MAE604_Early British Fiction

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 45 which he finds repulsive but which the Yahoo devours. The horses determine that he likes milk and give him large amounts of it to drink. Another horse comes to dine, and they all take great pleasure in teaching Gulliver to pronounce words in their language. They cannot determine what he might like to eat until Gulliver suggests that he could make bread from their oats. He is given a place to sleep with straw for the time being. Summary – Chapter 3 Gulliver endeavors to learn the horses’ language, and they are impressed by his intellect and curiosity. After three months, he can answer most of their questions and tries to explain that he comes from across the sea, but the horses, or Houyhnhnms, do not believe that such a thing is possible. They think that Gulliver is some kind of Yahoo, though superior to the rest of his species. He asks them to stop using that word to refer to him, and they consent. Summary – Chapter 4 Gulliver tries to explain that the Yahoos are the governing creatures where he comes from, and the Houyhnhnms ask how their horses are employed. Gulliver explains that they are used for traveling, racing and drawing chariots, and the Houyhnhnms express disbelief that anything as weak as a Yahoo would dare to mount a horse that was so much stronger than it. Gulliver explains that the horses are trained from a young age to be tame and obedient. He describes the state of humanity in Europe and is asked to speak more specifically of his own country. Analysis of Part IV – Chapters 1-4 In the fourth voyage, Gulliver reaches a stage at which he no longer cares for humankind at all, though in this section, we see only the beginnings of his transformation. After visiting countries in which he is too large, too small, and too down-to-earth, he finds himself in a country where he is neither rational nor moral enough, stuck in the limbo between the humane Houyhnhnms and the untamed, unruly Yahoos. In these chapters, we see the rough outline of Houyhnhnm society, which Gulliver finds pleasant but still alien. In the next section, he attempts to become a part of this society. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

46 Early British Fiction In the meantime, we are treated to a description of the Houyhnhnms’ society. Swift plays a clever trick in the first two chapters, obscuring the true nature of the Houyhnhnms so that we follow Gulliver in his mistaken belief that the horses are magicians or the servants of a magician. Instead of telling us outright that the horses are intelligent, Swift allows us to discover this fact through Gulliver’s eyes. As a result, what looks strange to Gulliver also looks strange to us, and at some point in the description of the horses’ behavior, we realize that there is nothing more to these creatures than meets the eye. Instead of being tools of humans, the horses are revealed to be intelligent in their own right. In one stroke, they go from being a manifestation of humanity to something utterly nonhuman. There are a number of differences between the first three voyages and the fourth. Three of these differences are particularly important because they signal changes in the overall satirical thrust of the novel: Gulliver finds himself not among fellow humans, however distorted in size or culture, but among a race of horses; instead of being happy to leave, he is eager to stay; and instead of seeing the world through his eyes, we are forced to step back and look at Gulliver himself as an important, though not always sympathetic, player in the drama. In other ways, these chapters are similar to the initial chapters of the other voyages. Gulliver arrives in a strange land, becomes the guest or prisoner of the people who live there, learns their language, and slowly begins to learn about their culture and tell them about European culture. The major difference here is that the humans, or Yahoos, are not his hosts. Instead, they are vile creatures that get nothing but his contempt. In his descriptions of the Yahoos, Swift uses the technique of describing the familiar in unfamiliar terms. Only slowly does it dawn on us that the Yahoos are humans. As with the realization that the Houyhnhnms are intelligent in their own right, the sudden shock—which we experience along with Gulliver—of recognizing the Yahoos for what they are strengthens the impact of the description. 3.3 Summary and Analysis of Part IV – Chapters 5-12 Summary – Chapter 5 Over the course of two years, Gulliver describes the state of affairs in Europe, speaking to his Houyhnhnm master about the English Revolution and the war with France. He is asked to explain CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 47 the causes of war, and he does his best to provide reasons. He is also asked to speak of law and the justice system, which he does in some detail, criticizing lawyers severely in the process. Summary – Chapter 6 The discussion then turns to other topics, such as money and the different kinds of food eaten in Europe. Gulliver explains the different occupations in which people are involved, including service professions such as medicine and construction. Summary – Chapter 7 Gulliver develops such a love for the Houyhnhnms that he no longer desires to return to humankind. His master tells him that he has considered all of Gulliver’s claims about his home country and has come to the conclusion that Gulliver’s people are not so different from the Yahoos as they may at first have seemed. He describes all the flaws of the Yahoos, principally detailing their greed and selfishness. He admits that Gulliver’s humans have different systems of learning, law, government and art, but says that their natures are not different from those of the Yahoos. Summary – Chapter 8 Gulliver wants to observe the similarities between Yahoos and humans for himself. So, he asks to go among the Yahoos. He finds them to be very nimble from infancy but unable to learn anything. They are strong, cowardly and malicious. The principle virtues of the Houyhnhnms are their friendship and benevolence. They are concerned more with the community than with their own personal advantages, even choosing their mates so as to promote the race as a whole. They breed industriousness, cleanliness and civility in their young and exercise them for speed and strength. Summary – Chapter 9 Gulliver’s master attends a Grand Assembly of Houyhnhnms, where the horses debate whether or not to extinguish the Yahoos from the face of the Earth. Gulliver’s master suggests that instead of killing them, they should, as the Europeans do with their horses, merely castrate them. Eventually, unable to breed, the Yahoos will die out, and in the meantime, the Houyhnhnms can breed asses to take their place. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

48 Early British Fiction Gulliver then describes further aspects of the Houyhnhnms’ society. They create excellent poetry, have a sound knowledge of medicinal herbs, build simple houses, and usually live about seventy or seventy-five years, dying of old age. They feel no sorrow about death, accepting it as a routine element of life. They have no writing system and no word to express anything evil. Summary – Chapter 10 A room is made for Gulliver, and he furnishes it well. He also makes new clothes for himself and settles into life with the Houyhnhnms quite easily. He begins to think of his friends and family back home as Yahoos. However, he is called by his master and told that others have taken offense at his being kept in the house as a Houyhnhnm. The master has no choice but to ask Gulliver to leave. Gulliver is very upset to hear that he is to be banished. He builds a canoe with the help of a fellow-servant and departs sadly. Summary – Chapter 11 Gulliver does not want to return to Europe, and so he begins to search for an island where he can live as he likes. He finds land and discovers natives there. He is struck by an arrow and tries to escape the natives’ darts by paddling out to sea. He sees a sail in the distance and thinks of going toward it, but then decides he would rather live with the Barbarians than the European Yahoos. So, he hides from the ship. The seamen, including Don Pedro de Mendez, discover him after landing near his hiding place. They question him, laughing at his strange horse-like manner of speaking, and cannot understand his desire to escape from their ship. Don Pedro treats Gulliver’s hospitably, offering him food, drink, and clothes, but Gulliver can think of him only as a Yahoo and is thus repulsed by him. Gulliver is forced to travel back to England, where he returns to his family, which has been convinced that he is dead. He is filled with disgust and contempt for them. For a year, he cannot stand to be near his wife and children, and he buys two horses and converses with them for four hours each day. Summary – Chapter 12 Here commences a New Dominion ... the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 49 Gulliver concludes his narrative by acknowledging that the law requires him to report his findings to the government but that he can see no military advantage in attacking any of the locations he discovered. Moreover, he particularly wishes to protect the Houyhnhnms. [W]hen I behold a Lump of Deformity ... it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience. Analysis of Part IV – Chapters 5-12 The desire that Gulliver experiences to live among the animals persists in European literature. This desire is echoed later by the Romantics, who, writing in the nineteenth century, idealized pastoral simplicity and a return to nature. In the case of the Romantics, however, this love of nature was a response to the urbanization and industrialization of European society. In Swift’s case, the return to nature is a two-pronged tool for satire, skewering both human civilization itself and those who would look to animals for a model of how to live. For the first time, Gulliver finds himself wanting to stay in exile from humanity, but he is not given the choice. He is appalled by the idea of going to live among the Yahoos, and he has so fully adopted the belief system of the Houyhnhnms that he cannot help but see his wife and children as primitive, ugly, beast-like creatures. But at the same time, he realizes that he has been living with the Houyhnhnms on borrowed time, pretending only half-successfully to be as rational as they are. The simplicity of the Houyhnhnms’ world attracts him, but it is not a world in which he is allowed to live. In the end, he is forced to return to the world from which he came—a single world that encompasses all of the flaws and complexities he has encountered in his travels. But even there Gulliver cannot rest easy. Having seen the things he has, the world of Yahoos is contemptible and disgusting to him. Barely able to tolerate the presence of his family, he retreats into a kind of madness, spending his days talking to the horses in his stable as if to recreate the idyll of Houyhnhnm land. In the first three voyages, it is easy to identify with Gulliver, but in the last voyage, he becomes so alienated from humanity that it is difficult to sympathize with him. This shift in our loyalty is accompanied by a shift in the method of satire. Whereas in the first voyages, we can look through Gulliver’s eyes—sharing his astonishment at the Lilliputians’ miniature society, his CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

50 Early British Fiction discomfort at being the plaything of the Brobdingnagian giants, and his contempt for the tyrannical intellectualism of the Laputans—here, in the fourth voyage, we are forced to step back and look not with Gulliver, but at him. Although in some ways, the Houyhnhnms are the ideal for which Gulliver strives unsuccessfully among his fellow humans; in another way, they are just as much the victims of Swift’s satire as the peoples of the first three voyages. Paragons of virtue and rationality, the horses are also dull, simple and lifeless. Their language is impoverished, their mating loveless and their understanding of the complex play of social forces naïve. What is missing in the horses is exactly that which makes human life rich: the complicated interplay of selfishness, altruism, love, hate and all other emotions. In other words, the Houyhnhnms’ society is perfect for Houyhnhnms, but it is hopeless for humans. Houyhnhnm society is, in stark contrast to the societies of the first three voyages, devoid of all that is human. 3.4 Character List Gulliver The narrator and protagonist of the story. Although Lemuel Gulliver’s vivid and detailed style of narration makes it clear that he is intelligent and well educated, his perceptions are naïve and gullible. He has virtually no emotional life, or at least no awareness of it, and his comments are strictly factual. Indeed, sometimes his obsession with the facts of navigation, for example, becomes unbearable for us, as his fictional editor, Richard Sympson, makes clear when he explains having had to cut out nearly half of Gulliver’s verbiage. Gulliver never thinks that the absurdities he encounters are funny and never makes the satiric connections between the lands he visits and his own home. Gulliver’s naïveté makes the satire possible, as we pick up on things that Gulliver does not notice. The Emperor The ruler of Lilliput. Like all Lilliputians, the emperor is fewer than six inches tall. His power and majesty impress Gulliver deeply, but to us, he appears both laughable and sinister. Because of his tiny size, his belief that he can control Gulliver seems silly, but his willingness to execute his subjects for minor reasons of politics or honor gives him a frightening aspect. He is CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 51 proud of possessing the tallest trees and biggest palace in the kingdom, but he is also quite hospitable, spending a fortune on his captive’s food. The emperor is both a satire of the autocratic ruler and a strangely serious portrait of political power. The Farmer Gulliver’s first master in Brobdingnag. The farmer speaks to Gulliver, showing that he is willing to believe that the relatively tiny Gulliver may be as rational as he himself is, and treats him with gentleness. However, the farmer puts Gulliver on display around Brobdingnag, which clearly shows that he would rather profit from his discovery than converse with him as an equal. His exploitation of Gulliver as a laborer, which nearly starves Gulliver to death, seems less cruel than simple-minded. Generally, the farmer represents the average Brobdingnagian of no great gifts or intelligence, wielding an extraordinary power over Gulliver simply by virtue of his immense size. Glumdalclitch The farmer’s nine-year-old daughter, who is forty feet tall. Glumdalclitch becomes Gulliver’s friend and nursemaid, hanging him to sleep safely in her closet at night and teaching him the Brobdingnagian language by day. She is skilled at sewing and makes Gulliver several sets of new clothes, taking delight in dressing him. When the queen discovers that no one at court is suited to care for Gulliver, she invites Glumdalclitch to live at court as his sole babysitter, a function she performs with great seriousness and attentiveness. To Glumdalclitch, Gulliver is basically a living doll, symbolizing the general status Gulliver has in Brobdingnag. The Queen The queen of Brobdingnag, who is so delighted by Gulliver’s beauty and charms that she agrees to buy him from the farmer for 1,000 pieces of gold. Gulliver appreciates her kindness after the hardships he suffers at the farmer’s place and shows his usual fawning love for royalty by kissing the tip of her little finger when presented before her. She possesses, in Gulliver’s words, “infinite” wit and humor, though this description may entail a bit of Gulliver’s characteristic flattery of superiors. The queen seems genuinely considerate, asking Gulliver whether he would consent to live at court instead of simply taking him in as a pet and inquiring CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

52 Early British Fiction into the reasons for his cold good-byes with the farmer. She is by no means a hero, but simply a pleasant, powerful person. The King The king of Brobdingnag, who, in contrast to the emperor of Lilliput, seems to be a true intellectual, well versed in political science among other disciplines. While his wife has an intimate, friendly relationship with the diminutive visitor, the king’s relation to Gulliver is limited to serious discussions about the history and institutions of Gulliver’s native land. He is, thus, a figure of rational thought who somewhat prefigures the Houyhnhnms in Book IV. Lord Munodi A lord of Lagado, capital of the underdeveloped land beneath Laputa, who hosts Gulliver and gives him a tour of the country on Gulliver’s third voyage. Munodi is a rare example of practical- minded intelligence both in Lagado, where the applied sciences are wildly impractical, and in Laputa, where no one even considers practicality a virtue. He fell from grace with the ruling elite by counseling a commonsense approach to agriculture and land management in Lagado, an approach that was rejected even though it proved successful when applied to his own flourishing estate. Lord Munodi serves as a reality check for Gulliver on his third voyage, an objective- minded contrast to the theoretical delusions of the other inhabitants of Laputa and Lagado. Yahoos Unkempt human-like beasts who live in servitude to the Houyhnhnms. Yahoos seem to belong to various ethnic groups, since there are blond Yahoos as well as dark-haired and redheaded ones. The men are characterized by their hairy bodies, and the women by their low- hanging breasts. They are naked, filthy and extremely primitive in their eating habits. Yahoos are not capable of government, and thus they are kept as servants to the Houyhnhnms, pulling their carriages and performing manual tasks. They repel Gulliver with their lascivious sexual appetites, especially when an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl attempts to rape Gulliver as he is bathing naked. Yet despite Gulliver’s revulsion for these disgusting creatures, he ends his writings referring to himself as a Yahoo, just as the Houyhnhnms do as they regretfully evict him from their realm. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 53 Thus, “Yahoo” becomes another term for human, at least in the semi-deranged and self-loathing mind of Gulliver at the end of his fourth journey. Houyhnhnms Rational horses who maintain a simple, peaceful society governed by reason and truthfulness—they do not even have a word for “lie” in their language. Houyhnhnms are like ordinary horses, except that they are highly intelligent and deeply wise. They live in a sort of socialist republic, with the needs of the community put before individual desires. They are the masters of the Yahoos, the savage human-like creatures in Houyhnhnm land. In all, the Houyhnhnms have the greatest impact on Gulliver throughout all his four voyages. He is grieved to leave them, not relieved as he is in leaving the other three lands, and back in England, he relates better with his horses than with his human family. The Houyhnhnms, thus, are a measure of the extent to which Gulliver has become a misanthrope, or “human-hater”; he is certainly, at the end, a horse lover. Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm Master The Houyhnhnm who first discovers Gulliver and takes him into his own home. Wary of Gulliver’s Yahoo-like appearance at first, the master is hesitant to make contact with him, but Gulliver’s ability to mimic the Houyhnhnm’s own words persuades the master to protect Gulliver. The master’s domestic cleanliness, propriety and tranquil reasonableness of speech have an extraordinary impact on Gulliver. It is through this horse that Gulliver is led to reevaluate the differences between humans and beasts, and to question humanity’s claims to rationality. Don Pedro De Mendez The Portuguese captain who takes Gulliver back to Europe after he is forced to leave the land of the Houyhnhnms. Don Pedro is naturally benevolent and generous, offering the half-crazed Gulliver his own best suit of clothes to replace the tatters he is wearing. But Gulliver meets his generosity with repulsion, as he cannot bear the company of Yahoos. By the end of the voyage, Don Pedro has won over Gulliver to the extent that he is able to have a conversation with him, but the captain’s overall Yahoolike nature in Gulliver’s eyes alienates him from Gulliver to the very end. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

54 Early British Fiction Brobdingnagians Giants whom Gulliver meets on his second voyage. Brobdingnagians are basically a reasonable and kindly people governed by a sense of justice. Even the farmer who abuses Gulliver at the beginning is gentle with him, and politely takes the trouble to say good-bye to him upon leaving him. The farmer’s daughter, Glumdalclitch, gives Gulliver perhaps the most kindhearted treatment he receives on any of his voyages. The Brobdingnagians do not exploit him for personal or political reasons, as the Lilliputians do, and his life there is one of satisfaction and quietude. But the Brobdingnagians do treat Gulliver as a plaything. When he tries to speak seriously with the king of Brobdingnag about England, the king dismisses the English as odious vermin, showing that deep discussion is not possible for Gulliver here. Lilliputians and Blefuscudians Two races of miniature people whom Gulliver meets on his first voyage. Lilliputians and Blefuscudians are prone to conspiracies and jealousies, and while they treat Gulliver well enough materially, they are quick to take advantage of him in political intrigues of various sorts. The two races have been in a longstanding war with each over the interpretation of a reference in their common holy scripture to the proper way to eat eggs. Gulliver helps the Lilliputians defeat the Blefuscudian navy, but he eventually leaves Lilliput and receives a warm welcome in the court of Blefuscu, by which Swift satirizes the arbitrariness of international relations. Laputans Absentminded intellectuals who live on the floating island of Laputa, encountered by Gulliver on his third voyage. The Laputans are parodies of theoreticians, who have scant regard for any practical results of their own research. They are so inwardly absorbed in their own thoughts that they must be shaken out of their meditations by special servants called flappers, who shake rattles in their ears. During Gulliver’s stay among them, they do not mistreat him, but are generally unpleasant and dismiss him as intellectually deficient. They do not care about down-to- earth things like the dilapidation of their own houses, but worry intensely about abstract matters like the trajectories of comets and the course of the sun. They are dependent in their own material needs on the land below them, called Lagado, above which they hover by virtue of a magnetic field, and from which they periodically raise up food supplies. In the larger context of Gulliver’s CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 55 journeys, the Laputans are a parody of the excesses of theoretical pursuits and the uselessness of purely abstract knowledge. Mary Burton Gulliver Gulliver’s wife, whose perfunctory mention in the first paragraphs of Gulliver’s Travels demonstrates how unsentimental and unemotional Gulliver is. He makes no reference to any affection for his wife, either here or later in his travels when he is far away from her, and his detachment is so cool as to raise questions about his ability to form human attachments. When he returns to England, she is merely one part of his former existence, and he records no emotion even as she hugs him wildly. The most important facts about her in Gulliver’s mind are her social origin and the income she generates. Richard Sympson Gulliver’s cousin, self-proclaimed intimate friend, and the editor and publisher of Gulliver’s Travels. It was in Richard Sympson’s name that Jonathan Swift arranged for the publication of his narrative, thus somewhat mixing the fictional and actual worlds. Sympson is the fictional author of the prefatory note to Gulliver’s Travels, entitled “The Publisher to the Readers.” This note justifies Sympson’s elimination of nearly half of the original manuscript material on the grounds that it was irrelevant, a statement that Swift includes so as to allow us to doubt Gulliver’s overall wisdom and ability to distinguish between important facts and trivial details. James Bates An eminent London surgeon under whom Gulliver serves as an apprentice after graduating from Cambridge. Bates helps get Gulliver his first job as a ship’s surgeon and then offers to set up a practice with him. After Bates’ death, Gulliver has trouble maintaining the business, a failure that casts doubt on his competence, though he himself has other explanations for the business’s failure. Bates is hardly mentioned in the travels, though he is surely at least as responsible for Gulliver’s welfare as some of the more exotic figures Gulliver meets. Nevertheless, Gulliver fleshes out figures such as the queen of Brobdingnag much more thoroughly in his narrative, underscoring the sharp contrast between his reticence regarding England and his long-windedness about foreigners. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

56 Early British Fiction Abraham Pannell The commander of the ship on which Gulliver first sails, the Swallow. Traveling to the Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean, and beyond, Gulliver spends three-and-a-half years on Pannell’s ship. Virtually nothing is mentioned about Pannell, which heightens our sense that Gulliver’s fascination with exotic types is not matched by any interest in his fellow countrymen. William Prichard The master of the Antelope, the ship on which Gulliver embarks for the South Seas at the outset of his first journey, in 1699. When the Antelope sinks, Gulliver is washed ashore on Lilliput. No details are given about the personality of Prichard, and he is not important in Gulliver’s life or in the unfolding of the novel’s plot. That Gulliver takes pains to name him accurately reinforces our impression that he is obsessive about facts but not always reliable in assessing overall significance. Flimnap The Lord High Treasurer of Lilliput, who conceives a jealous hatred for Gulliver when he starts believing that his wife is having an affair with him. Flimnap is clearly paranoid, since the possibility of a love affair between Gulliver and a Lilliputian is wildly unlikely. Flimnap is a portrait of the weaknesses of character to which any human is prone but that become especially dangerous in those who wield great power. Reldresal The Principal Secretary of Private Affairs in Lilliput, who explains to Gulliver the history of the political tensions between the two principal parties in the realm, the High-Heels and the Low- Heels. Reldresal is more a source of much-needed information for Gulliver than a well-developed personality, but he does display personal courage and trust in allowing Gulliver to hold him in his palm while he talks politics. Within the convoluted context of Lilliput’s factions and conspiracies, such friendliness reminds us that fond personal relations may still exist even in this overheated political climate. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 57 Skyresh Bolgolam The High Admiral of Lilliput, who is the only member of the administration to oppose Gulliver’s liberation. Gulliver imagines that Skyresh’s enmity is simply personal, though there is no apparent reason for such hostility. Arguably, Skyresh’s hostility may be merely a tool to divert Gulliver from the larger system of Lilliputian exploitation to which he is subjected. Tramecksan Also known as the High Heels, a Lilliputian political group reminiscent of the British Tories. Tramecksan policies are said to be more agreeable to the ancient constitution of Lilliput, and while the High Heels appear greater in number than the Low Heels, their power is lesser. Unlike the king, the crown prince is believed to sympathize with the Tramecksan, wearing one low heel and one high heel, causing him to limp slightly. Slamecksan The Low Heels, a Lilliputian political group reminiscent of the British Whigs. The king has ordained that all governmental administrators must be selected from this party, much to the resentment of the High Heels of the realm. Thus, while there are fewer Slamecksan than Tramecksan in Lilliput, their political power is greater. The king’s own sympathies with the Slamecksan are evident in the slightly lower heels he wears at court. Lemuel Gulliver Although Gulliver is a bold adventurer who visits a multitude of strange lands, it is difficult to regard him as truly heroic. Even well before his slide into misanthropy at the end of the book, he simply does not show the stuff of which grand heroes are made. He is not cowardly—on the contrary, he undergoes the unnerving experiences of nearly being devoured by a giant rat, taken captive by pirates, shipwrecked on faraway shores, sexually assaulted by an eleven-year-old girl, and shot in the face with poison arrows. Additionally, the isolation from humanity that he endures for sixteen years must be hard to bear, though Gulliver rarely talks about such matters. Yet despite the courage Gulliver shows throughout his voyages, his character lacks basic greatness. This impression could be due to the fact that he rarely shows his feelings, reveals his soul, or CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

58 Early British Fiction experiences great passions of any sort. But other literary adventurers, like Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, seem heroic without being particularly open about their emotions. What seems most lacking in Gulliver is not courage or feelings, but drive. One modern critic has described Gulliver as possessing the smallest will in all of Western literature: he is simply devoid of a sense of mission, a goal that would make his wandering into a quest. Odysseus’s goal is to get home again, Aeneas’s goal in Virgil’s Aeneid is to find Rome, but Gulliver’s goal on his sea voyage is uncertain. He says that he needs to make some money after the failure of his business, but he rarely mentions finances throughout the work and indeed almost never even mentions home. He has no awareness of any greatness in what he is doing or what he is working toward. In short, he has no aspirations. When he leaves home on his travels for the first time, he gives no impression that he regards himself as undertaking a great endeavor or embarking on a thrilling new challenge. We may also note Gulliver’s lack of ingenuity and savvy. Other great travelers, such as Odysseus, get themselves out of dangerous situations by exercising their wit and ability to trick others. Gulliver seems too dull for any battles of wit and too unimaginative to think up tricks, and thus he ends up being passive in most of the situations in which he finds himself. He is held captive several times throughout his voyages, but he is never once released through his own stratagems, relying instead on chance factors for his liberation. Once presented with a way out, he works hard to escape, as when he repairs the boat he finds that delivers him from Blefuscu, but he is never actively ingenious in attaining freedom. This example summarizes quite well Gulliver’s intelligence, which is factual and practical rather than imaginative or introspective. Gulliver is gullible, as his name suggests. For example, he misses the obvious ways in which the Lilliputians exploit him. While he is quite adept at navigational calculations and the humdrum details of seafaring, he is far less able to reflect on himself or his nation in any profoundly critical way. Traveling to such different countries and returning to England in between each voyage, he seems poised to make some great anthropological speculations about cultural differences around the world, about how societies are similar despite their variations or different despite their similarities. But, frustratingly, Gulliver gives us nothing of the sort. He provides us only with literal facts and narrative events, never with any generalizing or philosophizing. He is a self- CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 59 hating, self-proclaimed Yahoo at the end, announcing his misanthropy quite loudly, but even this attitude is difficult to accept as the moral of the story. Gulliver is not a figure with whom we identify but, rather, part of the array of personalities and behaviors about which we must make judgments. The Queen of Brobdingnag The Brobdingnagian queen is hardly a well-developed character in this novel, but she is important in one sense: she is one of the very few females in Gulliver’s Travels who is given much notice. Gulliver’s own wife is scarcely even mentioned, even at what one would expect to be the touching moment of homecoming at the end of the fourth voyage. Gulliver seems little more than indifferent to his wife. The farmer’s daughter in Brobdingnag wins some of Gulliver’s attention but chiefly because she cares for him so tenderly. Gulliver is courteous to the empress of Lilliput but presumably mainly because she is royalty. The queen of Brobdingnag, however, arouses some deeper feelings in Gulliver that go beyond her royal status. He compliments her effusively, as he does no other female personage in the work, calling her infinitely witty and humorous. He describes in proud detail the manner in which he is permitted to kiss the tip of her little finger. For her part, the queen seems earnest in her concern about Gulliver’s welfare. When her court dwarf insults him, she gives the dwarf away to another household as punishment. The interaction between Gulliver and the queen hints that Gulliver is indeed capable of emotional connections. Lord Munodi Lord Munodi is a minor character, but he plays the important role of showing the possibility of individual dissent within a brainwashed community. While the inhabitants of Lagado pursue their attempts to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and to eliminate all verbs and adjectives from their language, Munodi is a rare example of practical intelligence. Having tried unsuccessfully to convince his fellows of their misguided public policies, he has given up and is content to practice what he preaches on his own estates. In his kindness to strangers, Munodi is also a counterexample to the contemptuous treatment that the other Laputians and Lagadans show Gulliver. He takes his guest on a tour of the kingdom, explains the advantages of his own estates without boasting, and is, in general, a figure of great common sense and humanity amid CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

60 Early British Fiction theoretical delusions and impractical fantasizing. As a figure isolated from his community, Munodi is similar to Gulliver, though Gulliver is unaware of his alienation while Munodi suffers acutely from his. Indeed, in Munodi we glimpse what Gulliver could be if he were wiser: a figure able to think critically about life and society. Don Pedro de Mendez Don Pedro is a minor character in terms of plot, but he plays an important symbolic role at the end of the novel. He treats the half-deranged Gulliver with great patience, even tenderness, when he allows him to travel on his ship as far as Lisbon, offering to give him his own finest suit of clothes to replace the seaman’s tatters, and giving him twenty pounds for his journey – home to England. Don Pedro never judges Gulliver, despite Gulliver’s abominably anti-social behavior on the trip back. Ironically, though Don Pedro shows the same kind of generosity and understanding that Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master earlier shows him, Gulliver still considers Don Pedro a repulsive Yahoo. Were Gulliver able to escape his own delusions, he might be able to see the Houyhnhnm-like reasonableness and kindness in Don Pedro’s behavior. Don Pedro is, thus, the touchstone through which we see that Gulliver is no longer a reliable and objective commentator on the reality he sees but, rather, a skewed observer of a reality colored by private delusions. Mary Burton Gulliver Gulliver’s wife is mentioned only briefly at the beginning of the novel and appears only for an instant at the conclusion. Gulliver never thinks about Mary on his travels and never feels guilty about his lack of attention to her. A dozen far more trivial characters get much greater attention than she receives. She is, in this respect, the opposite of Odysseus’s wife Penelope in the Odyssey, who is never far from her husband’s thoughts and is the final destination of his journey. Mary’s neglected presence in Gulliver’s narrative gives her a certain claim to importance. It suggests that despite Gulliver’s curiosity about new lands and exotic races, he is virtually indifferent to those people closest to him. His lack of interest in his wife bespeaks his underdeveloped inner life. Gulliver is a man of skill and knowledge in certain practical matters, but he is disadvantaged in self-reflection, personal interactions, and perhaps overall wisdom. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 61 3.5 Themes Might versus Right Gulliver’s Travels implicitly poses the question of whether physical power or moral righteousness should be the governing factor in social life. Gulliver experiences the advantages of physical might both as one who has it, as a giant in Lilliput where he can defeat the Blefuscudian navy by virtue of his immense size, and as one who does not have it, as a miniature visitor to Brobdingnag where he is harassed by the hugeness of everything from insects to household pets. His first encounter with another society is one of entrapment, when he is physically tied down by the Lilliputians; later, in Brobdingnag, he is enslaved by a farmer. He also observes physical force used against others, as with the Houyhnhnms’ chaining up of the Yahoos. But alongside the use of physical force, there are also many claims to power based on moral correctness. The whole point of the egg controversy that has set Lilliput against Blefuscu is not merely a cultural difference but, instead, a religious and moral issue related to the proper interpretation of a passage in their holy book. This difference of opinion seems to justify, in their eyes at least, the warfare it has sparked. Similarly, the use of physical force against the Yahoos is justified for the Houyhnhnms by their sense of moral superiority: they are cleaner, better behaved, and more rational. But overall, the novel tends to show that claims to rule on the basis of moral righteousness are often just as arbitrary as, and sometimes simply disguises for, simple physical subjugation. The Laputans keep the lower land of Balnibarbi in check through force because they believe themselves to be more rational, even though we might see them as absurd and unpleasant. Similarly, the ruling elite of Balnibarbi believes itself to be in the right in driving Lord Munodi from power, although we perceive that Munodi is the rational party. Claims to moral superiority are, in the end, as hard to justify as the random use of physical force to dominate others. The Individual versus Society Like many narratives about voyages to non-existent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

62 Early British Fiction works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies and backstabbing. The Houyhnhnms also practice strict family planning, dictating that the parents of two females should exchange a child with a family of two males, so that the male-to-female ratio is perfectly maintained. Indeed, they come closer to the utopian ideal than the Lilliputians in their wisdom and rational simplicity. But there is something unsettling about the Houyhnhnms’ indistinct personalities and about how they are the only social group that Gulliver encounters who do not have proper names. Despite minor physical differences, they are all so good and rational that they are more or less interchangeable, without individual identities. In their absolute fusion with their society and lack of individuality, they are in a sense the exact opposite of Gulliver, who has hardly any sense of belonging to his native society and exists only as an individual eternally wandering the seas. Gulliver’s intense grief when forced to leave the Houyhnhnms may have something to do with his longing for union with a community in which he can lose his human identity. In any case, such a union is impossible for him, since he is not a horse, and all the other societies he visits make him feel alienated as well. Gulliver’s Travels could, in fact, be described as one of the first novels of modern alienation, focusing on an individual’s repeated failures to integrate into societies to which he does not belong. England itself is not much of a homeland for Gulliver, and, with his surgeon’s business unprofitable and his father’s estate insufficient to support him, he may be right to feel alienated from it. He never speaks fondly or nostalgically about England, and every time he returns home, he is quick to leave again. Gulliver never complains explicitly about feeling lonely, but the embittered and anti-social misanthrope we see at the end of the novel is clearly a profoundly isolated individual. Thus, if Swift’s satire mocks the excesses of communal life, it may also mock the excesses of individualism in its portrait of a miserable and lonely Gulliver talking to his horses at home in England. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 63 The Limits of Human Understanding The idea that humans are not meant to know everything and that all understanding has a natural limit is important in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift singles out theoretical knowledge in particular for attack: his portrait of the disagreeable and self-centered Laputans, who show blatant contempt for those who are not sunk in private theorizing, is a clear satire against those who pride themselves on knowledge above all else. Practical knowledge is also satirized when it does not produce results, as in the academy of Balnibarbi, where the experiments for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers amount to nothing. Swift insists that there is a realm of understanding into which humans are simply not supposed to venture. Thus, his depictions of rational societies, like Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnmland, emphasize not these people’s knowledge or understanding of abstract ideas but their ability to live their lives in a wise and steady way. The Brobdingnagian king knows shockingly little about the abstractions of political science, yet his country seems prosperous and well governed. Similarly, the Houyhnhnms know little about arcane subjects like astronomy, though they know how long a month is by observing the moon, since that knowledge has a practical effect on their well-being. Aspiring to higher fields of knowledge would be meaningless to them and would interfere with their happiness. In such contexts, it appears that living a happy and well-ordered life seems to be the very thing for which Swift thinks knowledge is useful. Swift also emphasizes the importance of self-understanding. Gulliver is initially remarkably lacking in self-reflection and self-awareness. He makes no mention of his emotions, passions, dreams, or aspirations, and he shows no interest in describing his own psychology to us. Accordingly, he may strike us as frustratingly hollow or empty, though it is likely that his personal emptiness is part of the overall meaning of the novel. By the end, he has come close to a kind of twisted self-knowledge in his deranged belief that he is a Yahoo. His revulsion with the human condition, shown in his shabby treatment of the generous Don Pedro, extends to himself as well, so that he ends the novel in a thinly disguised state of self-hatred. Swift may, thus, be saying that self-knowledge has its necessary limits just as theoretical knowledge does, and that if we look too closely at ourselves, we might not be able to carry on living happily. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

64 Early British Fiction 3.6 Motifs Excrement While it may seem a trivial or laughable motif, the recurrent mention of excrement in Gulliver’s Travels actually has a serious philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about human existence in general, and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the Enlightenment culture of eighteenth-century England tended to view humans optimistically as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies, Swift’s emphasis on the common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosophers of his day. Thus, when Gulliver urinates to put out a fire in Lilliput, or when Brobdingnagian flies defecate on his meals, or when the scientist in Lagado works to transform excrement back into food, we are reminded how very little human reason has to do with everyday existence. Swift suggests that the human condition in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe it is. Foreign Languages Gulliver appears to be a gifted linguist, knowing at least the basics of several European languages and even a fair amount of ancient Greek. This knowledge serves him well, as he is able to disguise himself as a Dutchman in order to facilitate his entry into Japan, which at the time only admitted the Dutch. But even more important, his linguistic gifts allow him to learn the languages of the exotic lands he visits with a dazzling speed and, thus, gain access to their culture quickly. He learns the languages of the Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, and even the neighing tongue of the Houyhnhnms. He is meticulous in recording the details of language in his narrative, often giving the original as well as the translation. One would expect that such detail would indicate a cross-cultural sensitivity, a kind of anthropologist’s awareness of how things vary from culture to culture. Yet surprisingly, Gulliver’s mastery of foreign languages generally does not correspond to any real interest in cultural differences. He compares any of the governments he visits to that of his native England, and he rarely even speculates on how or why cultures are different at all. Thus, his facility for translation does not indicate a culturally comparative mind, and we are perhaps meant to yearn for a narrator who is a bit less able to remember the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 65 Brobdingnagian word for “lark” and better able to offer a more illuminating kind of cultural analysis. Clothing Critics have noted the extraordinary attention that Gulliver pays to clothes throughout his journeys. Every time he gets a rip in his shirt or is forced to adopt some native garment to replace one of his own, he recounts the clothing details with great precision. We are told how his pants are falling apart in Lilliput, so that as the army marches between his legs, they get quite an eyeful. We are informed about the mouse skin he wears in Brobdingnag, and how the finest silks of the land are as thick as blankets on him. In one sense, these descriptions are obviously an easy narrative device with which Swift can chart his protagonist’s progression from one culture to another: the more ragged his clothes become and the stranger his new wardrobe, the farther he is from the comforts and conventions of England. His journey to new lands is also thus a journey into new clothes. When he is picked up by Don Pedro after his fourth voyage and offered a new suit of clothes, Gulliver vehemently refuses, preferring his wild animal skins. We sense that Gulliver may well never fully reintegrate into European society. But the motif of clothing carries a deeper, more psychologically complex meaning as well. Gulliver’s intense interest in the state of his clothes may signal a deep-seated anxiety about his identity, or lack thereof. He does not seem to have much selfhood: one critic has called him an “abyss,” a void where an individual character should be. If clothes make the man, then perhaps Gulliver’s obsession with the state of his wardrobe may suggest that he desperately needs to be fashioned as a personality. Significantly, the two moments when he describes being naked in the novel are two deeply troubling or humiliating experiences: the first when he is the boy toy of the Brobdingnagian maids who let him cavort nude on their mountainous breasts, and the second when he is assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl as he bathes. Both incidents suggest more than mere prudery. Gulliver associates nudity with extreme vulnerability, even when there is no real danger present—a pre-teen girl is hardly a threat to a grown man, at least in physical terms. The state of nudity may remind Gulliver of how non-existent he feels without the reassuring cover of clothing. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

66 Early British Fiction 3.7 Symbols Lilliputians The Lilliputians symbolize humankind’s wildly excessive pride in its own puny existence. Swift fully intends the irony of representing the tiniest race visited by Gulliver as by far the most vainglorious and smug, both collectively and individually. There is surely no character more odious in all of Gulliver’s Travels than the noxious Skyresh. There is more backbiting and conspiracy in Lilliput than anywhere else, and more of the pettiness of small minds who imagine themselves to be grand. Gulliver is a naïve consumer of the Lilliputians’ grandiose imaginings; he is flattered by the attention of their royal family and cowed by their threats of punishment, forgetting that they have no real physical power over him. Their formally worded condemnation of Gulliver on grounds of treason is a model of pompous and self-important verbiage, but it works quite effectively on the naïve Gulliver. The Lilliputians show off not only to Gulliver but to themselves as well. There is no mention of armies proudly marching in any of the other societies Gulliver visits—only in Lilliput and neighboring Blefuscu are the six-inch inhabitants possessed of the need to show off their patriotic glories with such displays. When the Lilliputian emperor requests that Gulliver serve as a kind of makeshift Arch of Triumph for the troops to pass under, it is a pathetic reminder that their grand parade—in full view of Gulliver’s nether regions—is supremely silly, a basically absurd way to boost the collective ego of the nation. Indeed, the war with Blefuscu is itself an absurdity springing from wounded vanity, since the cause is not a material concern like disputed territory but, rather, the proper interpretation of scripture by the emperor’s forebears and the hurt feelings resulting from the disagreement. All in all, the Lilliputians symbolize misplaced human pride, and point out Gulliver’s inability to diagnose it correctly. Brobdingnagians The Brobdingnagians symbolize the private, personal and physical side of humans when examined up close and in great detail. The philosophical era of the Enlightenment tended to overlook the routines of everyday life and the sordid or tedious little facts of existence, but in Brobdingnag, such facts become very important for Gulliver, sometimes matters of life and death. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 67 An eighteenth-century philosopher could afford to ignore the fly buzzing around his head or the skin pores on his servant girl, but in his shrunken state, Gulliver is forced to pay great attention to such things. He is forced to take the domestic sphere seriously as well. In other lands, it is difficult for Gulliver, being such an outsider, to get glimpses of family relations or private affairs, but in Brobdingnag, he is treated as a doll or a plaything, and thus is made privy to the urination of housemaids and the sexual lives of women. The Brobdingnagians do not symbolize a solely negative human characteristic, as the Laputans do. They are not merely ridiculous—some aspects of them are disgusting, like their gigantic stench and the excrement left by their insects, but others are noble, like the queen’s goodwill toward Gulliver and the king’s commonsense views of politics. More than anything else, the Brobdingnagians symbolize a dimension of human existence visible at close range, under close scrutiny. Laputans The Laputans represent the folly of theoretical knowledge that has no relation to human life and no use in the actual world. As a profound cultural conservative, Swift was a critic of the newfangled ideas springing up around him at the dawn of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a period of great intellectual experimentation and theorization. He much preferred the traditional knowledge that had been tested over centuries. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge that has never been tested or applied, the ludicrous side of Enlightenment intellectualism. Even down below in Balnibarbi, where the local academy is more inclined to practical application, knowledge is not made socially useful as Swift demands. Indeed, theoretical knowledge there has proven positively disastrous, resulting in the ruin of agriculture and architecture, and the impoverishment of the population. Even up above, the pursuit of theoretical understanding has not improved the lot of the Laputans. They have few material worries, dependent as they are upon the Balnibarbians below. But they are tormented by worries about the trajectories of comets and other astronomical speculations: their theories have not made them wise, but neurotic and disagreeable. The Laputans do not symbolize reason itself but rather the pursuit of a form of knowledge that is not directly related to the improvement of human life. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

68 Early British Fiction Houyhnhnms The Houyhnhnms represent an ideal of rational existence, a life governed by sense and moderation of which philosophers since Plato have long dreamed. Indeed, there are echoes of Plato’s Republic in the Houyhnhnms’ rejection of light entertainment and vain displays of luxury, their appeal to reason rather than any holy writings as the criterion for proper action, and their communal approach to family planning. As in Plato’s ideal community, the Houyhnhnms have no need to lie nor any word for lying. They do not use force but only strong exhortation. Their subjugation of the Yahoos appears more necessary than cruel and perhaps the best way to deal with an unfortunate blot on their otherwise ideal society. In these ways and others, the Houyhnhnms seem like model citizens, and Gulliver’s intense grief when he is forced to leave them suggests that they have made an impact on him greater than that of any other society he has visited. His derangement on Don Pedro’s ship, in which he snubs the generous man as a Yahoo- like creature, implies that he strongly identifies with the Houyhnhnms. But we may be less ready than Gulliver to take the Houyhnhnms as ideals of human existence. They have no names in the narrative nor any need for names, since they are virtually interchangeable, with little individual identity. Their lives seem harmonious and happy, although quite lacking in vigor, challenge and excitement. Indeed, this apparent ease may be why Swift chooses to make them horses rather than human types like every other group in the novel. He may be hinting, to those more insightful than Gulliver, that the Houyhnhnms should not be considered human ideals at all. In any case, they symbolize a standard of rational existence to be either espoused or rejected by both Gulliver and us. England As the site of his father’s disappointingly “small estate” and Gulliver’s failing business, England seems to symbolize deficiency or insufficiency, at least in the financial sense that matters most to Gulliver. England is passed over very quickly in the first paragraph of Chapter I, as if to show that it is simply there as the starting point to be left quickly behind. Gulliver seems to have very few nationalistic or patriotic feelings about England, and he rarely mentions his homeland on his travels. In this sense, Gulliver’s Travels is quite unlike other travel narratives like the Odyssey, in which Odysseus misses his homeland and laments his wanderings. England is CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 69 where Gulliver’s wife and family live, but they too are hardly mentioned. Yet Swift chooses to have Gulliver return home after each of his four journeys instead of having him continue on one long trip to four different places, so that England is kept constantly in the picture and given a steady, unspoken importance. By the end of the fourth journey, England is brought more explicitly into the fabric of Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver, in his neurotic state, starts confusing Houyhnhnm land with his homeland, referring to Englishmen as Yahoos. The distinction between native and foreign thus unravels—the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos are not just races populating a faraway land but rather types that Gulliver projects upon those around him. The possibility thus arises that all the races Gulliver encounters could be versions of the English and that his travels merely allow him to see various aspects of human nature more clearly. 3.8 Unit End Questions (MCQs and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions 1. Characterize Gulliver’s reaction to the Yahoos after landing. 2. What conclusion does he reach when he sees the Houyhnhnms? 3. What irony happens in this chapter and how does it occur? Recall a device used in Modest Proposal. 4. What do the Houyhnhnms do that Gulliver finds disgusting? Note the gradually emerging irony. 5. What is the nature of the initial Gulliver-Yahoo contact – recall the epistemology of the period? 6. What do the Houyhnhnms do in this chapter that they did in the last one? 7. What do the Houyhnhnms find amazing about Gulliver? 8. What is the meaning of the phrase, “I was taught to imitate a rational creature…”? Recall the “ancients”. 9. What does the word HOUYHNHNM mean, and what is Swift’s point? 10. Why is the phrase “say the thing which was not” so important? CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

70 Early British Fiction 11. By the end of the chapter, what is Swift establishing? 12. What does Gulliver tell the Houyhnhnms that they find hard to believe? 13. What is the irony regarding the comparisons made in this chapter? 14. What does Gulliver begin unconsciously to do in this chapter? Why? 15. What does it tell you about the Houyhnhnms in terms of the way they react to what Gulliver tells them about Europe? 16. What does Gulliver try to do in these chapters, and is he successful? 17. What does Gulliver say about lies and the truth? Recall a Shakespeare play. 18. What profound change has taken place in Gulliver? 19. What is the human condition as seen by the Houyhnhnms? 20. Outline a series of comparisons between the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms? 21. What is the most damning link between Gulliver and the Yahoos? 22. How is the answer to the last question illustrated in this chapter? 23. What does Gulliver admit? Why? 24. Give an analysis of the Houyhnhnms and their culture. What do they believe about themselves? How accurate is the assessment? What does Gulliver believe...and what does Swift think? 25. What is the question under debate at the general assembly, and what is the philosophy involved? 26. Do you see any modern parallels in your answer to question one? The irony is devastating. What could Swift foresee? 27. Note the continued description of the Houyhnhnms and their culture. The series of contrasts are especially significant. 28. What is Gulliver’s opinion of horses and men, and what is the humor involved—and is it just humor? 29. What is Gulliver told he must do, and why is he told? Note his reaction. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 71 B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions 1. When beginning his fourth voyage, what position did Gulliver have on the ship “Adventure”? (a) Surgeon (b) Captain (c) Cabbin Boy (d) Cook 2. How did Gulliver come to be in the land of Houyhnhnms? (a) Pirates attacked his ships, took him prisoner to the island. (b) A storm caused the ships to smash on the shore of a distant land. (c) His crew mutinied and sent him ashore on unknown land. (d) He stopped to explore a new land and was separated from his crew. 3. The first creatures that Gulliver saw on this land were Yahoos. How were Yahoos described? (a) Goat-like, nimble tree-climbing squirrels (b) Talking Cows (c) Three-legged humanoids (d) Hairy, dirty, deformed humans 4. Gulliver lived with the Houyhnhnms. How were Houyhnhnms described? (a) Hairy, dirty, deformed humans (b) Talking horses (c) Giants (d) Fairies 5. How did Gulliver describe the Houyhnhnms and their society? (a) Proud, corrupt (b) Rational, wise, virtuous (c) Superstitious, fanciful (d) Paranoid, aggressive, provoking 6. How did Gulliver leave the land of Houyhnhnms? (a) While fishing with the Houyhnhnms, he was thrown overboard in a storm. (b) He fell into a deep hole and tunneled to the underworld. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

72 Early British Fiction (c) A giant eagle carried him away. (d) He builds a boat and puts to sea. 7. After leaving the Houyhnhnms, in what land was Gulliver wounded by an arrow? (a) Lisbon, Portugal (b) China (c) New Holland (d) Japan 8. Gulliver’s famous travels began on 4 May, 1699. After all four of his voyage, in what year did Gulliver conclude his travels? (a) 1715 (b) 1749 (c) 1700 (d) 1799 9. How did the author feel about his wife and children upon returning home? (a) He hugged his wife and children dearly and often. (b) He could not endure their smell or presence. (c) He longed to take his family back to sea with him on his next voyage. (d) He neither loved nor was bothered by their presence. 10. After turning home to England, with what race from his travels did Gulliver equate Englishmen? (a) Houyhnhnms (b) The People of Glubbdubdrib (c) The People of Lilliput (d) Yahoos Answers: 1. (b), 2. (c), 3. (d), 4. (b), 5. (b), 6. (d), 7. (c), 8. (a), 9. (b), 10. (d) CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travel, Book IV 73 3.9 References Website: 1. http://www.stjohns-chs.org/english/Reason/gull.html Books: 1. SparkNotes Editors, “SparkNote on Gulliver’s Travels”, SparkNotes.com, SparkNotes LLC, 2003, Web, 16 January 2020. 2. DeMaria, Robert J. (ed.), Gulliver’s Travels, Penguin’ p. xi. 3. Swift, Jonathan (2009), Rawson, Claude (ed.), Gulliver’s Travels, W.W. Norton, p. 875, ISBN 978-0-393-93065-8. 4. Gay, John, “Letter to Jonathan Swift”, Communion, Communion Arts Journal, Retrieved 9 January 2019. 5. “The 100 Best Novels Written in English: The Full List”, Retrieved 17 August 2015. 6. Case, Arthur Ellicott (1945), Four Essays on Gulliver’s Travels, Gloucester, MA: P. Smith. 7. Jan, Firdaus and K.M. Shabam (2004), Perspectives on Gulliver’s Travels, p. 17. 8. Clive, Probyn “Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004. 9. Daily Journal, 28 October 1726, “This Day is Published”. 10. Swift, Jonathan (1980), Isaac Asimov (ed.), The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels, New York: Clarkson N. Potter Inc., p. 160, ISBN 0-517-539497. 11. Allan Bloom (1990), Giants and Dwarfs: An Outline of Gulliver’s Travels, New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 47-51. 12. Swift, Jonathan (15 November 1994), Gulliver’s Travels: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Fox, Christopher, Boston, ISBN 978- 0312066659, OCLC 31794911. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

74 Early British Fiction 13. Rogers, Katharine M. (1959), “‘My Female Friends’: The Misogyny of Jonathan Swift”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1(3): 366-79, JSTOR 40753638. 14. Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745 (1995), Gulliver’s Travels: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Fox, Christopher (1948), Boston, ISBN 0-312- 10284-4, OCLC 31794911.  CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 4 VICTORIAN NOVEL Structure: 4.0 Learning Objectives 4.1 Victorian Literature 4.2 Prose Fiction 4.3 Nature Writing 4.4 Supernatural and Fantastic Literature 4.5 The Influence of Victorian Writers 4.6 Historical Background of Victorian Age 4.7 Chief Characteristics of Victorian Period 4.8 Victorian Novels 4.9 Charles Dickens: A Popular Victorian Author 4.10 William Makepeace Thackeray: English Victorian Writer 4.11 Women Novelists of the Victorian Era 4.12 Overview of Victorian Period 4.13 The Victorian Novel 4.14 Early Victorian Novelists 4.15 Late Victorian Novelists 4.16 Unit End Questions (MCQs and Descriptive) 4.17 References CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

76 Early British Fiction 4.0 Learning Objectives After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Learn how Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. They were usually inclined towards being of improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed. 4.1 Victorian Literature Victorian literature is literature, mainly written in English, during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) (the Victorian era). It was preceded by Romanticism and followed by the Edwardian era (1901-1910). While in the preceding Romantic period, poetry had been the conquerors, novels were the emperors of the Victorian period. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) dominated the first part of Victoria’s reign and most rightly can be called “The King of Victorian Literature”. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864-5. William Thackeray’s (1811-1863) most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49) also published significant works in the 1840s. A major later novel was George Eliot’s (1819-80) Middlemarch (1872), while the major novelist of the later part of Queen Victoria’s reign was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), whose first novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared in 1872 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895. Robert Browning (1812-89) and Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) were Victorian England’s most famous poets, though more recent taste has tended to prefer the poetry of Thomas Hardy, who, though he wrote poetry throughout his life, did not publish a collection until 1898, as well as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), whose poetry was published posthumously in 1918. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is also considered an important literary figure of the period, especially his poems and critical writings. Early poetry of W.B. Yeats was also published CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 77 in Victoria’s reign. With regard to the theatre, it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) in the 1890s, and Oscar Wilde’s (1854-1900) The Importance of Being Earnest. 4.2 Prose Fiction Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist. Extraordinarily popular in his day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still one of the most popular and read authors of the world. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) written when he was twenty-five, was an overnight success, and all his subsequent works sold extremely well. The comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge and this pervades his writing. Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the public wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed. His most important works include Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), A Christmas Carol (1843), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Little Dorrit (1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860-61). There is a gradual trend in his fiction towards darker themes which mirrors a tendency in much of the writing of the nineteenth century. William Thackeray was Dickens’ great rival in the first half of Queen Victoria’s reign. With a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848), subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a form popular in Victorian literature: a historical novel in which recent history is depicted. 4.3 Nature Writing In the USA, Henry David Thoreau’s works and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850) were canonical influences on Victorian nature writing. In the UK, Philip Gosse and Sarah Bowdich Lee were two of the most popular nature writers in the early part of the Victorian era. The Illustrated London News, founded in 1842, was the world’s first illustrated weekly newspaper CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

78 Early British Fiction and often published articles and illustrations dealing with nature; in the second half of the nineteenth century, books, articles and illustrations on nature became widespread and popular among an increasingly urbanized reading public. 4.4 Supernatural and Fantastic Literature The old Gothic tales that came out of the late nineteenth century are the first examples of the genre of fantastic fiction. These tales often centred on larger-than-life characters such as Sherlock Holmes, famous detective of the times, Sexton Blake, Phileas Fogg and other fictional characters of the era, such as Dracula, Edward Hyde, The Invisible Man, and many other fictional characters who often had exotic enemies to foil. Spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a particular type of story-writing known as Gothic. Gothic literature combines romance and horror in attempt to thrill and terrify the reader. Possible features in a Gothic novel are foreign monsters, ghosts, curses, hidden rooms and witchcraft. Gothic tales usually take place in locations such as castles, monasteries and cemeteries, although the Gothic monsters sometimes cross over into the real world, making appearances in cities such as London. 4.5 The Influence of Victorian Writers Writers from the United States and the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada were influenced by the literature of Britain and are often classed as a part of Victorian literature, although they were gradually developing their own distinctive voices. Victorian writers of Canadian literature include Grant Allen, Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill. Australian literature has the poets Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda, and New Zealand literature includes Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning. From the sphere of literature of the United States during this time are some of the country’s greats including: Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry James, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. The problem with the classification of “Victorian literature” is the great difference between the early works of the period and the later works which had more in common with the writers of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 79 the Edwardian period and many writers straddle this divide. People such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard, Jerome K. Jerome and Joseph Conrad all wrote some of their important works during Victoria’s reign but the sensibility of their writing is frequently regarded as Edwardian. 4.6 Historical Background of Victorian Age In the year 1837, Queen Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britain and Ireland, and succeeded William the IV. She served for a period of sixty-four years, till her death in 1901 and it is one of the longest reigns in the history of England. The period was marked by many important social and historical changes that altered the nation in many ways. The population nearly doubled, the British Empire expanded exponentially, and technological and industrial progress helped Britain become the most powerful country in the world. 4.7 Chief Characteristics of Victorian Period While the country saw economic progress, poverty and exploitation were also equally a part of it. The gap between the rich and the poor increased significantly and the drive for material and commercial success was seen to propagate a kind of a moral decay in the society itself. The changing landscape of the country was another concern. While the earlier phase of Romanticism saw a celebration of the country side and the rich landscape of the flora and fauna, the Victorian era saw a changing of the landscape to one of burgeoning industries and factories. While the poor were exploited for their labor, the period witnessed the rise of the bourgeoisie or the middle class due to increasing trade between Britain and its colonies and the Reform Bill of 1832 strengthen their hold. There was also a shift from the Romantic ideals of the previous age towards a more realistic acceptance and depiction of society. One of the most important factors that defined the age was its stress on morality. Strict societal codes were enforced and certain activities were openly looked down upon. These codes were even harsher for women. A feminine code of conduct was levied on them which described every aspect of their being from the proper apparels to how to converse, everything had rules. The role of women was mostly that of being angels of the house and restricted to domestic confines. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

80 Early British Fiction Professionally, very few options were available to them as a woman could either become a governess or a teacher in rich households. Hence, they were financially dependent on their husbands and fathers, and it led to a commercialization of the institution of marriage. 4.8 Victorian Novels Victorian Era is seen as the link between Romanticism of the eighteenth century and the realism of the twentieth century. The novel as a genre rose to entertain the rising middle class and to depict the contemporary life in a changing society. Although the novel had been in development since the eighteenth century with the works of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson and the others, it was in this period that the novel got mass acceptance and readership. The growth of cities, a ready domestic market and one in the oversea colonies and an increase in printing and publishing houses facilitated the growth of the novel as a form. In the year 1870, an Education Act was passed which made education an easy access to the masses furthermore increasing literacy rates among the population. Certain jobs required a certain level of reading ability and simple novels catered to this by becoming a device to practice reading. Also, the time of the daily commute to work for men and the time alone at home for women could be filled by reading which now became a leisure activity. As a response to the latter, the demand for fiction, rose substantially. The novels of the age mostly had a moral strain in them with a belief in the innate goodness of human nature. The characters were well rounded and the protagonist usually belonged to a middle-class society who struggled to create a niche for himself in the industrial and mercantile world. The stress was on realism and an attempt to describe the daily struggles of ordinary men that the middle class reader could associate with. The moral tangents were perhaps an attempt to rescue the moral degradation prevalent in the society then and supplied the audience with hope and positivity. These moral angles allowed for inclusion of larger debates in fiction like the ones surrounding “the woman question”, marriage, progress, education and the Industrial Revolution. New roles for women were created because of the resultant economic market and their voice which was earlier not given cadence was now being spotted and recognized, and novels became the means where the domestic confinement of women was questioned. Novels reflected the larger CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 81 questions surrounding women, like those of their roles and duties. In the latter half of the century, Married Women’s Property Acts was passed, the women suffrage became an important point of debate, and poverty and other economic reasons challenged the traditional roles of women. The novel as a form became the medium where such concerns were raised. 4.9 Charles Dickens: A Popular Victorian Author In the same year that Queen Victoria ascended the throne, Charles Dickens published the first parts of his novel Oliver Twist, a story of an orphan and his struggle with poverty in the early part of the century. As the Industrial Revolution surged on, the class difference between the traditional aristocracy and the middle class was gradually getting reduced and with the passing of the Reform Act, the middle class got the right to vote and be politically engaged in the affairs of the nation. While the aristocracy criticized the work that the bourgeoisie had to do in the factories and the industries, to maintain the supremacy that they had the privilege of, the middle class in response promoted work as virtue. The result of this led to a further marginalization of those struck by poverty and were part of neither groups. The Poor Law that was passed made public assistance available to the economically downtrodden only through workhouses where they had to live and work. The conditions of these workhouses were deliberately made to be unbearable so as to avoid the poor from becoming totally dependent on assistance from outside. Families were split, food was inedible, and the circumstances were made inhospitable to urge the poor to work and fight a way through poverty. However, these ultimately became a web difficult to transgress and people chose living in the streets rather than seeking help from a workhouse. Dickens was aware of these concerns as a journalist, and his own life and autobiographical experiences entered the novel through Oliver Twist. His novel enters the world of the workhouses, the dens of thieves, and the streets and highlights that while there was economic prosperity on one side, there was poverty on the other and while morality, virtue were championed, hypocrisy was equally a part of society. His social commentary entered the world of his fiction. In 1836, before Oliver Twist, his serials of Pickwick Papers were published which led him to instant recognition and popularity. It started the famous Victorian mode of serial novels which dominated the age till the end of the century. It not only made the reader anxious for the next CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

82 Early British Fiction serial to come and spread the popularity of the book itself, but also gave the writer a chance to alter his work according to the mood and expectation of his audience. His works enjoyed continuous popularity and acceptance, and Dickens as a writer became famous for his wit, satire, social commentary and his in-depth characters. Bleak House, A Christmas Carroll, David Copperfield and Great Expectations are some of his other great works. 4.10 William Makepeace Thackeray: English Victorian Writer Thackeray was born in Calcutta, India and was also an important writer but one who expressed his age very differently from Dickens and other writers. He is most noted for his satirical work Vanity Fair that portrays the many myriads of English society. Although he was seen as equally talented as Dickens, but his views were deemed old-fashioned which hindered his popularity. He did not readily accept the changing values of the age. His work is seen almost as a reactionary voice. Vanity Fair, for example, has the subtitle ‘A Novel without a Hero’ and in a period where other writers usually embarked on a portrayal of the coming of age of a hero, Thackeray himself very deliberately opposes it. While the protagonist of Dickens’ David Copperfield invites the reader to identify with him, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp is the conniving, cynical and clever. Even his novel Pendennis is a complete opposite of the novel David Copperfield, although both were published the same year. Thackeray did not identify with the middle class because his novels lack a middle class hero. When novels were catering to reassure middle-class self-worth, Thackeray denied to give that assurance. Even, Dobbin, a middle-class character in Vanity Fair, is not completely granted hero status and a tone of criticism lingers on the character throughout the work. In The History of Henry Esmond, Thackeray deals with questions of not only of the concerns of society at large but also of individual identity. While most writers supported the idea of innate goodness in the individual human self, Thackeray differed. For example, the character of Henry Esmond is also not a completely positive character and the negatives of his self, is perhaps Thackeray’s critique of Victorian emphasis on the individual. An individualism that focused on personal virtue and morality is seen as Thackeray to at the risk of selfishness bordering on CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 83 narcissism and self-absorption. His discontent with his age became more vocal in later works like Phillip and The New Comes. While the former is injected with autobiographical accounts and goes back to the satirical tone of Vanity Fair, the latter is a harsh critique of the material greed of the age and a critique of the contemporary culture of the age. As a result of his strong opinions of his society and its issues, and a critical rejection of the dominant concerns found in works of other writers of the same age, Thackeray stands in isolation as an outsider to this circle due to his skepticism of the changing Victorian society. His stand did not change with time and lends to a social criticism and commentary of a very different sort in his works. Catherine, A Shabby Genteel Story and The Book of Snobs are some of his other works. 4.11 Women Novelists of the Victorian Era The era saw a proliferation of women writers. The novel as a genre was initially seen as feminine literature, and as the literacy rate among women increased, a new need for women writers catering to this segment was answered by these writers. Mrs. Gaskell Elizabeth Gaskell, popularly called Mrs. Gaskell, wrote short stories and novels that dealt with presenting a social picture of her society in the 1850s. While it was a time when doubts about material progress reaching the actual lives of the ordinary man were starting to be raised, Gaskell mostly gave an optimistic view of the time. Gaskell’s North and South, for example, seeks to present an answer to division and difference by presenting a form of a social reconciliation. There is an attempt at reconciliation of many divergent streams in the novel. Mary Barton was her first novel, published in 1848 with a subtitle, ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’ and sticks to the Victorian concern of presenting the daily life of the middle class. Cranford came next in the form of a serial and was edited by Dickens for the magazine called Household Words. It was received positively and Gaskell gained immediate popularity for it. It centered on women characters like Mary Smith, Miss Deborah and the others. However, the book was also critiqued for its lack of a significant storyline. She was also famous for her Gothic style in some CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

84 Early British Fiction of her works and this made Gaskell slightly different from other novelist of her time. Ruth, Sylvia’s Lovers, Wives and Daughters were other significant works by her. George Eliot Perhaps the one most famous women writers, George Eliot still maintains a canonical status. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans or Marian Evans, and she adopted the pseudonym George Eliot to escape the stereotype attached with women writers and successfully entered the domain of ‘serious’ writing. She had a controversial personal life and there too was not hesitant to break the norms of societal feminine boundaries. Adam Bede was her first novel, published 1859, set in a rural landscape and deals with a love rectangle. It received critical appreciation for its psychological descriptions of the characters and a realistic description of rural life. Mill on the Floss, 1860 revolves around the life of Tom and Maggie Tulliver and traces their life as they grow up near the River Floss. Historical, political references to those of the Napoleonic Wars and the Reform Bill of 1832 inform the novel and lend it a more intellectual and serious strain. Autobiographical elements also form a part of the novel as George Eliot fuses herself partly with Maggie, the protagonist of the book. After Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863) and Felix Holt, the Radical, (1866) came Eliot’s most popular novel Middlemarch in the year 1871. The novel revolves around the life of complex characters and the Reform Bill of 1832. Subtitled ‘A Study of Provincial Life,’ the plot is based in the fictitious town of Midlands. The greatness of the novel was because of the vast portraiture of country and urban life that it depicts, its complex plots and characters, and its stark realistic projection of the time its set in. The role of education, the women question, politics, social commentary and idealism are other complicated strands of the novel. Bronte Sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were the three famous novelist daughters of Patrick Bronte, a well-educated man and a writer himself; and Maria Bronte. The family together went through a series of tragedies where Maria Bronte died very early and none of the three sisters could reach the age of 40. Charlotte died at the age of just 39, Emily at 30 and Anne at 29. All three were educated by their father at home and all of them were fond of storytelling since CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 85 childhood. Charlotte Bronte is famous for her novel Jane Eyre, published in 1847. The titular protagonist of the book, Jane Eyre, and her struggles in life and love for Mr. Rochester along with the process of her mental and spiritual growth are traced. The novel is believed to have a feminist tone to it and the famous ‘woman in the attic’ character of Bertha Mason raises several gender and feminist issues. Emily Bronte, the second of the trio, became famous for her novel Wuthering Heights, published in the year 1847 and the only book written by her. Like George Eliot, Emily wrote under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, but after her death, Charlotte published the novel with her sister’s real name. The novel is the love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Anne Bronte, the last of the three, wrote two novels: Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The former was an autobiographical work and the latter is about a woman named Helen Graham who transgresses marital and social boundaries to assert her freedom. It is seen as a substantial piece of feminist writing. All three sisters deal with larger societal questions through mostly women characters and the plot focusses on their life with themes of love and passion. They hence enjoyed a large female readership and have achieved status as classics of literature. 4.12 Overview of Victorian Period The age hence was important for the rise of the novel as a genre and form which itself saw transformation within the period. From romanticism to realism, politics to passion, optimism to pessimism, the novel could successfully deal with the changing mood of the society. Class, gender, individualism and society – all were given space in the novel. The period was known to have witnessed the massive change of Britain from an agrarian to industrial landscape. All concerns informed the novel and the novel was made into perhaps the most important genre of the age and the ones that would follow. 4.13 The Victorian Novel  The Novel had a big success in the Victorian Age because it reflected the great social changes of this period. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

86 Early British Fiction  It was very popular among the educated middle classes; it reflected their values. Many readers were women. They often borrowed books from “circulating libraries”.  Novels were often published in installments based on the linearity.  Popularity of the Bildungsroman (= novel of formation), that told the story of a life of a character in a realistic way, especially considering the relation between individual and society. These novels showed on one hand the typical values of Victorian society: conformism, respectability, faith in progress, but on the other hand, they also denounced some social injustices.  Omniscient narrator – a moral guide, he analyzes the psychology of the characters (especially for the early Victorian writers). 4.14 Early Victorian Novelists They felt they had a moral and social responsibility. They described the social changes, they were aware of the evils of society and denounced them, although it was never radical criticism (they did not question the foundations of society).  Charles Dickens: He was the most representative Victorian writer. He was the first urban novelist; most of his novels are set in London. He described different social classes and professions, different conditions of life, even the most miserable ones. He showed different speech patterns. He criticized certain aspects of the “ Victorian compromise ” (greed, hypocrisy and indifference of the rich).  William Thackeray: He described more the world of the upper classes, but was critical of their lack of morals of a society based on money and appearances (Vanity Fair). Women writers In the Victorian age, women were considered the “angel in the home”. They were educated in order to become good wives, but were not sent to university. They were responsible for the education of children. Many middle- and upper-class women were great readers, and there were also some good women writers. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 87  Charlotte and Emily Bronte: Novels of Romantic love (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights), also influenced by the Gothic tradition.  Elizabeth Gaskell: Particularly interested in the condition of working class people and of fallen women (unmarried mothers, prostitutes…).  George Eliot: Her name was Mary Ann Evans but she, like the Bronte sisters, adopted a male pseudonym as a writer. She described in detail the rural life of the provinces and she expressed a deep psychological insight into her characters’ minds. 4.15 Late Victorian Novelists Thomas Hardy was the most important writer in the later part of the Victorian Era. He was influenced by both the romanticism of the earlier era and the social commentary of Dickens. He is famous for the conception of the fictional town of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd published in 1874, The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 1891, and Jude, the Obscure in 1895 are his famous novels but Hardy was also known for his poetry. The late part of the period also saw the rise of the ‘sensational’ novels by writers like Wilkie Collins and they too were based on the life of the middle class. The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) are Collins’ famous sensational novels. Anthony Trollope, another writer in the second half of the era, was himself from a middle-class background and wrote the Phineas Finn (1869) and The Way We Live (1874). It was the time when Lewis Carroll wrote his famous Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865 and stood very different from other because of the child fiction genre it became a classic of the Carroll’s different dreamy world that stood in direct contrast with the realistic tone of novels that was at its peak. George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson were other novels of the era. Rudyard Kipling and his short stories based in India pointed to the larger historical process of colonialism happening at the time. It was in 1877 that Queen Victoria became the Empress of India. Then also came George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, another two most famous writers of the time. In the second half of the century, writers no more identified with the values of society and openly criticized them. Their new realism was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

88 Early British Fiction (individual characters influenced by the environment, by the historical moment and by hereditary traits), and by Positivism (scientific precision in describing social and psychological aspects).  Thomas Hardy: Pessimistic view of the world. His characters follow their nature and are outsiders, often in conflict with the values of a narrow-minded society (Tess of the d’Ubervilles, Jude and the Obscure).  Henry James: American by birth, he showed the conflict between the American and the European culture. Also his characters are outsiders, but typically they are upper-class people forced to live in a narrow-minded bourgeois society (The Portait of a Lady). He started to experiment with new narrative techniques.  Lewis Carroll. In his children’s books, he liked to play with words and logic. (Alice in Wonderland)He created the genre of “Nonsense Literature”. In his apparent lack of logic, he exposed the conventions, prejudices and hypocrisy of the adult world and of Victorian society.  Oscar Wilde: The main representative of Aestheticism, an anti-Victorian trend that considered art completely detached from any morals. American Writers The main concern of American writers was to avoid the influence of European (especially British) tradition and to create a distinct American literature. James Fenimore Cooper and Nataniel Hawthorne wrote stories linked to American history.  Edgar Allan Poe: He was fascinated by the decay of European values. He was influenced by the Gothic tradition, but went beyond it. He mixed psychological insight with extreme ratiocination, anticipating the modern detective story. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood  Formed in 1848, it was a group of poets and painters who reacted against the artificiality of the art of the period. They wanted to return to the purity and simplicity of the Italian art of the thirteenth and fourteenth century (before Raphael). CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 89  They were influenced by the ideas of the art critic John Ruskin, who considered art as a way to react to the ugliness of modern, urban life.  The main characteristics were fidelity to nature, sensuality, use of non-industrial materials, re-evaluation of medieval religion and legends.  The main representatives were Dante Grabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.  William Morris created the Arts and Crafts Movement, which designed and manufactured a great variety of objects for interiors (stained glass, wallpapers, tapestries, rugs, etc.). They used handicraft and simple decoration in reaction to industrial machinery.  The Pre-Raphaelite movement influenced the Aesthetic Movement.  It originated in France, following the ideas of Theophile Gautier; it was a reaction against the materialism and the strict moral code of the bourgeoisie.  Aesthetes were not interested in political and social matters but isolated themselves in a world of beauty and art.  Their motto was “art for art’s sake,” which means that art does not have any moral aim but it is an end in itself.  The followers of Aesthetism led an unconventional life, full of sensations and excess (They wanted to be different from the working masses and they also rejected the Victorian moral values).  The main representative in Britain was Oscar Wilde. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49)  He was born in Boston. Both his parents died when he was very young. So, he was adopted by the Allan family, in Virginia.  He was brilliant at school, but did not finish university because he started drinking and gambling. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

90 Early British Fiction  After a short period in the army, he went to live in Baltimore with his aunt and cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1835 (she was only 13). He worked as a journalist and published his first poems and short stories. His first great success was The Gold Bug (1843).  His essay The Philosophy of Composition contains his aesthetic theories. He believed that Poetry should create an emotional effect on the reader, and not convey a message. So, the object of poetry should be pleasure and not truth.  When his wife Virginia died in 1847, he began to drink heavily, and he died in 1849. Poe’s Tales He wrote poems (in which the emotional effect was very important), but mainly short stories, which can be divided in two groups:  Stories of ratiocination: The protagonist is the detective Dupin, who anticipates more modern detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes. He is extremely rational, follows a deductive method, and he is very good at psychological analyses.  Stories of the grotesque (or of imagination): He uses some conventions of the Gothic fiction, but goes beyond them: the horror does not come from the outside, but from the inside of the characters. He explores the psychology of his mentally-disturbed characters. Most of his characters lose the sense of reality because they reject the conventional aspects of life and lead a life of their own, cut off from the world. In this condition, they develop an exceptional acuteness of the senses, an expanded consciousness that makes them lose their sanity. So, madness for Poe was a matter of higher awareness.  Main Themes: The double, being buried alive, confinement in a very small place, cruelty, perverseness, madness, fusion of beauty and death (For some aspects, he anticipates the aesthetic movement).  First-person Narrator: He made the reader explore directly the interior world of the narrator’s mind. Often, the narration becomes a long interior monologue in which he describes a great variety of moods and sensations. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 91 The Fall of the House of Usher  Main Themes: It is a good example of synthesis between rationality and intuition/ imagination. The characters live in a closed-off world, where every day conventions are suspended, and are taken over by madness, obsession and mental disintegration. However, they follow an impeccable logic in their actions.  Typically, Gothic setting, that contributes to create a feeling of terror. 4.16 Unit End Questions (MCQs and Descriptive) A. Descriptive Type Questions 1. Why were the novels called as the emperors of the Victorian period? 2. Who is considered as the most famous Victorian novelist? 3. Write a note on Poetry and Drama of the Victorian period. 4. What was the effect of science, philosophy and discoveries on literature of the period? 5. Give the historical background of the Victorian age. 6. Mention the chief characteristics of the Victorian period. 7. How did the Victorian Novel depict the contemporary life in a changing society? 8. Why is Thackeray’s work seen almost as a reactionary voice? 9. Write a note on the women novelist of the Victorian era. 10. Reflect on the main themes of the writings of the Victorian period. B. Multiple Choice/Objective Type Questions 1. In the Victorian era, the landscape changed to __________. (a) Flora and fauna (b) Countryside (c) Churches (d) Industries and factories 2. One of the most important factors that defined the age was its stress on __________. (a) Morality (b) Reason (c) Learning (d) imagination CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

92 Early British Fiction 3. Who among the following does not belong to the Victorian era? (a) Elizabeth Gaskell (b) Mary Ann Evans (c) Charlotte Bronte (d) Mary Clark 4. Who is known as the first urban novelist? (a) William Thackeray (b) Charles Dickens (c) Thomas Hardy (d) Edgar Allan Poe 5. Who created the genre of “Nonsense Literature”? (a) Oscar Wilde (b) Edgar Allan Poe (c) Lewis Caroll (d) Henry James Answers: 1. (d), 2. (a), 3. (d), 4. (b), 5. (c) 4.17 References Websites: 1. https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-novel#ref308461 2. https://www.authorship.ugent.be/article/download/4835/4831/ Books: 1. Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957, Print. 2. “Charles Dickens’s Popularity”, The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times [London, England], 20 August, 1892, Web, 17 May 2014,< http://bit.ly/1h20snz >. 3. Charlotte Bronte, Digital Image, The Recessionista, N.P., 1 January 2010, Web, 15 May 2015, <http://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/charlotte_bronte_for-web.jpeg>. 4. Dickens, Charles, ”Charles Dickens”, Wikipedia, 2007, JPEG, <http://an.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Charles_Dickens>. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Victorian Novel 93 5. Diniejko, Andrzej, “The New Woman Fiction”, The Victorian Web, Warsaw University, 17 December 2011, Web, 05 May 2015. 6. “English Literature”, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web, 17 May 2014, <https://www.britannica.com/shakespeare/article-13013>.  CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT 5 CHARLES DICKENS: THE NOVELIST Structure: 5.0 Learning Objectives 5.1 Charles Dickens 5.2 Early Years 5.3 Journalism and Early Novels 5.4 First Visit to the United States 5.5 Philanthropy 5.6 Religious Views 5.7 Middle Years 5.8 Last Years 5.9 Second Visit to the United States 5.10 Farewell Readings 5.11 Death 5.12 Literary Style 5.13 Characters 5.14 Autobiographical Elements 5.15 Unit End Questions (MCQs and Descriptive) 5.16 References CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)