247). There are other instances when Gulliver’s insight into institutions or practices are indistinguishable from Swift’s. For example, in Lilliput Gulliver points out that false accusers in criminal proceedings are made to pay for the trouble they have caused, and that crimes of fraud and breach of trust are taken seriously. He is even shrewd enough to recognize that the very advanced legal values he describes as practiced in Lilliput are hardly ever practiced in regard to him.

But what is the reader to think of Gulliver when he says, as he does in the third voyage, that he is made melancholy by the unhappy prospect of people actually recognizing “wisdom, capacity and virtue” (p. 190)? Part of the problem for Gulliver is that he cannot imagine readers thinking very deeply about his own inconsistencies as a character. He proceeds almost thoughtlessly and can only imagine the same response from readers. Perhaps one brief instance summarizes Gulliver for the reader of the Travels. In Houyhnhnmland Gulliver describes how horses milk cows, which he records as simple “dexterity” (p. 273). Dexterity? Does Gulliver have the capacity to withdraw from the surface of the narrative sufficiently to allow a reader to create a careful mental picture of a horse milking a cow? Probably not. And there is the rub. In subtle ways, the reader of the Travels reads Gulliver’s incapacities into the reading of the adventures. Gulliver’s story is among the most interesting of those in the book, but not always in the way he thinks.

Satire on the Body of Humankind

Swift’s sense of discomfort with all things human—especially all things the human body does—is a pervasive theme in Gulliver’s Travels, primarily because other travel writing, real and fictional, tended to leave the intimacies of the body alone. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, for example, says almost nothing about the body except for how Crusoe clothes it. Gulliver, on the other hand, is absorbed from the beginning with his own waste matter and the embarrassments of his own sexuality, limited though it be. In Lilliput, he claims reluctance to speak of anything so undignified as excretion, yet he takes something of a civil servant’s glee in the plans for removing his waste in Lilliputian wheelbarrows. In Brobdingnag, Gulliver yet again apologizes when he relieves himself in the herb garden, but this time claims that such ruminations “will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination” (p. 100). How exactly?

Gulliver finds a way to combine his excretory and sexual functions when the troops of the Lilliputian emperor’s army pass under his huge legs, and he confesses that “my breeches were at that time in so ill a condition, that they afforded some opportunities for laughter and admiration” (p. 49). The laughter is understandable but the admiration is arresting. Can Gulliver be referring to the size—or outsize, in this instance—of his parts? This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Gulliver’s private parts are at issue in the Travels. He first ships out as apprentice to a tantalizingly named Master Bates (Latin pranksters were said to have made up this pun in the seventeenth century). In Lilliput, he finds himself in the capital city, Mildendo, which breaks down anagrammatically to “dildo-men.” Later in Brobdingnag, the very little Gulliver becomes something of a dildo man himself, at least in the presence of the maids of honor at court, one of whom “would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular” (p. 123).

In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself in the snares of a potential adultery imbroglio involving his private concourse with the Lord High Treasurer Flimnap’s wife. In answer to the charge that “her Grace had taken a violent affection for my person” (p. 70), Gulliver defies his accusers to trace any “incognito” (p. 70) visit on her part. He takes offense that anyone would charge a sexual liaison between a man six feet in height and a woman six inches, but it does not occur to him that anyone would marvel at the physiology involved. On a reverse scale, Gulliver finds out more than he would like about sexuality in Brobdingnag when he gets too close to its magnified state, and, finally, on a human scale he is only too mortified when a very young female Yahoo tries to mount him in Houyhnhnmland: “I was a real Yahoo in every limb and feature, since the females had a natural propensity to me as one of their own species” (p. 266).

Swift plays out the theme of bodily embarrassment most dramatically in the last book of the Travels with the infamous Yahoos.