Post 6: Connect the Dots

Differences in Tone in 18th Century Travel Novels: Gulliver’s Travels and The Woman of Color

For this comparison of Gulliver’s Travels and The Woman of Colour I chose to look at passages from the start of each novel. These excerpts help set the mood for their respective stories and provide some introduction to the two main characters, Gulliver and Olivia. While these are both novels about the travels and experiences of the narrator written in an autobiographical form, their openings reveal significant differences in tone. Gulliver’s Travels is generally matter of fact in its tone while The Woman of Colour presents much more of Olivia’s personal thoughts and feelings, creating a more intimate tone.

The start of Gulliver’s Travels provides a detailed account of Gulliver’s life up until this point. This account primarily includes information about his family, his work, and his studies and it is presented in a list. The closest thing to an expression of emotion here is when he says “I always believed it would be, some time or other, my fortune to” travel (Swift, Chapter 1). This line does express Gulliver’s interest in traveling, but it does not really provide any insight into his feelings regarding his inability to travel at that time or explain why he wants to travel. The list of information and lack of emotional commentary are what create the matter of fact tone.

The use of this tone makes sense when considering what Swift is doing with the novel. He is not focusing on characters and their relationships, he is focusing on the characteristics of the places Gulliver visits and using them to satirize his contemporary society. The matter of fact tone allows Swift to achieve this more directly than an intimate focus on Gulliver would. Also, in the context of the novel Gulliver is supposedly writing for a public audience which would likely discourage him from sharing too much of his personal feelings.

The public audience of Gulliver’s Travels comes in direct contrast to the audience of The Woman of Colour, which is defined in the opening passage when Olivia mentions that she is writing to “dearest Mrs. Milbanke” (The Woman of Colour, 53). The fact that this is a correspondence between the narrator and someone she knows well and cares for, as evidenced by the use of the word “dearest”, explains why The Woman of Colour has a more intimate tone in the context of the story. The author develops this tone further with the use of emotive language, such as “your poor girl is every minute wishing for your friendly guidance” and “Every day, as it takes me farther from Jamaica… heightens my fear of the future” (The Woman of Colour, 53). From these lines we get a strong sense of Olivia’s anxieties about her current situation, something we would not see in Gulliver’s Travels.

The Woman of Colour’s tone is fitting as well. Where Swift is primarily concerned with his satirical commentary, the author of The Woman of Colour seems to have an interest in Olivia as a character and her state of mind. The Woman of Colour includes social critique as well, but the differences in tone of the opening passages suggest that it does not have the same singular focus on it that Gulliver’s Travels seems to have.

Works Cited

Anonymous. The Woman of Colour: A Tale. Edited by Lyndon J Dominique, Broadview Press,

2008.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. The Project Gutenberg, 1997.