The Yahoos are Swift’s most pronounced statement on the physical form of humanity in Gulliver’s Travels: “Upon the whole, I never beheld in all my travels so disagreeable an animal, or one against which I naturally conceived so strong antipathy” (p. 225). Gulliver reluctantly makes the connection to his own species “when I observed, in this abominable animal, a perfect human figure” (p. 231). During the course of the Travels, Gulliver turns from human propagandist to a hater of his own species, of who humans are, what they do, how they look, and how they smell. We learn at the end of the Travels that he is isolated from his kind, obsessive-compulsive, keeping company with male horses. Of his family, Gulliver has this to say: “I must freely confess the sight of them filled me only with hatred, disgust and contempt, and the more by reflecting on the near alliance I had to them” (p. 288). The sentiment here can only mean he disgusts himself, but why should disgust turn to hate? That question has plagued generations of Swift’s readers. Is bodily alienation a form of misanthropy? Swift always denied he shared Gulliver’s predisposition on the matter, but the body of the Travels and the body in them suggest another look. At a time just before the release of Gulliver’s Travels, when the issue most pressed upon him, Swift wrote to Pope and tried to distinguish his position from that of Gulliver. The letter does not absolve Swift from misanthropy; it merely refines his particular brand:

I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals; for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one and Judge Such-a-one; so with physicians (I will not speak of my own trade), soldiers, English, French, Scotch, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest the animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth (September 29, 1725; Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, p. 103).

Swift’s Satiric Language

Swift is one of the most practiced prose satirists ever to set pen to paper, and his style is marked by qualities that distinguish him from almost all others. Swift was a superb satirist, but he was also a superb mimic, which may be saying something of the same thing. His work is crowded with the feel and texture of real experience. Gulliver’s Travels gains a large measure of its effect from the thousands of named things that fill its spaces. Any claim that Gulliver might make at the end of the Travels for removing himself from life’s clutter is rendered moot by the very press of things he thinks he has escaped. Gulliver gets into Swift’s rhythm by reflecting on what is missing in Houyhnhnmland:

Here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos: no leaders or followers of party and faction: no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples: no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories: no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics: no pride, vanity, or affectation: no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes: no ranting, lewd, expensive wives: no stupid, proud pedants: no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions: no scoundrels, raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues: no lords, fiddlers, judges or dancing-masters (p. 276).

Throughout the Travels, language determines Gulliver’s sense of belonging, and his words become part of the circumstances he describes. When a six-inch being climbs on him in Lilliput, Gulliver reacts as if he feels a bug on his leg: “I felt something alive moving on my left leg” (p. 28). But as soon as he acclimates himself to the land he is in he begins to readjust his expressions to the point of view of his hosts. He urinates in public spaces and notices how the crowd scatters to the right and left “to avoid the torrent which fell with such noise and violence from me” (p. 31). Gulliver’s “water” is only a “torrent” falling with “noise and violence” for the Lilliputians, surely not for him. He has changed perspective and his language follows suit. Similar transformations occur in the second voyage when Gulliver, now minuscule in comparison with his hosts, when he refers to his mistress, Glumdalclitch, as only “forty foot high, being little for her age” (p. 101), or when he points out that whales from the known seas sometimes wash up on Brobdingnag’s shores: “These whales I have known so large that a man could hardly carry one upon his shoulders” (p. 116).

There is no end to the pleasure Swift takes in manipulating language and perspective in Gulliver’s Travels, and readers gain the most when they pay close attention.