Gulliver, throughout his adventures in the land of the Lilliputians and in the land of the Houyhnhnms, has over and over again returned to a topic one wouldn’t necessarily find to be important to this documentation of his travels. Gulliver always seems to make reference back to the state of his own body, and the dissatisfaction he feels when he remembers how he looks. For example, in the country of the Lilliputians, he feels ashamed of his need to pass excrement (even though this is a natural occurrence). He makes a big deal out of describing how he only did this out of complete necessity, and how thereafter he always made sure to do it in a more cleanly way. In the country of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver became disgusted with his body because he associated it with the bodies of the Yahoos. It got to the point where Gulliver even began to act like a horse – he would hold himself as a horse, “trot” like a horse, and even imitate their speech. Gulliver’s discomfort with his own body always came as a result of examining the majority beings’ bodies. Gulliver felt out of place in his own skin. This phenomenon reminded me of the way that black bodies were treated. When black Africans were uprooted from Africa and brought to the Americas, the justifications given for this were that black bodies were inferior to white bodies. As time went on, this idea was drilled into the minds of Africana people, to the point where very few of them could feel comfortable in their own skin. Gulliver’s examination of his own body could perhaps be taken as a gesturing to these experiences, as the slave trade had been going on for centuries at that time.
3 Replies to “Gulliver’s Feelings on His Body”
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Another reason for Gulliver’s self-consciousness arises from his lack of proper resources to take care of his body. The Lilliputians think it is gross when Gulliver relieves himself, but they don’t build him a proper place to do so. This also connects to your thoughts on the views of black bodies. For migrant workers and slaves, there were no proper spaces for them to use the bathroom or take care of their bodies. This adds to the view of these workers and slaves as unclean, when they were not given the opportunity to be clean.
To add on to those ideas, the other thing I thought was odd about the choice of a horse as the best, was that the role of horses as beasts of burden was never brought up in Gulliver’s description of horses in Europe. Horses, while often treated very well in wealthy households , are still used to complete menial labor, pulling large burdens, living sometimes in their own refuse and being sold for their ability to breed. I think this omission can be used to even further the comparison being drawn — that even the animals that we rode around on, very literally beneath us can be given preferential treatment over a human being.
I agree with the comparison drawn between Gulliver’s view of his own body and the racist white view of black bodies, as I touch on a little in my own blog post. But I find it interesting that Gulliver’s preferred alternative to the “disgusting” human body is the form of a horse. Horses, while respected by people of Swift’s time for the purpose of riding, are far grosser than human beings in my opinion. If you ever go to a stable, the first thing you notice is the smell. The horses reeks of excrement. Yet, Gulliver chooses to live inside a horse stable when he arrives back in England. I think Swift’s choice to use the horse as the most rational being must be part of the satire due to the juxtaposition between white men’s reverence of horses as a pet and a means of transportation and their disgust of African people. As pets/vehicles, horses may have been treated more like people by whites than slaves were, thus inspiring Swift to make the ridiculous decision of portraying horses as the most rational beings on the planet.