Lecture 10 Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels A Modest Proposal

1、Lecture 10 Jonathan Swift Gullivers Travels A Modest Proposal Part One Jonathan Swift 1.1. His Life Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin. His father, Jonathan Swift Sr., a lawyer and an English civil servant, died seven months before his son was born. Abigail Erick, Swifts mother, was left without priv

2、ate income to support her family. Swift was taken or stolen to England by his nurse, and at the age of four he was sent back to Ireland. Swifts mother returned to England, and she left her son to her wealthy brother-in-law, Uncle Godwin. Swift studied at Kilkenny Grammar School (1674-82), Trinity Co

3、llege in Dublin (1682-89), receiving his B.A. in 1686 and M.A. in 1692. At school Swift was not a very good student and his teachers noted his headstrong behavior. When the anti-Catholic Revolution of the year 1688 aroused reaction in Ireland, Swift moved to England to the household of Sir William T

4、emple at Moor Park, Surrey - Lady Temple was a relative of Swifts mother. He worked there as a secretary (1689-95, 1696-99), but did not like his position as a servant in the household. In 1695 Swift was ordained in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), Dublin. While in staying in Moor Park, Swift also

5、was the teacher of a young girl, Esther Johnson, whom he called Stella. When she grew up she became an important person in his life. Stella moved to Ireland to live near him and followed him on his travels to London. Their relationship was a constant source of gossips. According to some speculations

6、, they were married in 1716. Stella died in 1728 and Swift kept a lock of her hair among his papers for the rest of his life. After William Temples death in 1699, Swift returned to Ireland. He made several trips to London and gained fame with his essays. Throughout the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14),

7、 Swift was one of the central characters in the literary and political life of London. From 1695 to 1696 Swift was the vicar of Kilroot. There he met Jane Wairing, with whom he had an affair. For Swifts disappointment, she did not consider him a suitable marriage partner. Between the years 1707 and

8、1709 Swift was an emissary for the Irish clergy in London. Swift contributed to the Bickerstaff Papers and to the Tattler in 1708-09. He was a cofounder of the Scriblerus Club, which included such member as Pope, Gay, Congreve, and Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford. In 1710 Swift tried to open a pol

9、itical career among Whigs but changed his party and took over the Tory journal The Examiner. With the accession of George I, the Tories lost political power. Swift withdrew to Ireland. Hester Vanhomrigh, whom Swift had met in 1708, and whom he had tutored, followed him to Ireland after her mother ha

10、d died. She was 22 years younger than Swift, who nicknamed her Vanessa. In the poem Cadenus and Vanessa from 1713 Swift wrote about the affair: Each girl, when pleased with what is taught, / Will have the teacher in her thought. In 1723 Swift broke off the relationship; she never recovered form his

11、rejection. From 1713 to 1742 Swift was the dean of St. Patricks Cathedral. It is thought that Swift suffered from Mnires disease or Alzheimers disease. Many considered him insane - however, from the beginning of his twentieth year he had suffered from deafness. Swift had predicted his mental decay w

12、hen he was about 50 and had remarked to the poet Edward Young when they were gazing at the withered crown of a tree: I shall be like that tree, I shall die from the top. Jonathan Swift died in Dublin on October 19, 1745. He left behind a great mass of poetry and prose, chiefly in the form of pamphle

13、ts. William Makepeace Thackeray once said of the author: So great a man he seems to me, that thinking of him is like thinking of an empire falling. 1.2. His other major works 1.2.1 A Tale of a Tub written in the form of a parable: An old man died and left a coat, i.e., the Christian doctrine, to eac

14、h of his three sons, Peter, Martin and Jack, with minute directions for its care and use. These three sons stand for Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans. They evade their fathers will, interpret it each in his own way, and change the fashion of their garment. This is a satire upon all religious

15、sects. The Roman Catholic Church and Puritans are terribly satirized while the Church of England is professed to be justified. But the Church of England looks just as ridiculous as any other church, for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak under which to hide her hypocrisy. 1.2.2. The Battle of t

16、he Books” an unfinished work, mainly an attack on pedantry in the literary world of the time. The reader is told the story of the Bee and the Spider: A bee becomes entangled in a spiders web. The two insects quarrel and Aesop is called in as arbitrator. The bee, who is to be taken as typifying the a

17、ncient writers, goes straight to nature, gathering his support from the flowers of the field and the garden, without any damage to them. The spider, like the modern authors, boasts of not being obliged to any other creature hut of drawing and spinning out all from himself. The ancients, going throug

18、h every corner of nature, have produced honey and wax and furnished mankind with “the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light. In the great battle between ancient and modern books that follows, the moderns appeal for and to the malignant deity Criticism, who lives in a den at the top of sn

19、owy mountains. With Criticism are Ignorance, Pride, Noise and Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry and Ill-manners. Then the work ends “ being in several places imperfect, we cannot learn to which side the victory fell. Part Two Gullivers Travels 2.1. The story of Gullivers Travels

20、 In the first part Gulliver describes his shipwreck in Lilliput where the tallest people were six inches high. The emperor haltered himself to be the delight and terror of the universe, but it appeared quite absurd to Gulliver who was twelve times as tall as he. In his account of the two parties in

21、the country, distinguished by the use of high and low heels, Swift satirizes the Tories and the Whigs in England. Religious disputes were laughed at in an account of a problem which divided the Lilliputians: “Should eggs be broken at the big end or the little end? Then follows an ironical comment: T

22、his, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text, for the words are these, that all true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end. And which is the convenient end seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every mans conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrat

23、e to determine. This part is full of references to current politics. In the second part, the voyage to Brobdingnag is described. Gulliver now found himself a dwarf among men sixty feet in height. The King, who regarded Europe as if it were an anthill, said, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your nat

24、ives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. And Gulliver, after living among such a great race, could not but feel tempted to laugh at the strutting and bowing of English lords and ladies as much as the King did at him

25、. The third part is a satire on philosophers and projectors, who were given to dwelling in the air, like the inhabitants of the Flying Island. In the Island of Sorcerors, Gulliver was able to call up famous men of ancient times and question them. Then be found the world to have been misled by prosti

26、tute writers into ascribing the greatest exploits in war to cowards, the wisest counsels to fools, and sincerity to flatteners. He saw, too, by looking at an old yeoman, how the race had greatly deteriorated through vice and corruption. In the last part, Gullivers satire is of the bitterest. Gullive

27、r was now in a country where horses were possessed of reason, and were the governing class, while the Yahoos, though in the shape of men, were brute beasts with such vices as stealing and lying, In endeavouring to persuade the homes that he was not a Yahoo, Gulliver was made to show how little a man

28、 was re- moved from the brute. Gullivers account of the warfare among the English lords, given with no little pride, caused only disgust from the horses. He praised the life and virtues of the horses while he was disgusted with the Yahoos, whose relations reminded him of those existing in English so

29、ciety to such a degree that he shuddered at the prospect of returning to England. So, when he returned home, his family filled him with such disgust that he swooned when his wife kissed him. 2.2. Swifts Style: Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. His language is simple, clear and v

30、igorous. He said, Proper words in proper places, makes the true definition of a style.” Keeping his object steadily before him, he drives straight on to the end. There are no ornaments in his writing, but it comes home to the reader. In simple, direct and precise prose, Swift is almost unsurpassed i

31、n English literature. It is a great education in English to read Swifts prose. Swift is a master satirist, and his irony is deadly. But his satire is masked by an outward gravity, and an apparent calmness conceals his bitter irony. This makes his satire all the more powerful, as shown in his “ Modes

32、t Proposal. 2.3. Analysis of Major Characters Lemuel Gulliver Although Gulliver is a bold adventurer who visits a multitude of strange lands, it is difficult to regard him as truly heroic. Even well before his slide into misanthropy at the end of the book, he simply does not show the stuff of which

33、grand heroes are made. He is not cowardlyon the contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences of nearly being devoured by a giant rat, taken captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway shores, sexually assaulted by an eleven- year-old girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows. Additionally, th

34、e isolation from humanity that he endures for sixteen years must be hard to bear, though Gulliver rarely talks about such matters. Yet despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness. This impression could be due to the fact that he rarely shows his fee

35、lings, reveals his soul, or experiences great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like Odysseus in Homers Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly open about their emotions. What seems most lacking in Gulliver is not courage or feelings, but drive. One modern critic has desc

36、ribed Gulliver as possessing the smallest will in all of Western literature: he is simply devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would make his wandering into a quest. Odysseuss goal is to get home again, Aeneass goal in Virgils Aeneid is to found Rome, but Gullivers goal on his sea voyage is unc

37、ertain. He says that he needs to make some money after the failure of his business, but he rarely mentions finances throughout the work and indeed almost never even mentions home. He has no awareness of any greatness in what he is doing or what he is working toward. In short, he has no aspirations.

38、When he leaves home on his travels for the first time, he gives no impression that he regards himself as undertaking a great endeavor or embarking on a thrilling new challenge. We may also note Gullivers lack of ingenuity and savvy. Other great travelers, such as Odysseus, get themselves out of dang

39、erous situations by exercising their wit and ability to trick others. Gulliver seems too dull for any battles of wit and too unimaginative to think up tricks, and thus he ends up being passive in most of the situations in which he finds himself. He is held captive several times throughout his voyage

40、s, but he is never once released through his own stratagems, relying instead on chance factors for his liberation. Once presented with a way out, he works hard to escape, as when he repairs the boat he finds that delivers him from Blefuscu, but he is never actively ingenious in attaining freedom. Th

41、is example summarizes quite well Gullivers intelligence, which is factual and practical rather than imaginative or introspective. Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For example, he misses the obvious ways in which the Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept at navigational calcula

42、tions and the humdrum details of seafaring, he is far less able to reflect on himself or his nation in any profoundly critical way. Traveling to such different countries and returning to England in between each voyage, he seems poised to make some great anthropological speculations about cultural di

43、fferences around the world, about how societies are similar despite their variations or different despite their similarities. But, frustratingly, Gulliver gives us nothing of the sort. He provides us only with literal facts and narrative events, never with any generalizing or philosophizing. He is a

44、 self-hating, self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his misanthropy quite loudly, but even this attitude is difficult to accept as the moral of the story. Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify but, rather, part of the array of personalities and behaviors about which we must make judg

45、ments. The Queen of Brobdingnag The Brobdingnagian queen is hardly a well-developed character in this novel, but she is important in one sense: she is one of the very few females in Gullivers Travels who is given much notice. Gullivers own wife is scarcely even mentioned, even at what one would expe

46、ct to be the touching moment of homecoming at the end of the fourth voyage. Gulliver seems little more than indifferent to his wife. The farmers daughter in Brobdingnag wins some of Gullivers attention but chiefly because she cares for him so tenderly. Gulliver is courteous to the empress of Lillipu

47、t but presumably mainly because she is royalty. The queen of Brobdingnag, however, arouses some deeper feelings in Gulliver that go beyond her royal status. He compliments her effusively, as he does no other female personage in the work, calling her infinitely witty and humorous. He describes in pro

48、ud detail the manner in which he is permitted to kiss the tip of her little finger. For her part, the queen seems earnest in her concern about Gullivers welfare. When her court dwarf insults him, she gives the dwarf away to another household as punishment. The interaction between Gulliver and the qu

49、een hints that Gulliver is indeed capable of emotional connections. Lord Munodi Lord Munodi is a minor character, but he plays the important role of showing the possibility of individual dissent within a brainwashed community. While the inhabitants of Lagado pursue their attempts to extract sunbeams

50、 from cucumbers and to eliminate all verbs and adjectives from their language, Munodi is a rare example of practical intelligence. Having tried unsuccessfully to convince his fellows of their misguided public policies, he has given up and is content to practice what he preaches on his own estates. I

51、n his kindness to strangers, Munodi is also a counterexample to the contemptuous treatment that the other Laputians and Lagadans show Gulliver. He takes his guest on a tour of the kingdom, explains the advantages of his own estates without boasting, and is, in general, a figure of great common sense

52、 and humanity amid theoretical delusions and impractical fantasizing. As a figure isolated from his community, Munodi is similar to Gulliver, though Gulliver is unaware of his alienation while Munodi suffers acutely from his. Indeed, in Munodi we glimpse what Gulliver could be if he were wiser: a fi

53、gure able to think critically about life and society. Don Pedro de Mendez Don Pedro is a minor character in terms of plot, but he plays an important symbolic role at the end of the novel. He treats the half- deranged Gulliver with great patience, even tenderness, when he allows him to travel on his

54、ship as far as Lisbon, offering to give him his own finest suit of clothes to replace the seamans tatters, and giving him twenty pounds for his journey home to England. Don Pedro never judges Gulliver, despite Gullivers abominably antisocial behavior on the trip back. Ironically, though Don Pedro sh

55、ows the same kind of generosity and understanding that Gullivers Houyhnhnm master earlier shows him, Gulliver still considers Don Pedro a repulsive Yahoo. Were Gulliver able to escape his own delusions, he might be able to see the Houyhnhnm-like reasonableness and kindness in Don Pedros behavior. Do

56、n Pedro is thus the touchstone through which we see that Gulliver is no longer a reliable and objective commentator on the reality he sees but, rather, a skewed observer of a reality colored by private delusions. Mary Burton Gulliver Gullivers wife is mentioned only briefly at the beginning of the n

57、ovel and appears only for an instant at the conclusion. Gulliver never thinks about Mary on his travels and never feels guilty about his lack of attention to her. A dozen far more trivial characters get much greater attention than she receives. She is, in this respect, the opposite of Odysseuss wife

58、 Penelope in the Odyssey, who is never far from her husbands thoughts and is the final destination of his journey. Marys neglected presence in Gullivers narrative gives her a certain claim to importance. It suggests that despite Gullivers curiosity about new lands and exotic races, he is virtually i

59、ndifferent to those people closest to him. His lack of interest in his wife bespeaks his underdeveloped inner life. Gulliver is a man of skill and knowledge in certain practical matters, but he is disadvantaged in self- reflection, personal interactions, and perhaps overall wisdom. 2.4. Themes 2.4.1

60、. Might Versus Right Gullivers Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral righteousness should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudi