Since at least the 19th century readers have debated the meaning of Gulliver's fourth voyage in which he encounters the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. This handout provides a brief survey of the differing views and an opportunity for your students to weigh in on the topic.

Critics Who Believed the Houyhnhnms Were Swift’s Ideal, the Yahoos His

Misanthropic Vision of Mankind

(I believe all of the following quotations are from Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Gulliver’s Travels, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).

Many 19^th century readers and critics were offended by Swift’s scatology, especially in his depiction of the Yahoos. The novelist William Thackeray took the Yahoos to be

Swift’s misanthropic vision of mankind and warned against reading the fourth voyage: “Yahoo language; a monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind—tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene” (Quoted in Voight 7).

Another famous writer, Edmund Gosse, attributed the depiction of the Yahoos to Swift’s personal despair and madness when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels (Voight 8). (The despair was thought to have been caused by Swift’s many dashed hopes for political advancement throughout his life.)

In the mid-20^th century, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, likewise took the Yahoos as Swift’s depiction of mankind and the Houyhnhnms as his ideal. However, Orwell regarded Houyhnhnmland as a kind of precursor of the modern totalitarian state— an “extraordinarily clear pre-vision of the spy-haunted ‘police state,’ with its endless heresy-hunts and treason trials.” Regarding the role of persuasion when any disagreements arise among the rational horses, Orwell observed that public opinion is

“less tolerant than any system of law” (Quoted in Voight 83-84).

George Sherburn (1958) quotes from Swift’s letters: “I would have you know that I hate Yahoos of both Sexes, and that Stella and Madame de Villette are only tolerable at best, for want of Houyhnhnms.” He then concludes, “There can, then, obviously be no doubt that, for Swift as well as for Gulliver, the Houyhnhnms were a ne plus ultra.” He then refers to the many of virtues of the rational horses and states, “There is no evidence that Swift, though at times playful, did not share Gulliver’s opinion. In view of the evidence presented, the Houyhnhnms cannot be regarded as objects of satire” (Sherburn 94).

To explain the unappealing quality of the horses—their complete lack of emotion, the static nature of their society—Sherburn states, “The Houyhnhnms represent Swift’s clearly imperfect concept of ‘perfection of nature.’ . . . It is not strange that the portrayal of the Yahoos is far more powerful than is that of the ‘perfect’ Houyhnhnms. Depictions of hell have been in all ages more vivid and more numerous than pictures of heaven.” He goes on to explain Gulliver’s inability to reintegrate himself into human society on his return home as proof that “Swift was driving to a misanthropic conclusion.” After observing “an ideal way of life,” Gulliver was unable to accept the imperfections of human life (Sherburn 97).

The “Middle” Position (i.e., that Swift was espousing neither the Houyhnhnms nor the Yahoos)

An early 20^th-century (1926) writer who presented this middle position was the historian of ideas Theodore O. Wedel. He believed that the Yahoos were men in Hobbes’s state of nature and the Houyhnhnms the ideal of reason, which he associated with Locke. According to Wedel, Swift was “neither Hobbes nor Locke, just as Gulliver is neither Yahoo nor Houyhnhnm. . . . Gulliver, occupying a position between the two, part beast, part reason, is Swift’s allegorical picture of the dual nature of man. . . . He is rationis capax” (Quoted in Voight 88).

Raymond Bentman maintains that the disagreement over Swift’s intentions in the fourth voyage arises from misconceptions about the nature of satire, namely, that satires usually contain an “object of attack” and a “recommended alternative” (538). On the contrary, Bentman concludes that the actual objects of Swift’s satire were the “simplified ideologies” that were coming into fashion in the 18^th century. “Hence much modern criticism, which insists that the work is either for or against the Houyhnhnm ideal, extemplifies the single vision which Swift denounces, for literature is complex, as are all aspect of mankind” (535).

E.E. Sullivan distinguishes between the “hard” school of criticism that maintains that the rational horses are Swift’s ideal and the Yahoos are his misanthropic vision of mankind and the “soft” school; for the latter the Houyhnhnms are a satire of the Deist position (man as entirely rational and benevolent), the Yahoos are their complete opposite, and mankind is properly viewed as existing between the two extremes (Sullivan 497-98). He believes that “Actually Swift’s attack is an ingenious modification of the time-honored satiric strategy of comparing man with beast. In the comparison man is found wanting. Unreasoning animals act in accordance with their natural instincts. Only ‘rational animal’ is capable of perversion” (Sullivan 507). The disgust that Swift expresses toward the Yahoos is real, however. “The Yahoo served Swift as a metaphor of all those he found despicable. . . . The Yahoos represent the vehement expression of this kind of indiscriminate revulsion against the rabble, or the Irish, or politicians, or other offensive groups. In this vividly loathsome, imaginative creature Swift manages to collect much that makes mankind reprehensible” (Sullivan 509).

“Swift rather dubiously seems to want it every which way at once, so that the Yahoos both are and are not representations of ourselves, and the Houyhnhnms are and are not wholly admirable or ideal” (Bloom 9).

Martin Price cautions against confusing Gulliver with Swift, observing that Gulliver is “a matter-of-fact man, capable of minute accuracy of detail in what he reports but equally capable of total indifference to the ‘value tone’ of experience. . . . Gulliver embodies the incorrigible tendency of the mind to oversimplify experience, a trait that takes, with equal ease, the form of complacency or of misanthropy” (Price 65).

“Gulliver fails to make the most important distinction of all—between animal rationale and animal rationis capax.” By his fourth voyage he has abandoned his dream of man as a rational animal; he has belatedly recognized the corruption in European politics, but he has totally despaired of all politics. His desire to become a Houyhnhnm betrays him as “a literal-minded convert” (Price 68).

“It seems clear that Swift never meant anyone to choose between Houynhnms and Yahoos. . . . Their true importance lies in their providing the opportunity for a series of encounters on [Gulliver’s] part” (Steele 113).

“I think that the important thing, dramatically speaking, about the Houyhnhnms in the Travels is that Gulliver takes them to be an absolute authority. . . . They are his dream, the Yahoos his nightmare” (Steele 114).

Regarding Gulliver’s attack on pride at the end of the Travels, Steele points out that it “is the most extreme possible instance of pride. To take oneself for animal rationale instead of animal rationis capax, and to revile the incidental absurdities of being the latter, is, in Swift’s view, the strongest possible evidence for one’s being rationis capax, someone who stumbles into and out of reason” (Steele 119-120).

“The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms is a classic story of brainwashing: it shocks, not because Swift hates the human race, but because he shows a man’s imagination and his values taken over by the citizens of his new experience” (Donoghue 160). In other words, Gulliver’s conversion is further evidence of his limited intellect.

Essay on Gulliver’s Travels

Write a well-developed essay on one of the following topics. If you do A or B, refer to specific examples and passages and use at least one direct quotation to illustrate your points. Whichever topic you choose, show the breadth of your knowledge of Gulliver's Travels.

1. Like much science fiction today, Gulliver's Travels is a moral fable that uses the behavior of other civilizations and species to point up the needless follies of human society. The success of satires such as GT depends on the reader's ability to perform acts of abstraction and to learn from analogy; the enemy of satire is literalmindedness. Discuss.
2. Most of the follies of European society have been thoroughly ridiculed by the time Gulliver reaches Houyhnhnmland. What does the fourth voyage add to GT as a whole? Do you think Swift is speaking through Gulliver when Gulliver says, upon returning from the land of the horses and publishing his travels, "I have now done with all such visionary schemes forever"?
3. Write an imaginary scene in which a modern Gulliver tries to initiate the King of

Brobdingnag into some of the mysteries of modern society. Demonstrate your knowledge of Swift's techniques (irony, reductio ad absurdum, etc.) and of his favorite satiric targets.