The King of Brobdingnag is compelled to hear Gulliver's experiences in his own native country after forming an amiable relationship with him, wishing to emulate any form of improvement worth assimilating in his own kingdom. With Gulliver as the "Lilliputian" among the Brobdingnagians, Swift makes his largest criticism yet against the 18th century English government, evident in the Brobdingnagian King's response to Gulliver's summary of the English people and its history, asserting with the utmost confidence,
"[British history] was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition."
This is a striking comparison to the glory and reverence Gulliver bathes the image of England as what the king brushes off as "a most admiral panegyric upon [his] country." Furthermore, Swift makes the most bold statement in the last sentence of Chapter VI:
"I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
While in the previous section Swift mocks the British in a third-person point of view from Gulliver's observations of the Lilliputians and their customs, this section reverses the previous order of point of view and makes a direct affirmation of British riddance in society. Furthermore, the giants can be seen as bastions of moral rectitude, with Gulliver (for the most part) extolling the society of Brobdingnag.
I agree with your claims Cody, but would the statements that Swift says suggest that Gulliver himself doesn't represent English society, but the encountered nations do? In other words, why do you think that Swift doesn't make Gulliver (despite being English himself) resemble the British society?
ReplyDeletePerhaps Gulliver's point of view as a representative of European politics changes as he travels from place to place. I believe that the Lilliputian and Blefuscan societies were representations of the savageness of European politics in England with Gulliver as the "sane" person of them all, while the Brobdingnagian society takes the role of the refined thinker in comparison to the overly proud Gulliver, this time impersonating the corruptness and English politics.
DeleteI'd imagine Gulliver's point will change again in the next chapters - he will encounter several other countries and Japan. Perhaps the feudalistic society of Japan will be compared to English government in that chapter?