Political Characterization in 'Gulliver's Travels'

Abstract

From the time of its publication onwards Gulliver's Travels has been subjected to severe political analysis, and attempts have been made, with varying degrees of ingenuity, to find consistent political characterization and a foolproof political allegory. Sir Charles Firth's lecture on the political significance of Gulliver's Travels has been superseded in more recent years by Arthur Case's explanation of political allusions, especially in A Voyage to Lilliput1. Despite their inherent historical inaccuracy and subsequent attempts to elucidate Swift's meaning in terms of the little language he used in his Journal to Stella, and his undoubted fondness for nonsense words, Case's views have gained some currency and remain unchallenged. Irvin Ehrenpreis has said that 'there is not a great deal to alter in his foundations', though he did make the important distinction between the actual events of 708-I5 and Swift's own highly personalized and distorted image of them.2 While Case admits that the 'burden of proof lies on the shoulders of anyone who argues that the political allegory is consistent' in Gulliver's Travels, these admirable sentiments make no significant contribution to his subsequent efforts to convince the reader of the rightness of his argument in favour of a fairly strict political characterization, and too often we are obliged to be content with a platitudinous: 'It is hardly necessary to labor the significance of the rest of the allegory'.3 No one has questioned the identification of Flimnap as Walpole, the representation of the Orders of the Garter, the Bath, and the Thistle by the three coloured silks, the references to the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians, the high-heels and the lowheels. But the problems of pinpointing a consistent allegory remain, and considerable difficulty obscures the characterization of Skyresh Bolgolam, of Reldresal, and of Lord Munodi in A Voyage to Laputa. Can such characters be identified with any certainty, and were they, indeed, meant to represent particular men? Is the answer not merely one of reconciling the general satire of Gulliver's Travels with a desire to narrow down Swift's design? Is there not a tendency to attribute a specific aim to the darts with which he was liberally showering the contemporary political scene when the real issue is more concerned with policies and measures, and not men?