Gulliver's Travels & Moll Flanders The e

The eighteenth century is generally characterized as an era devoted to reason and to "enlightenment" in which man's primary strivings were for rationality, objectivity, and progress. If one carefully reads selected texts from the period, however, a somewhat different portrait emerges. In this essay, two works of fiction - Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders - will be examined to argue that underneath the veneer of rationality in this age, a world filled with chaos and uncertainty along with a spirit of wildness and exuberance was very much present. Where indicated, critical commentary will be employed to support this view.

In Swift's Gulliver's Travels, there is a constant movement back and forth between the real and the unreal, the normal and the absurd, which has been described by Joseph Horrell (1964) as Swift's satirical rendition of the world that he himself knew. The books are about qualities of mind or rationality, but suspended within these seemingly rational world views as attributed to the Brobdingnagians, the Lilliputians, the Yahoos, and the Houyhnhnms is a satirical comment on mankind.

Gulliver lives in his travels, among races of creatures who either mirror man's best or worst characteristics. The rational man of these travels is the horse-like Houyhnhnm while the irrational man is the Yahoo. Horrell (1964) suggests that it is in the horse-like creatures encountered in the final book of Gulliver's Travels that Swif

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view of human nature is too black to admit of any hopes of their millennium." The second piece of literature to be discussed here is Daniel Defoe's (1991) Moll Flanders, a woman who is variously an orphan, a wife and mother, a prostitute, and a thief. Paula Backscheider (1990) asserts that Moll Flanders represents the vicissitudes that were very commonly experienced by many people in what was supposed to be a rational, enlightened, and even compassionate age. As an orphan, Moll should have been able to expect that the government and society would provide for her care. Defoe (1991) demonstrates that the minimal lip service given to the social contract and the social welfare of the less fortunate conceals societal attitudes that hold the poor in utter contempt. The difference between Moll's dreams of a neat, clean, safe, and respectable life and her actual status and potential in a callous society are central to Defoe's (1991) novel. The world portrayed by Defoe (1991) is one in which the rational and the wild live side by side. Moll Flanders increasingly speaks of herself as a commodity and therefore bargains, barters, and cheats her way through life (Backscheider, 1990). Defoe quotes Moll as saying that: This Knowledg

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