Gulliver as a misogynist. Explain it

 Gulliver as a misogynist because Gulliver hates humanity through women. Swift portrays women as inferior creatures, comparing them to lusty, dirty, and ignorant animals, ultimately leading to Gulliver’s disgust in women in general at the end of the novel. In the moral domain, women inspire as much aversion as they do on the physical side. We know that Misogynistic reflecting or exhibiting hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women. Reflecting or exhibiting ingrained and institutionalized prejudice against women; sexist: misogynistic attitudes stemming from the highest corporate level. In Lilliput, Gulliver illustrates the carelessness of women, when he retells the story of the fire. The only way to extinguish the fire is through urination, an act so rude and grotesque that a woman could not handle it. The queen is autocratic and infuriated when Gulliver urinates on her apartment to keep it from burning. She decrees that public urination be banned and that the contaminated building be left as it is. The method by which Gulliver describes this event, leads the reader to believe that only a woman would act so harshly to his actions.

 In “A Voyage to Brobdingnag”, when the farmer shows Gulliver to his wife, she screams with disgust, the way a woman would react to a bug. Gulliver in Brobdingnag discovers that his sense was more acute in proportion to his littleness. He sees everything magnified, he examines everything as if through a microscope. Looking up close at the women’s anatomy, Gulliver notices that their skin seems very rough, discolored and greasy. Also he has difficulty breathing because of their strong and repugnant scent. He is disgusted by the sight of their huge pores, spots, pimples, hair and moles and even more repulsed by one maiden who places Gulliver on her nipple to play. Swift uses the Maids of Honor to illustrate flaws in a woman’s beauty that are generally overlooked or hidden. Gulliver expresses his aversion to their naked bodies.

They were, “very far from being a tempting sight”, and gave him, “any other emotions than those of horror and disgust”. Gulliver makes the connection that the women of England, that he normally finds so beautiful, have the same flaws, but he just does not see them as easily because they are of the same size: “This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and course and ill coloured.” Only the women are described as having such horrible discolored skin. Men had it too, but he only brought attention to the women.

 

When Gulliver describes a grotesque vision of humanity in Brobdingnag, he generally uses women as the objects of repulsion. It is the Empress who eats in a grotesque fashion. When Gulliver sees beggars and homeless, he describes in unkind detail the lice crawling on their clothes. The homeless beggar with cancerous breast is a horrific sight to Gulliver as he can see into the crevices and cavities in her body, destroyed by vermin and disease. That is “the most horrible spectacle that ever an European eye beheld”. Swift deploys the rhetorical “instruments” necessary for such disavowal figuring the decaying body as female. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver is shocked to see the “monstrous breast” of a nurse giving suck in front of him. Even the act of feeding does not escape his disgust: “I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast…”. The flying island of Laputa  has been the object of several feminist discussions particularly to show that women are repeatedly described separately from men. The women are described by geometric shape and mathematical figures. Furthermore, the women are not allowed to explore or travel off the island without specific doctrine from the King. In Laputa, a wife is someone who would rather prostitute herself than stay with her neglectful husband. According to Susan Bruce, Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa enacts men’s ultimate inability to control women’s bodies and desires.

 

In Houyhnhnms women were also supposed to be gross, lusty, sexual, benevolent and disgusting as the description of the Yahoo female shows: “The females had long lank hair on their heads and only a sort of down on the rest of their bodies. Their dugs hung between their fore feet and often reached almost to the ground as they walked.” A young female Yahoo gets “inflamed with desire” at the sight of Gulliver. Never does Swift suggest they are more than what he presents them to be, nor does he suggest that they think, feel, love or are morally responsible. The Yahoo female who, driven by sexual craving, throws herself on Gulliver is a strikingly horrific image.

While the Houyhnhnm females are sexually modest and controlled, the Yahoo females are sexually aggressive: “A female Yahoo would often stand behind a bank or a bush, to gaze on the young males . . . and then appear, and hide, using many antic gestures and grimaces . . . and when any of the males advanced she would slowly retire, looking often back.” However, Gulliver encounters several women in his travels but we never hear their opinions. We never find out how women think or what they feel about their own society. We also never find out what they think about Gulliver’s society. The reason for this is that women did not have figurative voices. The conversations that he had with the queen, the lady and the women in Laputa are not brought up because it doesn’t matter. Women’s voices were not important. So we could say Gulliver as a misogynist.