The Problem of Political Allegory in "Gulliver's Travels"

Abstract

Political allegory of the kind I shall be discussing uses symbols instead of personifications and is read the same way we are accustomed to reading a historical parallel such as Absalom and Achitophel. I imagine practically every reader of Dryden's poem from 1681 down to the present time has agreed on three basic assumptions. First of all, we take for granted that each of the individual characters and groups, although provided with names taken from the Old Testament, actually represents other individuals and groups who are Dryden's real subject. Second, we assume that the relationship among these individuals and groups and the actions in which they are engaged form a single, consistent pattern which corresponds in every detail with the political situation in England at the time the poem was written. Finally, most readers would agree that, as Pope remarked to Spence, Absalom and Achitophel is a piece, that is to say, a poem which attacks one political party while defending its opposite number.' Modern critics of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature have frequently agreed on a fourth assumption about Dryden's poem: that it can be used as a paradigm for interpreting other political satires of the period which employ some kind of narrative, even when this has been invented by the author instead of being drawn from sacred history. It is not hard to find examples of this kind of criticism-the interpretations which Hardin Craig and Ward S. Miller have given to part I of Hudibras, for instance2-but I want to discuss the best known of these cases, the commonly accepted reading of the first book of Gulliver's Travels. We are so accustomed to reading the voyage to Lilliput as a continued allegory or dark conceit that it is easy to forget that this is a recently acquired habit. Readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not read the story in this fashion, if we are to judge from the editors and commentators of these eras. They saw certain allusions in Swift's description of Lilliput which they applied to contemporary England, associating Flimnap with Walpole, the enmity between Lilliput and Blefuscu with their own wars with France, the low heels and the high heels with the Whigs and the Tories; but they did not imagine that the account of Gulliver's adventures in the land of the pygmies was intended as a consistent allegory relating the political history of England in the early eighteenth century.3 As late as 1882, Sir Henry Craik could declare that in the voyage to Lilliput Swift cannot refrain altogether from references to contemporary affairs: but his side