Syphilis, Satire and Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Abstract

Taking Jonathan Swift as a surgeon-satirist who dissects both the human body and the social or communal ”health” with his satiric narratives, this paper argues that Swift's abject images of women and Yahoos in ”Gulliver's Travels” reflect his fears regarding social dangers, especially his fear of the current syphilis epidemic. These images of the microorganisms that spread the sexual disease were closely associated by Swift, a neurotic misogynist, with the barbarous and grotesque bodies of women and Yahoos, and together these represented for him the contagion of uncontrolled desire and the invasion of ”foreign bodies.” Like the surgeon who peels away the body's outer surfaces to expose its inner structure, the satirist uncovers the interior, the ”substance” of the satirized people, institutions, societies. Using his satire as a ruthless remedy for social evils, Swift ”treats” his ”patients” in something like the way the prison-hospital for syphilis inmates in eighteenth-century in Paris treated its patients: it beat and whipped them in order to cure their disease. While female bodies were commonly seen, in eighteenth-century Europe, as being responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, Swift was especially interested in the medical discovery that syphilis is caused by invasive viruses from the outside, and in his obsessively detailed, shockingly close-up ”views” of naked human bodies, most obviously those of Yahoos and Brobdingnagian women, we see the focus of the newer medical practice on external signs and symptoms rather than on ”interior examination.” In the novel's final scene Gulliver, now back home, is suffering from a form of ”syphilis madness” that causes a mental disorder corresponding to the corporeal disfigurement of syphilis. Swift the satirist will identify this horrid psychic condition with that of his Augustan contemporaries.