Gullivers Observation of and Interaction with Gender Roles in Jonathan Swifts Gulliver Travels
This 10-page graduate paper takes 3 episodes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels and discusses the gender roles of each situation, as well as Gulliver's interaction within those gender roles. Briefly, this paper concludes that in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels, Gulliver encounters a number of gender roles in the countries he visits. He tends to view these roles in terms of the roles he is familiar with in England. Thus, he tends to applaud patriarchal behaviour and he tends to view roles such as wife and mother as natural roles. In his encounter with the female Yahoo, however, Gulliver encounters a gender role, which is deeply disturbing. Not only does the Yahoo upset Gulliver’s sense traditional gender roles by acting as the sexual aggressor, but she also implicates Gulliver more deeply in gender politics. While Gulliver can view the Lilliputian Empress as a wife and the Brobdingnag wife as a mother, gender roles which allow him to maintain his agency as a male, the female Yahoo’s behaviour is more threatening. It posits him as an object of desire and identifies him as a specific species, facts which ultimately remove his agency. Simply, through her actions, the female Yahoo labels him just as Gulliver has labelled the Empress and the Brobdingnag mother through his narrative voice. The trauma Gulliver undergoes from his experience with the Yahoo compels him to exercise a despotic level of patriarchal authority upon his return home, in an attempt to re-establish his sense of traditional gender roles.
