The Peace of the Augustans and the War of the Sexes. What Gender Is Gulliver?
p. 269-280
Texte intégral
1With due respect for Damian Grant’s novel metaphorical interpretation of Gulliver’s presence in various small boats, a chronological caveat should make clear that the phrase “little man / boy in the boat” was unknown to Swift and the eighteenth century. The word bout, as recorded by Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1969 ed.), may refer, by a shape allusion, to the female pudend. This should be compared with the phrase “Have a passage in Venus’boat,” recorded as early as 1658 in The Crafty Whore: see Claude Rudigoz’s excellent, if unfairly neglected, Systématique génétique de la métaphore sexuelle, 2 vols, vol.1 (Paris: Champion, 1978) 85. Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang (1963 ed.) also gives pleasure-boat for the female pudend, but as a nineteenth-century phrase, while he records “little man in the boat” as “low” for the clitoris (mid-nineteenth century). The phrase is not recorded in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785; 1963 ed.), but it figures in Tony Thorne’s Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1991 pb ed.) with the interesting gloss: “So-called because of a supposed resemblance [with the clitoris], though it is unclear why the pilot of this particular craft is invariably male. In the 19th century the same phrase referred to the navel” (316). One may well wonder how Damian Grant would have interpreted Gulliver’s sailing in small boats, had he plumped for the umbilical meaning of the phrase. He was also asked during the conference what he might make of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat(1889), let alone the frisky and wayward dog Montmorency, a question he prudently declined to answer. P.G.B.
2We have recently become accustomed to thinking about the eighteenth century as a much more turbulent time than it once appeared to historians —including literary historians. Reading Swift inevitably makes one wonder how so many wars real and metaphorical, so many battles of men and books, could ever have been so elided in the collective recollection. So out of curiosity I found myself looking up Saintsbury’s Peace of the Augustans to see how this critic could possibly have accommodated Swift within that excessively bland presentation of the eighteenth century as a place of “rest and refreshment” (26). What I (re)discovered was that of course Saintsbury couldn’t do any such thing; what we have in the opening chapter is in fact a distinctly unpeaceful account of Swift —appropriate perhaps to the year in which the book was published, 1916. But this does not derive, interestingly, from Swift’s radical analysis of human aggression and belligerence (as, for example, in Gulliver’s enthusiastic portrayal of modem warfare in Gulliver’s Travels bk. 4, ch. 5). Rather, what destabilizes Saintsbury’s account of Swift is the vivid sense he provides —a remarkable sense, even, at the time— of the gender ambivalence of Swift’s writing. What is promised to the reader as a place of “rest and refreshment” turns out to be a much more tense, even tortured area: one which coincides exactly with that I myself wish to explore in this paper.
3Saintsbury begins his account by conceding that Swift fits awkwardly with his general thesis: “It may well seem to be either an idle paradox or a wanton absurdity to speak of the ‘Peace of the Augustans’ in connection with their greatest man, Jonathan Swift” (20). But he defends his position by arguing that it is Swift’s very coolness, his control, which permits the application of his metaphor: “… in Swift’s actual works there is never any moaning or raving; there is as little of the inky cloak and the skull in the hand as of the desperado’s yellow boots and the fist shaken at heaven” (20). It is Swift’s control, what Coleridge applauded as a writer’s aloofness, that allows his most remarkable effects. Over the whole “immense range” of his work (measured in formal terms, for its variety). Saintsbury argues that Swift “always manages to satisfy the reader in one sense, to keep him unsatiated in another, and so still full of intellectual appetite and intellectual curiosity” (37). There is no actual reference to Coleridge here, but the terms Saintsbury uses have a distinctly Coleridgean feel to them; and even a hint, perhaps, of Barthes, the sense he gives us of the very jouissance of reading? After proposing a series of comparisons —all favourable to Swift— with Addison, Pope, and Voltaire, Saintsbury goes on:
But Swift never wearies, for as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms quelque chose d’infini, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger, to the most drastic restoratives— the very strychnine and capsicum of irony. (37)
4The “peace” of Swift’s writing, that is to say, may be located in its balancing and refraction of ambiguities; at the still centre of irony itself.
5Most interestingly, movingly, and relevantly for my purpose, Saintsbury locates an instance of this ambiguity in four words to which he devotes two pages of commentary: “the famous final words, ‘Only a woman’ s hair’.” In what is a profoundly sympathetic and imaginative passage, Saintsbury sees these words —which have perversely been read as evidence of Swift’s misogyny— as expressing “the riddle of the painful earth… more poignantly and finally than it has been expressed by any uninspired being other than Shakespeare” (32-33). This comment makes claims not only for Swift’s technique —a concentration, a reverberation, a depth of focus in the phrase that stands outside eighteenth-century rhetorical norms— but also, inevitably, for what he sees as Swift’s profound, instinctive sympathy and identification with the female; the female that he could ‘torture’ because he knew it so well.
6Saintsbury proposes the Journal to Stella as the extended and elaborated example of this sympathy. It’s significant that Saintsbury reserves his very highest praise for this work: the two pages devoted to it are a real “rave review” that takes us (that took me, anyway) by surprise. “I have sometimes thought,” he says, “that the Journal, long before others, is the first great novel, being at the same time a marvellous and absolutely genuine autobiography” (31):
hardly has the greatest work of Fielding, of Miss Austen, of Thackeray himself attained the essence of novel representation better than this ‘True History’ has in being at the same time a story of actual truth —the story of a life from day to day, and an artistic presentation of incident and character, after the fashion Aristotle was really thinking when he spoke of poetry being ‘more philosophie’ than history. (30)
7Its qualities go beyond comparable works by Pepys, Rousseau, Goethe; it is written “not in ink but in blood, traced not on paper but on ‘the red-leaved tablets of the heart’ and the pulsing tissue of the brain” (31). It may be questioned, says Saintsbury, whether the eighteenth century “ever gave us again, or whether its successors have ever given us, anything so strange, so great, so true, and at the same time so recreative as this astonishing production” (30-32). It is useful to be so challenged in our critical assumptions, and our formal categories; and I am grateful to Saintsbury for serving as a springboard into my subject.
II
8No-one before now (to the best of my knowledge) has ever considered it necessary to question Lemuel Gulliver’s gender. He is, after all, a respectable (if absentee) husband and father of two children; and even if this evidence might in our sceptical times be questioned —after all, we’re not even sure any longer that Walter Shandy is Tristram’s father— the memorable means with which Gulliver extinguishes the fire at the Empress’s palace in Lilliput surely leaves no room for doubt: he is equipped as a man. It is no part of my intention to argue over Gulliver’s sex, therefore; I am perfectly happy to accept the conventional view of the case. Even my eight-year-old son, upon enquiring what I was working on, observed with all the scorn that children reserve for their parents’ pursuits that “everybody knows Gulliver is a man.” But of course biological sex and cultural gender are different matters; and what I do want to argue in this paper is that we might come to a better understanding of Swift’s celebrated satire if we consider the eponymous hero of Gulliver's Travels as culturally female: as representing, in many of ‘his’ manifestations, his actions and experiences, features and values more usually associated (then as now?) with the female sex.
9There are two obstacles to my argument which I must acknowledge at the outset. One is that the best critical opinion on Gulliver’s Travels reminds us, rightly, that Gulliver is not a ‘character’ in the novelistic sense: therefore. how should his gender matter? To this I would make the provisional answer that the gender-identity I have in mind is indeed not an ‘individual’ trait, not a feature of a consistent and developing personality, but a rhetorical trace on Swift’s part (the way Gulliver’s ‘identity’ functions as part of the argument of the work), the recognition of which is therefore quite consistent with a respectably sophisticated reading of the work.
10Then there is an objection (well documented in feminist criticism) to the gender identification of human characteristics, especially when these are polarized: as for instance, mind=male, body=female. This typology I shall nevertheless have recourse to in this paper; and meanwhile in (provisional) defence I will quote D. H. Lawrence, who says in his Study of Thomas Hardy that “the division into male and female is arbitrary, for the purpose of thought” (Phoenix 448). I will also assert my own belief —which is as often confirmed as questioned by my reading of feminist criticism— that it is only when we can use the terms in this way (as it were, algebraically) that we have freed ourselves of their prejudicial associations. I hope at least that this is true; and that the elaboration of my argument will help to demonstrate the fact.
11In naming the culture as gendered I am not confirming or perpetuating a stereotype but rather exhibiting it for critical attention. There are differences, that have to be named; feminists themselves share the structuralist perception that we need to resort to binary Systems, in order to think at all (that is, in order to think our way out of them). As Hélène Cixous remarks: “Thought has always worked through opposition… through dual, hierarchical oppositions… logocentrism subjects thought —all concepts, codes, and values— to a binary System” (Cixous, 63-64). And in that the sexual system/terminology is deeply imbricated with other Systems of discrimination, it is actually helpful to use it —deliberately, consciously, critically— in order to explore those other Systems. This does not imply, as Stephen Heath argues, that in doing so we have to accept what he calls the whole “Sexual Fix”; that the terms masculine and feminine “serve only to and oppressively to naturalize cultural realizations and representations of human activity that should and must be analyzed as such” (Heath 142). Such a disabling reaction is in my view a travesty of the real rhetorical situation, a locking up of energies that may be harnessed and put to radical use from within this metaphorical circuit. I would rather cite the conclusion of another study in this area, which suggests that with the “tuning” appropriate to our times sexual difference is a “dichotomous variable” that will “continue to be an important basis for social comparison” (Archer/Lloyd 214). But at this point it is necessary to get back (or get on) to Gulliver: and to the absorbing subject of Swift’s sexual rhetoric.
III
12The cultural markers I want to put down relate, then, to language and the body. The body we are familiar with as a female entity, or a metaphor for the female in the sexual semiotic (though there is ideological resistance to this idea, as we are all aware). The masculine body and the feminine body are equally ‘female’ from this perspective: the sentient self, the dark self, the dumb, physical self, as opposed to the reflective, luminous, spiritual and articulate self: which is thought of as male. In one of her most iconoclastic fictions, Angela Carter even identifies the penis itself as man’ s most characteristically female part: “his instrument of mediation between himself and the other” (Carter 128). But despite the intimidating phallogocentric structures of Freud and Lacan —which would seem at times to deny woman the right or the possibility of speech altogether: (theoretically, how can a woman invade the symbolic order, how can she possibly speak at all?)— there is also a cultural tradition which recognizes the language facility itself as female. We talk of “the mother tongue,” we learn our first language from our mothers, (Wordsworth’s infant drinks in language as well as passion from his/her mother’s eye); Julia Kristeva, we know, has theorized the “semiotic” (in contrast to Lacan’s symbolic order), a pre-Oedipal phase where the child shares the mother’s fluid language, her libidinal syntax, as it has shared her bloodstream and been nurtured by her milk. In the terms of the metaphor used by Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink” (Cixous 251). These two traditions merge in the idea of “speaking the body,” an idea we find in Virginia Woolf (Lily Briscoe asks herself in To the Lighthouse, “How could one express in words the emotions of the body?… It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind” [Woolf, 202-03]) and also, again, in D. H. Lawrence: “All the emotions belong to the body, and are only recognized by the mind” (Phoenix II 493).
13Both of these “cultural markers” are important in Gulliver’s Travels, and I want to spend a little time adducing the evidence for my case; beginning with language. Although Gulliver studies navigation, mathematics, and “physick” (that is, medicine) to equip himself for his travels, he is really (unlike Mary Shelley’s unreconstructed naturalist Victor Frankenstein) a student of the humanities:
My Hours of Leisure I spent in reading the best Authors, ancient and modem; being always provided with a good Number of Books; and when I was ashore, in observing the Manners and Dispositions of the People, as well as learning their Language; wherein I had a great Facility by the Strength of my Memory. (GT 4).
14This facility is called upon on all four of his voyages, and Gulliver is very specific —on each occasion— as to how he learns the language. It is especially interesting that in Brobdingnag he is taught the language by the nine-year old daughter of the family he first lives with, who is only forty feet tall, washes and dresses him like a Cindy doll, and gives him the name Grildrig. Gulliver calls her Glumdalclitch, or “little nurse”: but there are other, more intimate meanings encoded in the name, which I will return to later. She teaches him with the help of “a common Treatise for the use of young Girls, giving a short Account of their Religion; out of this she taught me my Letters, and interpreted the Words” (91). Later on, Gulliver is “much diverted with a little old Treatise” that he finds in Glumdalclitch’s bedchamber and which belongs to her Governess, “who dealt in Writings of Morality and Devotion”: “The Book treats of the Weakness of Human kind; and is in little esteem except among Women and the Vulgar" (131).
15Note the disparaging association of “women and the vulgar”; significantly, we will find it used again (in Book 3) in the context of language —which, it is implied, is better left to their care and control than to the administration of a (male) academy: least of all the Academy of Lagado. It is here that Gulliver informs us of the project proposed by three Professors in their School of Languages (as it might be, their Faculty Research Committee): this is “a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever,” which is urged “as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity”:
For, it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion; and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on, (184)
16And Gulliver assures us that “this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in Conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the Manner of their Forefathers: Such constant irreconcileable Enemies to Science are the common People” (185). Here is one of the many instances where the irony works at Gulliver’s expense, as he identifies himself with the dislocated and deranged male position; while the rhetoric of the text clearly points in the other direction, towards the sanity and security of female nurture.
17There is another celebrated episode in Book 3 which I must allude to here before passing on to the theme of the body in Gulliver’s Travels, partly because it works in the same way as this last example (against the grain of Gulliver’s own stated opinion), and also because it will serve as a very appropriate introduction to the politics of the body —rather than the body politic— in the text as a whole. This is the story that Gulliver tells us while still on the Flying Island of Laputa, of the court lady —the wife of the prime minister, no less— who in despair of life among the rarefied spirits of the flying island, with their culture of mathematics and music, their flappers and their abstraction, has absconded to the mainland below with her lover, “an old deformed Footman, who beat her every Day” (162). She has been brought back from below once (“much against her Will”), but later contrives to “steal down again with all her Jewels, to the same Gallant” (163), and this time disappears from view. Once again, Swift lets Gulliver fall into the trap of articulating the conventional patriarchal position:
This may perhaps pass with the Reader rather for an European or English Story, than for one of a Country so remote. But he may please to consider, that the Caprices of Womankind are not limited by any Climate or Nation; and that they are much more uniform than can be easily imagined. (163)
18But it is clear to the attentive reader that this passage —like the whole text of Gulliver’s Travels, as I am trying to argue— needs to be read from a female perspective, in order to yield its satirical sense; or indeed, to bear its humanistic meaning. The life of the body, we are to understand, including the biological functions and the prompting of the passions, is a surer guide to human behaviour than the trigonometrical calculations native to the flying island: or, for that matter, than the horse-sense (which of course isn’t horse-sense at all) of the rational equine Houyhnhnms. Back in Brobdingnag, we may remember, Gulliver is much better received by the Queen than by her husband: she carries him “in her own Hand” to His Majesty, who “conceived I might be a piece of Clock-work” (94).
19The sheer wilfulness and perversity of the rational, scientific, male mind is perhaps best exhibited in the celebrated operation on the dog, where an experimental physician, having accidentally killed a dog by blowing up its guts with “a large Pair of Bellows” (180), is observed “endeavouring to recover him by the same Operation” (182)—a notable instance of that blinkered perversion of the mental process known as “vertical thinking”; although the Doctor in the School of Political Projectors comes a close second in this respect with his radical scheme for dealing with party factions:
When Parties in a State are violent, he offered a wonderful Contrivance to reconcile them. The Method is this, You take an Hundred Leaders of each Party; you dispose them into Couples of such whose Heads are nearest of a Size; then let two nice Operators saw off the Occiput of each Couple at the same Time, in such a Manner that the Brain may be equally divided… [the two half-heads are then joined together, and]… the two half Brains being left to debate the Matter between themselves within the Space of one Scull, would soon come to a good Understanding. (189)
20This sublime satirical notion contains in itself an ironic perversion of the sexual “coupling” which (as Swift remarked in his “Thoughts on Religion”) is one of those crucial “points of the greatest moment to the being and continuance of the world" in which “God hath intended our passions to prevail over reason” (Nonesuch Swift, ed. John Hayward, 1949; 466-67).
21But what are we to make, then, of Gulliver’s own deepening disgust at the body and its functions, through the four stages of his travels? Gulliver maintains a distinctly physical presence throughout his four voyages. It is remarkable that in Book I, he is as much concerned to record the “Demands of Nature” (7) upon himself as he is to describe Lilliput and its inhabitants. When first delivered from the sea, he finds himself immediately “much inclined to sleep,” and lies down on the grass “which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remember to have done in my Life” (5). Later in this first chapter Gulliver expresses his hunger “by putting my Finger frequently on my Mouth, to signify that I wanted Food” (7-8); a gesture which is fortunately understood by the Lilliputians. And afterwards, naturally (but not inevitably, in such a narrative) he has “to ease [himself] with making Water; which I very plentifully did, to the great Astonishment of the People” (10). Chapter 2 finds him in an even more awkward predicament:
I had been for some Hours extremely pressed by the Necessities of Nature; which was no Wonder, it being almost two days since I had last disburthened myself. I was under great Difficulties between Urgency and Shame. The best Expedient I could think on, was to creep into my House, which I accordingly did; and shutting the Gate after me, I went as far as the Length of my Chain would suffer; and discharged my Body of that uneasy Load. (14)
22Later, Gulliver assures us, things are better organized: in that he defecates in the open air, “and due Care was taken every Morning before Company came, that the offensive Matter should be carried off in Wheel-barrows, by two Servants appointed for that Purpose” (14-15). (Defoe’s Crusoe, for all his literalness and calculation, never descends to these bodily details; nor is there — in this work at least —any of the dialectic of gender which goes with such registration).
23But it is in Book 2, the land of the giants, that Swift will have much more opportunity to explore the physicality of our natures, as the diminutive Gulliver is now exposed to the grossness of his new hosts. The nurse’s “monstrous Breast,” its nipple “about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous” (82), the queen’s equally nauseous eating habits (97-98), and the flies that “would sometimes alight upon my Victuals, and leave their Loathsome Excrement or Spawn behind” (101); the “Woman with a Cancer in her Breast,” the “Fellow with a Wen in his Neck”, and “the Lice crawling on their Cloaths” (105); the “coarse and uneven” skins of the maids of honour, who lift their smocks and urinate in his presence (111-12), and the decapitation of the criminal whose “Veins and Arteries spouted up such a prodigious Quantity of Blood, and so high in the Air, that the great Jet d'Eau at Versailles was not equal for the Time it lasted” (112), are all magnified versions of a physicality that Gulliver cannot but find offensive.
24However, it is the total immersion of Gulliver himself in this physicality that is the most interesting thing, for my present argument. Far from being alienated, or hermetically sealed like the Laputans themselves against the realities of the body, he is relentlessly implicated in what Yeats (himself a distinguished student of Swift) referred to in his poem “Byzantium” as “the fury and the mire of human veins.” It’s not only a matter of the body in isolation —as in a controlled experiment, or on an operating table. Physical reality as a whole seems ready to engulf Gulliver at every turn. On one occasion he nearly drowns in a “Silver Bowl of Cream” (100), on another he falls up to his neck in a “fresh Mole-hill” (110), and once, when he is sailing his boat, a frog climbs in and over him, “dawbing [his] Face and Cloaths with its odious Slime” (114): I will return to this episode, which has another interesting aspect. In the last chapter, when inside the box made for him by Glumdalclitch, he falls finally into the sea— from which he is duly rescued by “Mr. Thomas Wilcocks, an honest worthy Shropshire Man” (139), to whom we are all indebted for the survival of our narrator. But it is the body itself which is the locus of our true engulfment: the female body, whence we issue (the body of the mother), and to which we return (episodically, in our sexual experiences; and ultimately, in death, to the symbolic earth or the sea). Remember how Gulliver describes the cancer in the woman’s breast: it is a truly remarkable perception, in both physical and psychological terms.
There was a Woman with a Cancer in her Breast, swelled to a monstrous Size, full of Holes, into two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole Body. (105)
25This is certainly sexual in a generalised sense, in its intense registration of physical otherness, if not exactly erotic: Gulliver is being imaginatively incorporated into the body he finds so repellent (though does the adverb “easily” suggest some other disposition?). But we cannot avoid the explicit erotism of the passage where Gulliver-as-victim describes how the maids of honour use him as their plaything. Here, he is mounted on the nipple of a frolicsome girl of sixteen, “with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular” (112): it will not, I think, be too prurient a suggestion to make, that the diminutive Gulliver has served as some kind of sexual toy for the maids. Indeed, after offering her own account of Gulliver’s “fascinated revulsion towards the physical,” Carol Houlihan Flynn refers to “Gulliver turned dildo” in this episode (Flynn 89, 108).
26Book 4 brings Gulliver to the extremity of his experience: and to the extremity of this physical identification too— the furthest the text can take us in exploring (however obliquely) the rhetoric of the sentient female. It is here, to begin with, that the vulnerability of the human body is most exposed: he is espied asleep by the Sorrel Nag, naked, and later strips off his clothes to show the “poor, bare, fork’d animal” he is to his Houyhnhnm master (who concludes that despite superficial differences Gulliver “must be a perfect Yahoo” [238-39]); in the next chapter, his master gives an elaborate analysis of the manifest defects of the human body (244-45); and then the accounts that follow of the violence done to the body in war (250-51), by disease (257) and —worse— by medicine (258) are also strictly relevant.
27It is here also that Gulliver tries most strenuously to dissociate himself from the body —from the dimension of the human— in pursuit of “pure reason”: “When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self” (286). But the narrative into which Gulliver is plunged makes it clear that this abstention will not be tolerated; episode after episode reminds him that he is but a man. There is a gross instance in ch 1, when Gulliver first encounters the Yahoos: “Several of this cursed Brood getting hold of the Branches behind, leaped up into the Tree, from whence they began to discharge their Excrements on my Head… [I] was almost stifled with the Filth, which fell about me on every Side” (226). It may be going too far to suggest that the tree in question may be a debased or carnivalized version of Yggdrasil, the Scandinavian Tree of Life (and source of Stephen Dedalus’s ashplant in Ulysses); but it should perhaps have occurred to Gulliver that you are only ever shat upon so purposefully by your own kind. A more pointed instance occurs later on, when to his horror Gulliver is embraced by a female Yahoo as he is bathing naked in the pool:
Being one Day abroad with my Protector the Sorrel Nag, and the Weather exceeding hot. I entreated him to let me bathe in a River that was near. He consented, and I immediately suipped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the Stream. It happened that a young Female Yahoo standing behind a Bank, saw the whole Proceeding; and inflamed by Desire, as the Nag and I conjectured, came running with all Speed, and leaped into the Water within five Yards of the Place where I bathed. I was never in my Life so terribly frighted; the Nag was grazing at some Distance, not suspecting any Harm: She embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could, and the Nag came galloping towards me, whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost Reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite Bank, where she stood gazing and howling all the time I was putting on my Cloaths. (272)
28This intrepid female should perhaps be recognized as the heroine of Gulliver’s Travels; and we do actually learn a little more about her in the next paragraph:
Neither was the Hair of this Brute of a Red Colour, (which might have been some Excuse for an Appetite a little irregular) but black as a Sloe, and her Countenance did not make an Appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of the Kind; for, I think, she could not be above Eleven Years old. (272)
29It is probably significant, too, that the rest of this chapter is taken up with a description of the desiccated social and sexual life of the Houyhnhnms; their loveless marriages, the unfeeling education of their children, their general affective impoverishment. Gulliver’s own willing association of himself with this way of life is a measure of his madness; and it is with an awareness of this radical alienation that we have to read the account of his return to his wife and children:
My Wife and Family received me with great Surprize and Joy, because they concluded me certainly dead; but I must freely confess, the Sight of them filled me only with Hatred, Disgust and Contempt… And when I began to consider, that by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species, I had become a Parent of more; it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion and Horror. (298)
30Gulliver’s own excuse to the reader for the circumstantiality of the physical detail throughout his Travels is that of the natural philosopher (or scientist); these details, like any other details, are deserving of objective record. But the reader is unlikely to be misled by such an observation. Criticism suggests that he/she is more likely to make the mistake of taking the disgust at its face value: as evidence of Gulliver’s (and hence Swift’s own) unease with the body. But I want to argue that we should read it with exactly the opposite sense; the best evidence we could have of a complex and imaginatively refracted but in the end unconditional love of the body, an impassioned acknowledgement of the order of the physical, disseminated unmistakeably through the text. To return to the exploits of the newly identified heroine: the fact that, as Gulliver is forced to acknowledge, “the Females had a natural Propensity to me as one of their own Species” (272) is more significant as a determinant of the text’s ultimate meaning than any attempted ideological deflection on Gulliver’s part. George Saintsbury himself, it may be worth remarking, considered that Gulliver’s discomfiture in this particular episode provided the best instance in the Travels of Swift’s “intus et in cute satiric knowledge of human nature” (Saintsbury 26).
31Of course, I don’t propose to attribute this to the “ghost” of Gulliver, nor to the shadow of Swift. Given the rhetoric of Gulliver’s Travels, we are not reduced to this stratagem. We can’t speak with any confidence of the “signifying System” that was Swift himself, the Dean at his desk (that is to say, the langue); there is only the text, the local parole. And the evidence of the text itself suggests large “plates” of meaning (to invoke a geological metaphor) running against each other to create that tension and contradiction that are such essential features of his work: features which were as evident to Saintsbury as they are to us.
IV
32At this point I would like to invoke the very interesting discussion of gender in Swift provided by Ellen Pollak in her excellent book The Politics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Pope and Swift (1985): a book which is the more welcome because (with few exceptions: such as in the work by Carol Houlihan Flynn, referred to above) Swift does continue to be either ignored or used as a whipping boy by feminist critics of the eighteenth century —or by critics of the eighteenth century who happen to be women. In her book, Pollak contrasts the ideological formation underlying the poetry of Swift and Pope in terms which may readily be adopted for the fiction, and which provide persuasive support for my argument. Whereas Pope, she says, represents the discourse of the male (binary, definitive, patriarchal, imperious/al), Swift is curiously incorporated into the discourse of the female by the very energy of his resistance to it. Swift’s “savagely reactionary response to modem discourse” in works such as A Tale of a Tub “reflects an aversion to an all-absorbing textuality for which woman is a central metaphor” (Pollak 172); but at the same time:
… even as the cluster of physical metaphors by which women, the body, and modem discourse are reciprocally disparaged remains intact within his texts, Swift nonetheless engages in a curious swirling around the stasis of those fixed analogies, so that the double negativity of his relation to modem writing and to the figures it assumes takes on the aspect of an affirmative attitude…. Swift’s toying with the rethinking of sexual metaphor is a possibility built into the infinitely negative pressure of his thought that he never quite responsibly embraced. Thus Swift’s texts manage to remain both open and closed at the same time… they are simultaneously occasions for the affirmation and cancellation of cultural codes. (Pollak 178)
33In the spirit of this analysis, I can now propose that when Gulliver describes his urination and defecation in such graphic detail, he (or the body of text which incorporates him) is actually celebrating those bodily functions, no less than is Joyce when he describes the loosening of Leopold Bloom’s bowels in Ulysses. When Gulliver describes his being dandled on the nipple of the maid of honour, he is claiming his share in the erotics of the text; as he is also when he relates (with whatever adventitious disgust) the amorous approaches of the young female Yahoo. When he observes the holes in the cancer in the beggar-woman’s breast “in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole Body” (105) he is indeed entering that body, fascinated by its otherness, identifying himself with the most palpable manifestation of the physical there can be: an organism dying of its own excess. And he is returning at the same time to the female body, to the breast, the source of nurture. And when, as throughout Book 2, he describes himself as relentlessly engulfed in the physical, the viscous —the bowl of cream, the frog’s slime— he is symbolically readmitting himself to the slime of his own physical substance: as we might say, converting the Biblical metaphor to something more literal, “remember man thou art but slime, and unto slime thou shalt return.”
34I have appealed already to the cultural identification of the body as such with the female. But there is further evidence of a symbolic, coded nature that I would like to adduce here and in conclusion. Gulliver reaches each of his islands in a small boat (bk.1: 5; bk.2: 75; bk.3: 151; bk.4: 229). During his stay in Brobdingnag he even has perilous adventures in a boat, about which Swift is curiously specific. It is the queen who has a boat made for her mannikin, “a Pleasure-Boat with all its Tackling” (113), in the belief that “a little Exercise of Rowing might… be convenient for my Health” (112); and in this boat Gulliver entertains the ladies with his skill:
Here I often used to row for my Diversion, as well as that of the Queen and her Ladies, who thought themselves agreeably entertained with my Skill and Agility. Sometimes I would put up my Sail, and then my Business was only to steer, while the ladies gave me a Gale with their Fans…. (112-13)
35Now, we know that the “man in the boat” is a colloquial reference to the clitoris, the erectile tissue in the female organ which is found so offensive in some cultures —as an usurpation of male prerogative— that it is actually excised. The metaphor has its origin in Latin (navicula = little boat, naviculans = clitoris); Mc Conville and Shearlaw record “widespread usage in Britain and (especially) Ireland” (The Slanguage of Sex 122). The clitoris is the badge of the woman’s bisexuality; what has even been claimed as her “omnisexuality.” And I see Gulliver as planted there; born, on each voyage, out of and into the female body. This is simply the most explicit episode; especially in the near-disaster that befalls him in the boat, when a frog tries to climb aboard:
When the Frog was got in, it hopped at once half the Length of the Boat, and then over my Head, backwards and forwards, dawbing my Face and Cloaths with its odious Slime. The Largeness of its Features made it appear the most deformed Animal that can be conceived. (114)
36We may remember that it is the Yahoo creature itself that Gulliver later refers to as “singular, and deformed” (225). The frog here —itself a favoured vehicle for sexual metaphor —can be seen, in its largeness and deformity, as a peculiarly grotesque reminder of the sexual base of our own natures. It is this passage, also, that tempts me to look for a coded reference to the clitoris in the name Gulliver gives to his little nurse, Glumdalclitch; perhaps there is even an allusion to an absorption in the body in the form of female masturbation here, to balance the evidently punning reference to “my good Master Bates” in bk. 1, ch.1 (4). And this would fit with my not unserious suggestion (mentioned above), that we should read Gulliver’s own name Grildrig as an anagram of ‘rig’d girl’: a girl in drag, a woman in man’s disguise. For one so alert to etymologies as Gulliver (and his author/scriptor Swift), these things cannot be disregarded as accidental. As is noted by Turner (327), P. O. Clark in his 1953 “decoding” of the names in Gulliver’s Travels proposes “girl thing” for Grildrig, and “grim doll clutch” for Glumdalclitch; perhaps we can better penetrate Swift’s meaning in these enlightened times.
37There is a well-known article by Pat Rogers entitled “Gulliver’s Glasses,” in which Rogers argues that his obsession with his glasses identifies Gulliver’s spectatorial role in his book; he is always an observer, never involved in the action. Furthermore:
Swift shares Gulliver’s instincts, to hide and to peer out, to avoid bodily contact which squeezes and pains us. He wants to do this while at the same time negotiating at a safe distance with the physical world, through his sight… the desire to escape from the body —to conceal its frailties and repress its urges — was Swift’s very own. (Rogers 187)
38It is the purpose of this paper to argue the contrary (or at least complementary) position: that although Gulliver may not take much part in the action as character, he is symbolically inglutinated in the body throughout the text, thereby defeating Swift’s plan of escape. As Ellen Pollak remarks: “For Gulliver, the creation of an identity is an infinitely regressive enterprise; he is constantly absorbed by that which he defines himself as not” (Pollak 179). And in this process, according to the terms I have proposed here, he crosses the binary divide and becomes an honorary woman; bisexual, bifocal (if spectacled at all), at once male Gull and female bearer of veracity; plural, polyglot; the perfect performing instance of the polymorphous perverse.
V
39The argument I have been trying to advance in this paper is a contribution to the discourse of gender (to which we are all committed, both professionally and personally). It is not possible to evacuate our discourse of gender, any more than we can simply step outside of binarism —in this or any other instance— and refuse to have anything to do with it. Binary structures provide discourse with its very dimension; and the sexual divide (however perceived) is an ineluctable element of the System. Feminist critics have wrestled for a generation with this problem. As Elaine Showalter remarks, “All [feminist criticisms] are struggling to find a terminology that can rescue the feminine from its stereotypical associations with inferiority” (Showalter 16). What we can, and must do, is to revalue, reincorporate, reclaim, recuperate, reinvest the terminology of binarism in a more mobile, a more carnivalesque, a more collaborative discourse; one adapted to the evolution of our ideas of sexuality itself. As one of Angela Carter’s (female) characters remarks: “Well… one day, you’ll discover that sexuality is a unity manifested in different structures and it’s a hard thing, in these alienated times, to tell what is and what is not’” (Carter 66). And here the critical theories of Bakhtin and Barthes, of Kristeva and Cixous, are an incitement, as are the exemplary texts that they return to. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Angela Carter’s (Thousand and One) Nights at the Circus —via the heteroglossia and polyphony of Rabelais, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Joyce— these are the texts that avail us in the continuous reconstruction of consciousness; and the reclamation of our common —if sexually polarized— humanity.
40Swift, far from being a misogynist monster and pillar of the patriarchy, is actually an unexpected ally in this process, in all his diverse and diversely ventriloquised works; and even Lemuel Gulliver, retired to Newark (xl) after all his misfortunes (Newark which is, accidentally or not, an anagram for ‘wanker’), might be understood as an apostle of emancipation. To put it another way: that the often-attempted fifth book of Gulliver’s Travels is actually there, in ghostly paradigm; revealed to us as a voyage in time, into modernity; into the brave new world of “gender bending,” of sexual morphology.
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
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List of Works Cited
Archer, John and Barbara Lloyd. Sex and Gender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve. London: Virago, 1982.
10.1086/493306 :Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. Eds Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Harvester, 1981.
Clark, Paul Odell. “A Gulliver Dictionary.” Studies in Philology 50 (1953): 592-624.
10.1017/CBO9780511553462 :Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: CUP. 1990.
10.1007/978-1-349-16767-8 :Heath, Stephen. The Sexual Fix. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Lawrence, D. H. Phoenix. Ed. E. D. Macdonald. London: Heinemann, 1936. Phoenix II. Eds Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1968.
McConville, Brigid and John Shearlaw. The Slanguage of Sex. London: MacDonald. 1984.
Pollak. Ellen. The Poetics of Sexual Myth. Chicago: Chicago UP. 1985.
Rogers, Pat. “Gulliver’s Glasses.” The Art of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Clive T. Probyn. London: Vision Press, 1978.
Saintsbury, George. The Peace of the Augustans. London: OUP, 1916.
Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness.” Writing and Sexual Difference. Ed. Elizabeth Abel. London: Harvester, 1982.
10.1007/978-1-137-12357-2 :Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. 1726. Ed. Paul Turner. Oxford: OUP, 1986.
Selected Writings. Ed. John Hayward. London: Nonesuch Press, 1949.
10.1093/owc/9780199536610.001.0001 :Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
Auteur
University of Manchester
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