When I was a little girl, I read Gulliver. A version that was adapted for kids, of course. It was in Spanish, it rhymed and the best parts were actually the drawings. Later I read the book in Spanish, I saw the 90s mini-series and finally I read it in English; merely because I still didn’t know what to do with the ending (it still bugs me).
The first two episodes are the ones that get adapted the most, and that is not only because they can easily be bowdlerised into a children’s book, but because they are the best written parts and also the most easily understandable for a modern reader.
Even though I didn’t know anything about 18th century British politics, I understood Swift was parodying petty political and religious differences. For example, when the Lilliputians fight against their neighbours because they have a disagreement over which end to open a boiled egg, I understood he was talking about Protestants and Catholics, though I didn’t know the details of the real conflict, and I enjoyed the story too; it was satirical but not so satirical as to distract me. I even liked Gulliver at that stage, even though he wasn't showing any emotions.
Obviously, there are more correlations to the political situation of Swift’s time: Gulliver’s pacifism (what I most liked about him) is actually the reflection of the Tory government’s withdrawal from the Spanish Succession War and thus Swift defends his political ideals. Again it’s good for the story as well.
Brobdingnag is a bit less memorable, but still enjoyable. In it, Gulliver and the European society are judged by that country’s standards, and since is a bit of a Marysuetopia, both are seen as “pernicious” and unnecessarily aggressive. Again, political satire that is comprehensible without ‘invading’ the plot and Gulliver develops as a character and becomes more thoughtful and mature.
Also, for the moment the anti-feminism of the book is not too jarring (though I doubt if a book that was written before the feminist movement can be called anti-feminist; I think that misogynist or just misanthropic are better). There are a couple of female characters that are interesting, though undeveloped: the queen of Brobdingnag and Gulliver's nurse. Gulliver worships the queen (just imagining her 'graciously' letting Gulliver kiss her pinky was a very funny image when I first read the book) and adores her nurse (who even gets a name!), but he's merely considered an amusing toy by both. Also from that part of the book: 'I must confess no object ever disgusted me as the sight of her monstrous breast’. Well, I suppose it makes sense in context.
In the last two parts, Swift turns the satire to eleven. The third part is a bit funny sometimes, but most of the time I was thinking ‘but I like the scientists’. Or at least, I couldn’t see what was so wrong with them. There were no poor people suffering because they were all dedicated to interesting but useless experiments, though their wives were unable to be faithful to their silly husbands (and of course, of participating in the experiments). I know now that Swift was parodying the Enlightenment, which he loathed. Pity we normally agree is a good thing. No, actually it’s not a very good parody. What I mean is that, though Gulliver’s attitude toward the Laputians is very unsympathetic, most readers now won’t agree. Now the satire is completely lost, then.
In the fourth part, the anti-colonist message, which has been implied in the other parts, is fully developed. The Houyhnhnms are super intelligent horses that have enslaved the yahoos, a race of primitive humans. The Houyhnhnms exploit the yahoos, and later decide to exterminate them, and rationalise both the exploitation and the extermination, using a very similar language to the imperialistic one. In fact, the yahoos are clearly established as ‘untouchable’ evil and as the ‘other’, as a matter of fact the word means “evil”. They finally decide to sterilise all of them, as Gulliver suggests (thank you, idiot. Oh, well by this point he is very unlikable). As you can see, Gulliver has completely fallen for the horses’ way, as opposed to Lilliput (too similar to the real England, I suppose) and Laputa (nice bilingual pun there). He ends up mad as a result, not knowing what he is and convinced that all humans are Yahoos and the horses’ way is the one true path.
Some have commented that that happens when someone comes in contact with an imperialistic society, they try to identify themselves with the ruling class, no matter that they don’t belong to it, and can lose their identities in the process. Maybe that happened to Swift when he was first living in England, but later changed his attitude and decided to parody this behaviour. I don’t know, maybe it happened to Anglo-Irish like him. Therefore, I think that it is an excellent satire, but the novel’s aspects of the book suffer at the end. Or at least when I read it I thought it was too bitter a message, though maybe it was necessary. So at the end, Gulliver is back home, but can’t stand his family and past friends and only talk to the silent horses.
