Analysis of the Enlightenment from Jonathan Swift’s “gulliver’s Travels”

Term Paper

Analysis of the Enlightenment

From Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”

Abstract:

        The Enlightenment, from the late 17th century to the late 18th century, is a philosophical movement whose main ideas are about rationality, liberty, democracy and science. It’s a significant but broad concept. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the literary features and thoughts during that time by analyzing “Gulliver’s Travels” from its plots, character, and reflection. There are two main parts in the paper—introduction, the work’s analysis.

        Key words: Enlightenment, Gulliver’s Travels, literary features, thoughts

Introduction:

        Enlightenment is the ideological emancipation movement of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe, contrasting with irrationality, feudalism and superstition. The rise of early Enlightenment thought is from England in 17th Century. In the middle of the 17th Century in France, a feudal autocratic Catholic country, a large number of the Enlightenment thinkers appeared, who promoted the enlightenment movement into climax. Then it spread throughout Germany and other countries. The central tenets of the Enlightenment are as followings: opposition to the autocratic monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the class system and superstition; the promotion of political democracy, rationality, equality, intellectual liberation and the spirit of science. Here are some key figures and their claims--Voltaire: the enlightened monarchy; Montesquieu: Separation of Powers; Rousseau: the social contract and the people's sovereignty; Kant: freedom and self discipline. The Enlightenment promoted the bourgeois revolutions as well as reforms, and became the foundation of modern capitalist society; it also had a direct impact on the European feudal autocratic monarchy, which prepared for the establishment of the capitalist political system and the French Revolution in 1789.

        The 18th-century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the ruling power in England passed from the king to the parliament, during which the constitutional monarchy was established. The Industrial Revolution, starting from the 1760s to 1840, exerted an immense impact on human thinking. English enlighteners are different from those of France. England had gone through its bourgeois revolution in the 17th century and the development of bourgeois relations revealed to the enlighteners’ minds the contradictions of a new society—e.g. the purpose of capital accumulation by any possible means and the continuous, large-scale enclosures of land resulting in rural bankruptcy, which has laid a foundation for the Enlightenment. Thus, they were aware of the need to reform the society through the Enlightenment and education to bring common prosperity for mankind.

        In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. Influenced by the Enlightenment, those writers believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. In the 18th Century, the prosperity of English prose appeared whose style is based on the aesthetic principles of the neoclassicism. The supreme master in the first part of the century is Jonathan Swift. He was the most remarkable personality of the epoch of Enlightenment in England who ruthlessly exposed the dirty mercenary essence of bourgeois relationships. His best known literary work, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest satires.

Work’s analysis

        “Gulliver’s Travels” contains four parts, each about one particular voyage during which Gulliver has extraordinary adventures. The four places he visits are: Lilliput (the land of miniature), Brobdingnag (the land of giant), Laputa (the flying land) and the Houyhnhnm land (the land ruling by intelligent horses). Through the description of Gulliver’s adventures, Swift reveals the hypocrisy, crude vices of his society and the fallacies of human nature, exposing them all to the satire. The four parts of the book are arranged in a planned sequence to show at the beginning Gulliver's optimism and lack of shame with the Lilliputians, then decaying into his shame and finally disgust with humans when he is in the Houyhnhmns land. His point of view is like a mirror by contrasting each one part—Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same way; Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.

        There are some plots in Part III and IV to explicate reflection of the Enlightenment thoughts and Swift’s satire.

        Part III 

        The third voyage concerns the scientific, mental side, as demonstrated by the Laputians, strange-looking intellectuals who "think only in the realm of the abstract and exceedingly impractical". The masters of Laputa study only abstract mathematics and music theory without any practical application. The most ludicrous plot in Part III takes place in the Academy of Projectors in Balnibarbi. As mentioned in the Introduction Part, the spirit of science and rationality, requiring evidences and experiments, are two of the central tenets of the Enlightenment. These projectors, who are supposed to be developing ways to improve agriculture, architecture, and learning in general, represent Swift's bitter satire against abstract science. For example, one projector is trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and bottle them for use during cloudy days. Also, there are softening marble for pillows, breeding naked sheep, inventing a book-writing machine, and making conversation simpler by eliminating all parts of speech except nouns. Of course, none of the methods could possibly succeed. As a result, they dress badly, their houses are poorly built, and their farms produce very little.

        In this part, Swift also criticizes the human nature more openly than he does in previous two parts which describe the more physical side of humanity. From Gulliver’s perspective, readers find the “intellectuals” both anti-practice and difficult to communicate with: "I had not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy People, nor so slow and perplexed in their Conceptions upon all other Subjects, except those of Mathematics and Music" (III, 136). And he sums up the problem with this society as follows: "I rather took this Quality to spring from a very common Infirmity of human Nature, inclining us to be more curious and conceited in Matters where we had least Concern, and for which we were least adapted either by Study or Nature". As Swift satirizes the people who absorb themselves so much into the scientific world that they cannot communicate with others, Gulliver as a character becomes more aware of the dark side of human nature. Scholar Allan Bloom points out that Swift's critique of science (the experiments of Laputa) is the first work questioning by a modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost on a society which embraces and celebrates policies pursuing scientific progress.