Page 47 - Gullivers

a rather sophisticated and intelligent one perhaps, but still a yahoo. He himself, though shocked to find out how the horses categorise him, is also irrationally enthusiastic about the lifestyle of the reasonable Houyhnhnms – treating
his ‘master’ Houyhnhnm with cringing deference and, in the end, using the
word ‘yahoo’ to describe, without discrimination, his fellow humans. Towards the end of the book, Gulliver muses that, when he thinks of his own family, friends and countrymen or of the human race in general, he ‘considered them as...Yahoos in shape and Disposition... making no other use of Reason than to improve and multiply...Vices...’. This is a bleak view of humanity – one which has been misinterpreted by critics over the years, driving them to accuse Swift of misogyny or hatred of the human race.
But this misogyny is not that of
Swift himself; the speaker is his invented character, Lemuel Gulliver, a gullible and in many ways a deranged representative of the human race whose views we should recognise as unreliable and ‘unsafe’ – distorted as they are by the satirist to provoke our outrage (and, perhaps, as we look at our own world, to provoke our
shame). The nineteenth-century
critics who damned Swift as a hater of humankind simply misread the passages in which Gulliver likens us to yahoos, mistaking the deliberate exaggerations Swift puts into Gulliver’s mouth for his own views.
The key to Gulliver’s Travels is an understanding that Swift’s purpose is satiric, not vituperative. Swift certainly believed that humans behave in ways that are morally disgraceful and that they need to be alerted to this so that they can reform, but he wanted his readers
to interpret the various judgements of human behaviour in the book as all, in one way or another, the results of distorted perception. Though we may agree with the King of Brobdingnag that many human beings are, indeed,‘little odious vermin’, we must remember that his judgement is the product of his way of seeing – for him, humans are a mere six inches high – and of what he has been told of human activity by the absurd little Gulliver. As the king understands things, so he describes them, and Swift manipulates the king’s language to shock us into recognising that there is at least some truth in what he says, given Gulliver’s description of our world.
II. Some Thoughts on Gulliver’s Travels
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