This week I thought a lot about Gulliver as a reputable and trustworthy character. While relatively neutral in part one, I found Gulliver to be very unlikeable in part four. This was mostly due to his rejection of his family and all of humanity as he comes to believe he is above them after his time with the Houyhnhnms. Is this forgivable? Gulliver spurns his wife and children to the point of only letting his wife eat all the way across the table from him. He cannot stand the smell of his wife or the sight of his children. But, Gulliver rejects them because he has no home. He is constantly on the move, feeling out of place where-ever he ends up. With the Lilliputians, he is a giant unable to be sustained by their society. To the Houyhnhnms, he is a yahoo – a kind of pet for them to play and converse with but never fully relate to. While this does not fully excuse Gulliver’s rejection of his family and the rest of humanity, it helps me understand why he makes this ultimate decision. If he never feels at home, how can he reintegrate himself within society without a certain sense of trust and companionship?
Gulliver is very similar to Helga Crane in Quicksand. Quicksand is about a young biracial woman who struggles to find a home as she moves between America and Denmark. After being rejected by her European relatives, Helga moves schools, communities, and countries, always feeling as though she is in-between or out of place. She doesn’t fit in with the strict atmosphere in the school she teaches in, Harlem’s rigid ideas of race, or the lavish Denmark lifestyle. She ends up in an unhappy marriage and fails to find fulfillment in every move she takes. This novel has a very pessimistic outlook, matching the tone of Gulliver’s Travels. Helga and Gulliver both end up unhappy without a home or family, due to their constant movement and rejection. Looking at Gulliver through the lens of Helga Crane, I can understand his rejection of humanity as not just thinking he is “above”, but that he does not belong.
I agree with this assessment of Gulliver at the end of the novel. His rejection of his family in particular is hard to swallow and makes his already ridiculous figure even harder to like. The example of Helga Crane is very helpful in thinking about Gulliver in potentially kinder and more realistic terms — it both demonstrates the more universal nature of Gulliver’s Travels and allows us to consider the wider and more nuanced socio-political landscape of Gulliver’s era. While we cannot get around the hierarchy in which Gulliver participates in his analyses of the peoples he encounters, by framing him as a rejected in-between himself, we can better read his rejection of humanity — a rejection of a category he felt had already rejected him.