• Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels Lecture 1.2 à We are examining “A Voyage to the Country of the ,” the fourth and final part of the picaresque prose tale Gulliver’s Travels (1726; amended 1735) by the Irish Anglican (Episcopal) priest and philosophe Jonathan Swift (1667-1749). Swift also used the following as the work’s title: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By , First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. à Quick review of picaresque genre (experienced also in Voltaire’s Candide): tale of protagonist who, influenced by one or more preceptors, travels from place to place, experiencing a series of didactic episodes. à A critical literary template for Gulliver’s Travels was the 1516 book Utopia (“no place”), written in Latin by the English Renaissance humanist and politician Thomas More. Utopia imagines an ideal New World island society. Each of the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels is divided into chapters; Part Four has twelve chapters. Essentially, Part Four posits an island nation (near Tasmania, southern Australia) ruled by a rational, stoic, and ingenuous (i.e. unaffected; naturally innocent) horse-people. à In effect, Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels assesses and satirizes the Enlightenment’s privileging of rationality and reason. Some Biographical Details about Swift à Author, most famously, of the first-person, fantasy travelogue Gulliver’s Travels and the satirical political polemic A Modest Proposal, Swift is fondly remembered in his native Ireland as “the Dean” — a reference to his service as dean or chief priest-administrator of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, the so-called national cathedral of the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican (Episcopal) church, a Protestant denomination. A minority of Ireland’s population is Protestant. For years, a portrait of Swift featured on Ireland’s ten-punt note (similar to our ten-dollar bill). à Swift’s life is a study in hyphenated or hybrid identity, a phenomenon familiar to many Americans. At a time of religious tension in the “three kingdoms” of England-Wales, Scotland, and Ireland (which had the same monarch and would later become the United Kingdom), Swift was born in majority-Catholic Ireland to immigrant parents: an English Protestant couple. Thus, his identity was Anglo-Irish. He received undergraduate and Master’s degrees from the University of Dublin (Trinity College), then Ireland’s only university (and open only to Episcopalians). à In 1689, Swift secured a job in England as private secretary to Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat whose home (Moor Park) featured an extensive library. Temple’s writings about language and diverse global cultures influenced Swift, and we can identify both concerns in Gulliver’s Travels. As regards language: In his treatise A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), Swift argued for the establishment of a regulatory authority to oversee the English language, then increasingly becoming a global means of communication. à In Gulliver’s Travels, a bay (reddish-brown) horse “trie[s]” or tests the title character’s linguistic ability by means of a hard-to-pronounce word, which Gulliver manages both to speak and to “[reduce] … to the English orthography [spelling system].” Based on a horse’s neigh, the word is the noun/substantive that names the horse-people who dominate Part Four of the text: . Reputedly, it means “nature’s perfection.” Although fundamentally rational, the horses have neither a writing system nor books; arguably,

1 the text implies that the Houyhnhnms’ language is that spoken by Adam and Eve in the prelapsarian (“before-the-Fall”) Garden of Eden. à While working for William Temple, Swift took some time off to be ordained a Church of Ireland (Anglican/Episcopal) priest in Ireland, and later he would lobby for that institution before the monarch, Queen Anne. However, up to 1713, the year he turned 46, the adult Swift based himself primarily (although not exclusively) at Moore Park and other venues in England. à In 1704, after Temple’s death, Swift published, anonymously, a volume containing several works that underscored his (Swift’s) talent as a satirical author, able to voice an unreliable narrator. Of particular note are: A Tale of a Tub (which takes aim at several Christian denominations); and The Battle of the Books (which uses an Ancient bee and a Modern spider to comment on tensions between old and new forces in intellectual life). à Among other activities, Swift contributed to The Tatler (precursor of The Spectator), a pioneering literary and society journal. Two of his Tatler poems — “A Description of the Morning”; “A Description of a City Shower” — interrogate urban life, a key dimension of the modern human experience. à Politically, Swift aligned himself with conservatism, producing propaganda for England’s principal conservative party, the Tories, and against its leading liberal party, the Whigs. à Swift hoped that his work for the Tories would yield a prestigious church appointment in England; however, that outcome did not transpire, for anti-Irish racism has historically been high in England. The English often derided Irishmen as “Paddies,” portraying them in cartoons as simian (i.e. looking and acting like monkeys or apes). The coterie known as Yahoos in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels is based on this simianization. à In a poem, “The Author upon Himself,” Swift specifically blamed Queen Anne his failure to gain a high-profile ecclesiastical position in England. Swift’s Irish Career à Swift’s political service did secure his receipt of the deanship of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the working- class Liberties of inner-city Dublin, a neighborhood characterized by severe poverty, which resulted in physical- and mental-health challenges for residents. à While Swift was reluctant to return to live in Ireland, he did roll up his sleeves when there, writing polemical pamphlets that pushed for industrial and agricultural development and less government regulation by the British colonial authorities. Important examples among these pamphlets are A Proposal for the Use of Irish Manufactures (1720) and A Short View of the State of Ireland (1728). à The latter text points out the irony of Ireland’s having a depressed farming sector given “the fruitfulness of the [Irish] soil to produce the necessaries and conveniences of life,” not just “for the inhabitants, but [also] for exportation into other countries.” It also insists that the Irish should be “governed only by laws made with their own consent, for otherwise they are not a free People” à Swift’s relationship to Ireland is perhaps comparable to how certain GS students had UGA as their first- choice school. In their hearts, they’d prefer the bulldog as their mascot, but nonetheless they wear the blue- white-gold GS colors and cheer for the Eagles. à Swift gained renowned across Ireland when his polemics, known as Drapier's Letters (1724-1725), pushed for economic reform through the fictional voice of a draper, posited as an honest, upright Irish tradesman, struggling to maintain a small business in the face of government taxation and regulations. In a later work, The Legion Club (1736), Swift took aim not at the English but rather at the Irish establishment — specifically, the Dublin-based Irish parliament — which he deemed corrupt. à Swift’s most famous economic pamphlet is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden (published in 1729, three years after Gulliver’s Travels debuted). Deploying the satirical conceit of breeding children for (domestic and export) food, that work’s aim is to

2 criticize how England’s colonial fettering of the Irish economy had resulted in famine after famine, despite the country’s having manifest potential for significant agricultural and industrial productivity. The breeding regime would be one male to every four women. à A Modest Proposal includes such over-the-top assertions as the following: “A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.” Also: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” à Around 1714, along with some of their friends, Swift and Alexander Pope (an English Catholic Neo-Augustan poet) formed the Tory or conservative-leaning Scriblerus Club, which facilitated the production of highly consequential satirical writing. In time, Swift and Pope would collaborate on Miscellanies in Verse and Prose, by Alexander Pope, Esquire, and Dean Swift. à Although he never married, Swift had complicated relationships with two women: Esther (“Stella”) Johnson — alongside whom he is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin — and Hester or Esther (“Vanessa”) Vanhomrigh. Some critics have labeled Swift’s writings misogynistic (anti-woman); and there is little doubt that certain passages in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels suggest high female libidos, as if women are more governed by the Passions — and less by Reason — than men. However, as discussed later in this lecture, with respect to gender-equality, the horse-people operate a progressive educational system. à In anticipation of his death (which occurred in1749), Swift mandated that a considerable portion of his fortune be used to establish the still-extant St. Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, which serves the mentally ill. (Swift himself suffered from senility in his old age.) The epitaph he authored for display in the Dublin cathedral where he ministered characterizes him (in Latin) as “Champion of Liberty.” à Over the centuries, Swift’s literary reputation has been mixed. In 1851, the influential English novelist and critic William Makepeace Thackeray lambasted him as a “monster gibbering shrieks and gnashing imprecations against mankind.” He accused Swift of “tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, raging, obscene.” Certainly, in Gulliver’s Travels and elsewhere, Swift can be highly explicit. For example, Gulliver discusses the external genitalia of female Yahoos; and, in addition, he focuses on such bodily functions as urination and defecation. à But modesty can also be Swift’s topic. Fearful that loss of his clothing would reveal his bodily resemblance to the Yahoos, Gulliver manifests anxiety over his own nakedness, a condition that Enlightenment Deists would — and that the Houyhnhnms do — argue is natural and, therefore, godly. Gulliver’s Travels and the Irish Enlightenment, Anti-Irish Racism à Swift’s observations of Ireland’s condition under English colonialism — plus reports coming into Europe of the discovery and colonization of foreign territories by such European powers as England, the Netherlands, and Spain — informed the composition of the four-part Gulliver’s Travels (first published in 1726). à We are studying the final part of Gulliver’s Travels, in which the peripatetic (traveling) ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver experiences an island populated by two groups: (1) the dominant Houyhnhnmns (pronounced to suggest a horse’s neigh), an ostensibly rational/dispassionate equine (horse) people; and (2) the marginalized Yahoos, a purportedly irrational/passions-driven simian (monkey- or ape- like) people.

3 à Things are so rational under the Houyhnhnms’ rule that trees naturally (i.e. without planting) spring up in “long rows.” à Elsewhere in Gulliver’s Travels: By positing the Grand Academy of , Part Three of the text satirizes the Royal Society (founded in 1660 and still extant), England’s outstanding Enlightenment institution for scientific experimentation and debate. The Lagado Academy’s efforts include attempts to “[extract] sunbeams out of cucumbers” and “[soften] marble for pillows and pin-cushions.” This kind of mild and good-humored satire is called Horatian satire (named after the Roman author Horace); more biting and bitter satire is called Juvenalian satire (named after the Roman author Juvenal). à One famous conceit in Gulliver’s Travels is the title character’s being huge in comparison to one of the peoples he meets, in the land of Lilliput (Part One of the text), and his being tiny — like a “groveling insect” — in comparison to another of the peoples he meets, in the land of (Part Two), an encounter that critiques the militarism and violence of so-called civilized European nations. While most locales in Gulliver’s Travels are fictitious (for example, the flying island of ), some, such as Japan, are real. à Jonathan Swift may be accounted one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment or long eighteenth century in Ireland. Others in that category include the so-called Three Bs: George Berkeley, a philosopher who interrogated how we perceive (a crucial matter when doing and analyzing experiments); Robert Boyle, an empirical scientist, regarded worldwide as the “father of chemistry”; and Edmund Burke, a political thinker, considered the “master intellectual” of the conservative movement. If you vote Republican, you should certainly know about Burke, after whom Burke County, one of Georgia’s original counties, is named, rather as Berkeley, California, is named to honor George Berkeley. Other Irish Enlightenment philosophes may be invoked, not least Francis Hutcheson, whose formulations concerning social happiness and “inalienable rights” informed Thomas Jefferson’s production of the US Constitution. à While Swift’s protagonist Gulliver is an Englishman, some aspects of that character’s journeys may be intended to reflect and comment on Ireland’s difficult relationship with England, long its colonial overlord. In Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver carries “a small bundle of linen” as he is “set ashore” on a “strand” or beach in the Houyhnhnms’ — the horse people’s — island country. By the late eighteenth century, linen (produced from a plant called flax) accounted for around half of Irish exports. à When the gray master-horse, Gulliver’s host among the Houyhnhnms, showcases a typical Houyhnhnm house, that building strikes the protagonist as long and narrow in character: “Beyond [the first] room there were three others, reaching the length of the house, to which you passed through three doors, opposite to each other, in the manner of a vista.” This physical configuration is reminiscent of Irish vernacular houses of Swift’s time, which had to be narrow in width because the English colonists had cut down most of Ireland’s tall trees (for ship-building and other purposes), leaving just short ones to serve as roof-trees, a major construction component. à The most obvious way in which Gulliver aligns with stereotypes of the Irish is when he recognizes his physical likeness to the Yahoos. He acknowledges, for example, “the same resemblance between our [his and the Yahoos’] feet.” For their part, early in Part Four, the gray master-horse and one of his friends repeatedly utter “the word Yahoo” while examining Gulliver. Later, the master-horse comes to explicitly characterize Gulliver as “an exact Yahoo in every part, only of a whiter color, less hairy, and with shorter claws.” à While, ideologically, Gulliver increasingly identifies with the horse-people — and hero-worships the gray master-horse — he cannot escape his essential Yahoo-ness. Ultimately, the (vegetarian, oat-eating) Houyhnhnms feel obliged to banish him to avoid the possibility that he might, one day, make common cause with the (omnivorous) Yahoos and perhaps even incite them to revolt or commit terrorism against

4 mainstream Houyhnhnm society. Thus, Gulliver reluctantly constructs a sea-going vessel to carry him to a neighboring island, still in sight of the Houyhnhnms’ land. à The story concludes with a Portuguese captain’s taking an increasingly desperate Gulliver back to Europe, where he attempts (with very limited success) to reconnect with his London-based wife and children. The concluding version of Gulliver is a man alienated from human society, even — or especially — his immediate family. He attempts to reconnect to the civilizational potency of the rational Houyhnhnms by purchasing “two young stone-horses” — that is, male animals with their testicles intact. Maleness pervades the tale’s ending; in addition to the stone-horses, one notes Gulliver’s relative comfort with their “groom,” as well as the Portuguese captain (Pedro de Mendez), who has “no wife.” à As already mentioned, the horses’ social marginalization of the Yahoos and the text’s racist simianization of those creatures reflect English colonial practices in Ireland. The text presents the Yahoos as ape-like in appearance, and it delineates their character as sub-intelligent, uncouth, and both physically and sexually aggressive. The gray master-horse derides the Yahoos as lacking “teachableness, civility, and cleanliness.” Overall, the “filthy Yahoos” are interpretable as representing the Irish, for they conform to the anti-Irish rhetoric and imagery advanced by the English. à As early as the twelfth century, when England first colonized Ireland, the British historian Giraldus Cambrensis opined that the Irish were “[a] most filthy race … sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of the faith.” He continued by criticizing their sexual morality: “They … do not contract marriage, nor shun incestuous connections.” When, in Chapter 8 of Part Four, Gulliver and his minder horse, the sorrel nag, visit one of “the herds of Yahoos,” a certain over-sexed female Yahoo attempts to copulate with Gulliver as he skinny-dips to cool down in response to hot weather. “[I]nflamed by desire,” she “embrace[s]” Gulliver in “a most fulsome manner.” à Given the commonplace notion of the Irish as red-headed, it’s crucial to note that Gulliver underscores how “the red haired [Yahoos] of both sexes are more libidinous [lustful] and mischievous” — as well as stronger — than the rest. à The common, racist trope of the Irish as heavy, belligerent drinkers seems present in the description (in Chapter 7 of Part Four) of intoxicated Yahoos as being given to “tear[ing] one another” while “howl[ing]” and “tumbl[ing],” before “fall[ing] asleep in the mud.” à In Chapter 9 of Part Four, Houyhnhnm racism towards the Yahoos becomes unambiguous when, at a quadrennial (once-ever-four-years) session of the horse-people’s grand assembly, the delegates debate the question, “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?” One pro-extermination argument centers on the nativist claim that the Yahoos must originally have been immigrant aliens — that “they could not be yinhniamshy (or aborigines of the land).” Clearly, this discourse prefigures the rationale that German Nazis invoked and disseminated with respect to the Jews, the Roma, and other “non-Aryan” populations. à Gulliver’s chief acquaintance, the gray master-horse, proposes to the assembly the programmatic castrating of male Yahoos, an idea he derived from Gulliver’s account of the gelding of stallions as a chronic practice across Europe. Using surgery, X-rays, chemicals, and other means, forced sterilization became a feature of the Nazi regime, although as early as 1907 “involuntary asexualization” was approved by Indiana’s legislature (only to be overturned by that state’s supreme court). One credible estimate is that the Nazis subjected around 400,000 people to this barbarity, justifying the effort by invoking eugenics (a word that first appeared in the 1880s), the pseudo-science of breeding for preferred traits. Being ultra-rational, Houyhnhnms mate to achieve specific qualities, such as strength, comeliness (i.e. good looks), and skin color.

5 à While the Houyhnhnms exhibit racism towards the Yahoos, they also seem to maintain a kind of color-based class structure within their own society, which differentiates between “noble families” and “inferior Houyhnhnms, bred up to be servants.” The master-horse is a dapple-gray steed, suggesting whiteness; however, his valet or servant horse is a sorrel (chestnut) nag, suggesting brownness. Gulliver explains, “In their marriages, [the Houyhnhnms] are exactly careful to choose such colors as will not make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female; [they marry] not upon the account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating.” à Furthermore, for the sake of socio-economic stability, the Houyhnhnms strive to limit their reproductive rate to one male and one female offspring per couple and not to favor one’s own child over a neighbor’s, the key matter being “love [for] the whole species,” notwithstanding the class system. Homestead as Foundational Social Unit While Voltaire sees education as foundational to Enlightenment society, Swift deems the domestic sphere essential. The first building Candide sees in the ideal Enlightenment polity of El Dorado is a school; by contrast, the first building Gulliver sees on the Houyhnhnms’ island is a homestead. If Candide maintains that a nation’s economic strength is primarily a factor of education, Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels implies that such strength depends first on well-ordered family life in the home. The word economy derives from the Greek terms oikos (“house”; “hearth”) and nemein (“manage”). It is notable that Gulliver ends up among the Houyhnhnms after he fails to manage the household constituted by his ship’s (replacement) crew; a group of mutineers “[takes] the government of [Gulliver’s] ship,” the Antelope. à Informed by the qualities of “temperance [moderation], industry [hard work], exercise [physical activity], and cleanliness,” education does feature in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels. Notably, young females and males receive identical schooling, with parents having high performance expectations for their offspring, as regards both academics and athletics. Gulliver notes that “lessons [academic courses]” are “equally enjoined [delivered] to the young ones of both sexes,” with the master-horse deeming “monstrous” the contemporary European practice of “giv[ing] … females a different kind of education from … males,” for that system renders half the population “good for nothing but bringing children into the world.” He also calls the raising of children by uneducated mothers an “instance of brutality.” à The text’s discourse on education is also remarkable for explicitly embracing physical activity in a kind of “healthy body, healthy mind” mode. Although the Houyhnhnms do not engage in warfare, their, students must — at quarterly district competitions — exhibit the acquisition of “strength, speed, and hardiness” in “running and leaping, and other feats of strength and agility.” à In our country, controversy ensued when a Yale law professor, Amy Chua, published her parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2010). Consider the following extract, which lauds academics while marginalizing athletics: “A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it’s like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. Here are some things my daughters … were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover; have a playdate; be in a school play; complain about not being in a school play; watch TV or play computer games; choose their own extracurricular activities; get any grade less than an A; not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama; play any instrument other than the piano or violin; not play the piano or violin.” à Overall, “teachableness” is a virtue highlighted in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels. •••

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