Importance Of Moralism In 'Gulliver's Travels'

Jonathon Swift offers an invitingly hilarious and unbelievable tale to the readers of Britain at the time through his early novel, Gulliver’s Travels. Swift also uses his novel to satirize the British culture at the time. Swift focuses on the human body through excrement, size, and other extremely obvious, but often ignored, human tendencies. Swift focuses on the mind of Britons by satirizing the ideals of the Enlightenment and their negative effects on the British society. Through visiting four extremely variant countries, Swift uses his character Gulliver to polarize spirituality and animalistic tendency often ignored by the philosophers and other Enlightenment idealists at the time. Gulliver’s first wildly chaotic and satirical trip is

Swift also uses his novel to satirize the British culture of the time. Swift focuses on the human body through excrement, size, and other extremely obvious, but often ignored, human tendencies. Swift focuses on the mind of Britons by satirizing the ideals of the Enlightenment and their negative effects on the British society. Through visiting four extremely variant countries, Swift uses his character Gulliver to polarize spirituality and animalistic tendency often ignored by the philosophers and other Enlightenment idealists at the time. Swift uses the Lilliputians to shock British readers into making them focus on the humanity Britain was ignoring at the time. By viewing the Brobdingnags, readers are seeing the body in a new perspective and Gulliver is able to give readers a special insight to the body’s imperfections. Swift offers a view that makes it impossible throughout the novel to view humans as purely spiritual and ignore their humanity. Swift offering a magnified view of the most beautiful ladies in Brobdingnag shows that, no matter how beautiful something is, there will always be a flaw when viewed closely enough. As an intensely cultural traditionalist, Swift was a critic of the new ideas that came from the Enlightenment. He directly pokes fun at the experiments that were proposed or tried by satirizing them directly in Gulliver’s visit to the academy in Glubbdubdrib, as province of the Laputan nation. Finally Swift satirizes Britain and human nature as a whole by attacking the philosophers of the Enlightenment who spent their entire lives dedicated to exploring ideals that, even though they furthered human knowledge in general, wholly brought the human race down by attempting to exterminate those wonderful things that make humanity. Overall, Swift was ultimately successful in satirizing the Enlightenment