Gulliver Travels : social and Political allegory

Gulliver’s Travels: A Social and Political Allegory

Allegory means a story based on two levels, “apparent level and deeper”. Swift’s polemical tour de force ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is a multi-genre text working on many levels. It is at once a folk-myth, a delightful children's story, a wonderful travelogue, a neurotic fantasy, and an unequivocal moral tale. Each of the four books—recounting four voyages to fictional exotic lands—may have a different theme but all are the attempts to deflate excessive human pride. Critics hail the work as a satiric reflection on the shortcomings of Enlightenment thought.

The form and structure of the whole work enhances Swift's purpose. By using outlandish humans such as midgets and giants, Swift allows us to examine the fallacies of mankind without being overly frightened. As Tuveson points out, "In Gulliver's Travels there is a constant shuttling back and forth between real and unreal, normal and absurd.”

From the start the Lilliputians arouse our interest and win our liking. The pigmies of Lilliput ingeniously capture the giant whom chance has cast on their shore. Gulliver becomes an object of curiosity. He is instantly given the name “Man-Mountain”. The manner in which several ladders are applied by the Lilliputians to feed Gulliver and the way Gulliver cripples the fleet of Blefuscu by his hand is incredible and exciting. Similarly the customs of Lilliputians, their dancing on the tight rope, conflict between Big Endians and Little Endians, and between high heel and low heel are also a great source of amusement to us. Moreover, “they bury dead with their head directly downward because they hold an opinion that in eleven thousand moons, they are all to rise again” which catches our attention.

Next, Gulliver reaches the island of Brobdingnag whose inhabitants are giants with a proportionately gigantic landscape. Here, Gulliver is exhibited as a curious midget, and has a number of local dramas such as fighting giant rats. He is frightened by a puppy, rendered ludicrous by the tricks of a mischievous monkey and embarrassed by the lascivious antics of the Maids of Honour. Gulliver’s adventures in Brobdingnag keep the interest of a young reader alive.

The voyage to Laputa, Lagado and other islands is also full of interesting and mysterious incidents. In Laputa, the Flying Island, every eatable thing e.g. the mutton, the beef, or the pudding, is given geometrical shape or the shape of musical instrument. The manner in which flappers are employed to draw the attention of their master and the way tailor takes his measure by employing a quadrant, rule and compasses is also very funny. The experiments which are in progress at the academy of projector in Lagado are preposterous and fantastic.

In the fourth voyage, Gulliver’s adventure touches the apex when we see him in the land of Houyhnhnms, the philosophical horses. The horses can talk to one another and can even teach their language to a human being. They so skilled and ingenious that they can execute such improbable tasks as threading needles or carrying trays, and so complacent in their belief that they are the “Perfection of Nature”.

So on the apparent level, all the four voyages contain the situations and incidents full of delightful adventures in a very funny and interesting manner and one can hardly reckon that these funny episodes of adventure can bear in deep sense a very lethal and poignant satire on the follies and absurdities of mankind. 

The first voyage in particular contains Swift's the most memorable shots at the political figures of his time. Flimnap’s dancing on the tight rope symbolizes Sir Robert Walpole’s dexterity in parliamentary tactics and political intrigues. The phrase “one of the king’s cushions” refers to one of king George I’s mistresses who helped to restore Walpole after his fall in 1717. High Admiral Skyresh Bolgolam which turns out to be Gulliver’s ‘mortal enemy’ represents Earl of Nottingham while Reldresal may stand for Lord Townshend or Lord Carteret who was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by Walpole.

Gulliver’s extinguishing of the fire in the queen’s palace is an allegorical reference to Queen Anne’s annoyance with Swift on writing “A Tale of a Tub”. The queen misinterpreted the book and got annoyed. The conflict between the Big-Endians and the Small-Endians in which “eleven thousand persons have, at several times, suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end” is the satirical allusion to the bitter schism and theological disputes between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Similarly Swift pokes fun at ‘Whigs’ and ‘Tories’ the two political parties in England by distinguishing from their low heels and high heels. 

In the second voyage of Gulliver, there is a general satire on humanity and human physiognomy. Much of this voyage is made up of lampooning British political history. After Gulliver tries to extol the virtues of his country-men, the king deduces that the history of Gulliver’s country “was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments” etc. When Gulliver tries to improve his condition by offering him the secret of gun-powder, the king is horrified and dismissively concludes that “the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”.

In the description Laputa, “Floating or Flying island”, there is satirical allusion to the English constitution and British colonial policy. The revolt of Lindalino becomes an allegory of Irish revolt against England and England’s violent foreign and internal politics. Swift also takes shots on certain ‘high-minded’ intellectuals who literally have their heads in the clouds. Among the sights Gulliver visits in his third voyage to Laputa, is the grand academy of Lagado, full of ‘projectors’ whose job is to come up with new ideas and inventions. The scientists are here busy trying “to extract sunbeams out of cucumbers, to convert human excrement into its original food, to build houses from the roof downwards to the foundation, to obtain silk from cobwebs”. This description is the firm pointer to Swift’s cynical view of contemporary science and Royal Society of England.

In his fourth and the last voyage to the country of Houyhnhnmms, Gulliver faces yet another inversion and there is a sharp-pointed satire on human moral shortcomings. Human beings here are represented as Yahoos—filthy, mischievous, gluttonous, ugly monsters that covet for some ‘shining stones’.

By contrast, the Houhnhnms are noble and benevolent animals governed by Nature and Reason and their “grand maxim, is to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it.” . So it is a lethal attack on the human race to be represented inferior to horses mentally and morally. Gulliver tells his master-Houyhnhnm of all the evils and vices that were prevailing in European countries. Gulliver also tells about the numerous deadly weapons and the wars in western countries which were fought sometimes due to the “ambitions of princes” and sometimes due to “corruption of the ministers.”

Thus we can conclude that “Gulliver’s Travels” is a great work of allegory. The whole book is written in a fanciful manner, but beneath the fiction and under the surface there lies a serious purpose “to vex the world rather than divert it”.