Gulliver's Travels: Savaging the Savages
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a tour of the folly and ignorance in
fantastic lands, allegorizes the European mentality Swift detested and savaged as humankind's irremediable nature. The protagonist moves through gullibility and pessimism into misanthropy as he grapples with the chimeras of ignorance and unreason during his four voyages into the prevailing prejudices of his era. Much of the contemporary political allegory requires notes to explain some of Swift's specific targets, but the intrinsic frauds and popular hallucinations show up in outlines.
The savagery of the Yahoos, the most vivid symbolic group in the narrative, stems as much from cultural excrescence as from the Yahoo's ungoverned bestiality, violence, and animal behavior. Structurally, they are not from Gulliver, and that adds shock to the recognition of their baseness. In Chapter Eight, Gulliver's description of he Yahoos and his report of their delight in filth and degradation makes it plain, as Samuel Monk observes, that the Yahoos represent the irrational, immoral, and aspect of mankind at its most foul ("The Pride of Lemuel" 645). They are depraved, obscene, and incorrigible; they wallow in filth and excrement, relish their own stench, and fight savagely over things of no consequence, except the drive to possess them or deny them to another. (In the end, they provide a handsome income for the legal system.)
These humanlike beasts serve the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses. Yahoo males have hairy bodies; Yahoo females have low-hanging breasts. They are naked, filthy, and primitive in their eating habits. Their sexual lust repels Gulliver, especially when an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl attempts to rape Gulliver as he is bathing naked. Gulliver eventually refers to himself as a Yahoo; "Yahoo" becomes a term of self-rejection at the end of Gulliver's fourth journey. Swift's
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