Gulliver’s Travels Part 2: Satire in Brobdingnag

Posted on Jan 30, 2025 in English Language and Literature

Brobdingnag

Gulliver’s Journey: From Power to Powerlessness

  • As in part I, Gulliver departs from and returns to reality.
  • Now a pygmy in a land of giants, Gulliver moves from a position of power to powerlessness.
  • Gulliver is initially perceived by the farm laborers as a dangerous animal: at first, the farmer’s wife reacts to Gulliver as if he were a toad or spider.
  • Gulliver’s animality had begun in Lilliput with his monstrous defecation.
  • For the first time, we see that his identity is questioned. His animality is made apparent: dehumanization, a process that had already begun in Lilliput.

The Microscopic Perspective

  • In scientific terms: Well-publicized experiments with the microscope provided Swift with literal data he could turn to satirical account, for instance, in his description of the Brobdingnagians.
  • Lens production had become so widespread that microscopes were available not only to professional scientists.
  • In The History of the Royal Society of 1667, Thomas Sprat celebrated the microscope as one of the triumphs of the “moderns” over the “ancients”.
  • In fact, the scientific origins of bacteriology arise in these years.
  • Obviously, in Lilliput, humanity is put under the microscope.
  • In Brobdingnag, Gulliver observes as if looking through a microscope and is observed in this way.
  • When the king has three scholars examine Gulliver, they are like three scientists at the Royal Society observing something for the first time through a microscope.
  • Swift uses scale and proportion to defamiliarize; that is to say, to show familiar things from a new perspective. E.g., In Lilliput, little; in Brobdingnag, giant.

Gulliver’s Humiliation and the King’s Critique

  • Gulliver is physically displayed when forced to become an entertainment in country shows.
  • His antics make human actions ridiculous.
  • Furthermore, the court maids treat Gulliver in a peculiar way: they undress before him, while he experiences horror and revulsion at their magnified physicality.
  • The King of Brobdingnag cannot understand Gulliver, at first believing him to be a clockwork device and then disbelieving the story of his misadventures.
  • Court philosophers think Gulliver an inferior carnivore and settle for Lusus Naturae.
  • Gulliver attends five audiences with the King and offers a two-page panegyric on “the Constitution of the English Parliament,” the peers of the realm and church, the House of Commons, and the courts of justice.
  • All are presented in an idealized form, but the King of Brobdingnag offers a devastating critique.
  • To ingratiate himself with the king, Gulliver offers one of the triumphs of “modernism”: the formula of gunpowder.
  • The humane horror of the monarch rejects such destructive power.
  • There is a contradiction between the Gulliver of Lilliput and that of Brobdingnag.
  • In Brobdingnag, we witness the transformation of the Whig libertarian, Gulliver, into a tyrannical absolutist.
  • The philosopher king, however, rules over a factionless utopian society, regulated by a militia that ensures constitutional balance. Laws are simple and few, as in More’s Utopia.
  • In Brobdingnag, Gulliver reverses the satirical technique of the voyage to Lilliput: While in Lilliput, he had been the vehicle of satire on what he observed, in Brobdingnag, he becomes the object of satire.