures that it is both humorous and critical, constantly criticizing British and European society through its descriptions of imaginary countries. Also, there is a general tone of mockery in the text, echoing the sarcastic voice found in other works by Swift. Gulliver is sometimes wise, sometimes foolish, but always eager to please his new masters. The sarcastic tone of the text sets Swift himself as a kind of foil to Gulliver; unlike his protagonist, Swift's purpose was no doubt to annoy the leaders of Britain rather than please them. Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels at a time of political change and scientific invention, and many of the events he describes in the book can easily be linked to contemporary events in Europe. One of the reasons that the stories are deeply amusing is that, by combining real issues with entirely fantastic situations and characters, they suggest that the realities of 18 th-century England were as fantastic as the situations in which Gulliver finds himself.
The fourth book of Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, " is particularly filled with satire, as Gulliver discovers a Utopian society of horses (Houyhnhnms) who sneer at humans (Yahoos) as being savage. There can be little doubt that the major purpose of the Fourth Voyage is to reveal the barbarism of humanity. The theme is found nearly everywhere. The reader cannot help but feel in part ashamed of himself after finishing the book. Swift here is writing almost an allegory on the constituent elements in man: he is splitting man into his animal and rational parts, and seeing how the parts work separately. He is showing man as slave, and man as master.
Swift is reminding us so compromising of the strength of our animality- the animality, which it is more comfortable and reassuring to forget that we are him and his harsh from complacency. At the same time, he sets forth in utopian fullness the human achievements possible through the exercise of reason. In this book the story is Gulliver's own story, he is the hero, almost the tragic hero. He becomes the seriously troubled protagonist: Gulliver belongs to both parties, and all the open antagonism between Yahoos and Houyhnhnms is really the war in his soul. He has learned much about himself, and his problem is to accept his knowledge without being overcome by it.
The book is about him, in its picture of his various stages of development, presents the tightest structure of all four books. Each part of a very casual-looking story has a specific function. The first stage in Gulliver's inner drama in his recognition that a member of the herd of creatures whom he has instinctively hated has a perfect human figure, it is his first glimpse of the human being from a new perspective. Yet in the first stage he resists being identified with the Yahoos and clings to his rationality, which surprises the Houyhnhnms, as his distinguishing feature.
In his second stage (Chaps. 5, 6, 7) he gives his Houyhnhnm friend an account of life in Europe: here Swift, as the deadpan ironist, works through Gulliver, making him report the follies and evils of life, either with admiration for familiar way of doing things or without recognizing the Yahooism of European practices. Gulliver still feels essentially different from the Yahoos, and comes to love the Houyhnhnms. In the third stage (Chaps. 7, 8) the Houyhnhnm argues that Gulliver's people are the same as the Yahoos, and after the brilliant scene in which he is attacked by an eleven-year-old female Yahoo, Gulliver can no longer deny that he is a yahoo, and must recognize Europeans as Yahoos or even worse. His long study with the Houyhnhnms-his newly intense practice of reason-has brought him to this self-knowledge. This is the dramatic climax of the story, and it is not an accident that Gulliver is kicked out at this point (Chap. 10) because at this point Swift is giving his story a new turn. He is not content with the allegory.
So the Houyhnhnms expel Gulliver, and his expulsion, far from being a merely convenient of his experience-his readjustment to humanity, which he now sees exclusively in the light of pure reason. The drama of Gulliver is quite a complex one. As he become more and more aware of the animal ingredient in man, he is more and more overcome by shame and loathing, and insofar as the reader identifies himself with Gulliver, he may be led into similar disgust or else into a disgust against the writer who can thus portray Yahooism. But Gulliver's very shame is an index of the moral capacity of man. At the same time that Gulliver comes to knowledge of human animality, he is exhibiting the other side of man- the capacity for rational communication and understanding. He is a Yahoo who thinks, and as long as a Yahoo can think, there is at least some hope for him.
A doctrine of hopelessness would appear only if man were shown content with Yahooism, unable to rise above it, and indeed ignorant of anything else. In another point of view, Swifts treatment of Houyhnhnm rational ideality is remarkable. He never undervalues rational activity, yet he can embody reason in the Houyhnhnms and surround them with humble but absolute qualifications. Gulliver's friend and master knew it was impossible that there was a country beyond the sea, (Chap. 3) he tends to be parochial, unimaginative, and dogmatic. The Houyhnhnms live a dispassionate, schematic, mathematical, even arid life; they discipline reality by simply cutting too much of it out, and the result is a factitious order.
Ironically, the sharpest critique of the Houyhnhnms comes from Gulliver in his comment on the order each exiles him: I thought it might consist with reason to have been less rigorous (Chap. 10). The im passionate devotee of reason himself points to inflexible doctrinaire quality of his heroes. Pure reason is not an adequate guide to life. The Houyhnhnms, tho...
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Research essay sample on 18 Th Century Gulliver Travels
