Gulliver’s Travels as a Mock Utopia:

Gulliver’s Travels as a Mock Utopia:

The tendency to hanker after a utopia is a perfectly human desire. Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia.

The literal meaning of Utopia is no place, nowhere. Thomas More gave this term to his ideal commonwealth.  Swift incorporates the key concepts of Plato’s and More’s utopias into his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical. One can see the different lands of Gulliver’s travels as the parody of utopian literature. Hence Gulliver's Travels can be regarded as a mock Utopia.

One of the main aspects about these famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness.

Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliputian are torn between conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing. Nonetheless, they are prone to making ‘official’ edicts concerning the lives of the citizens and have well-established systems of granting their law-abiding citizens: “Whoever there can bring sufficient proof that he hath strictly observed the laws of his country for seventy-three moons, hath a claim to certain privileges.”

Brogdingnag forms more practical moral utopia than Lilliput. The Bobdingnagians are the epitome of moral giants and their size shows that their morality is also gigantic. Brobdignagians, however, are not without their flaws. Unlike Gulliver who always considered Lilliputians to be the miniature men, Brobdingnagians cannot consider him a miniature Brobdingnagian. Even the Brobdingnagian king treats him like a little tiny fellow unaware of the grandiose ideas of the diminutive creature. The maids of honour treat Gulliver as a plaything, undress themselves in front of him, and titillate themselves with his naked body.   

 Swift’s clinical dissection of the utopian ideal is at best in the description of the Houyhnhnms. Swift tells us that the Houyhnhnms use ‘nature’ and ‘reason’ as their distinctive features.  It is supported by Gulliver’s assertion that Houyhnhnm society’s “grand maxim, is to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it.”  They are in stark contrast with the loathsome Yahoos, brutes in human shape.

Indeed the Houyhnhnms possess many laudable qualities. Gulliver finds an ideal society organized entirely along rational lines. This emphasis on rationality leads them to arrange all aspects of social life according to logical patterns. They even brainwash Gulliver, erasing his human nature insofar as they can and replacing it with a pure and abstract rationality like their own. But Gulliver, owing to his ‘unteachable’ Yahooish nature, endeavours not to become a more rational human being, but to become a Houyhnhnm itself. Thus it is clear that he has not learned the teachings of the Houyhnhnms, for he does not behave rationally at all. “Man, of course, can never be a Houyhnhnm, nor was meant to be, but the rational society of Houyhnhnmland nevertheless offers a goal of moral perfection toward which he should strive” says Beauchamp.

The utopian Houyhnhnms can be lauded as the manifestatation of ‘man’s rational nature, untainted by man’s bestial traits’ while Yahoos represent ‘man’s apish, stupid, unredeemed animal nature.’  

Significantly, Hobbes suggested that human nature is to be warlike in our pursuit of desires, and so life will be, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Locke would later write a counter argument, that the nature of humankind is inclined more toward cooperation, as opposed to Hobbes that saw humankind in a never-ending state of war.

Wedel suggests middle path, “… Swift is clearly neither Hobbes nor Locke. Gulliver is neither Yahoo nor Houyhnhnm. He cannot attain to the rational felicity of the Houyhnhnms. Neither has he sunk to the level of the Yahoos.”

Swift ingeniously suggests that the Houyhnhnms do not stand for perfected human nature but  they manifest pre-fallen state of innocent human nature.  The Houyhnhnms cannot be admired or emulated because they are just doing what they inherently do.  The same reason is not inherent in Yahoos. The Houyhnhnms are ice-cold reason while the Yahoos are fiery sensuality. Swift places Gulliver somewhere in between Houyhnhnm and Yahoo poles. To Swift, human nature is both sensual and rational. If the reason is extracted man becomes a lump of hideous instincts. Similarly if passion is extinct what remains is a tame animal.

Houyhnhnms society is entirely instrumental serving only to maintain itself without any other consideration.  Their rationality is focused on the preservation of their static ‘perfection’ and this instinct of self-preservation overrules their every other impulse and consideration. Houyhnhnms cannot see the world from any other perspective and all their ‘perfection’ is directed to this end.

Also, the dichotomy of Houyhnhnms’ morality highlights the self validating nature of their judgments. The Houyhnhnms preserve Yahoos because the benefits of exterminating them do not clearly outweigh costs of keeping them alive. This version of reason is coldly functional, almost Machiavellian, in the way the end is seen to justify the means. The extermination of their yahoo foils mean undermining their self-proclaimed status as the “Perfection of Nature.”  They even expel Gulliver their sole ardent supporter from the Yahoo race. This is the state of their utopia, into which Gulliver stumbles, an eternal, unchanging society built on some values that are intrinsic to the nature of creatures that populate it.

Swift thus mocks the very concept of utopia and makes it clear that nowhere an ideal state exists because evil exists in every society in one form or the other. The world of Utopia is doomed to remain a dream in this world because, "whether man is three inches or three miles high, he remains a man—a presumptuous zero.