Rita Hoffman
Jonathan Swift has often been characterized as a misogynist in literary criticism. Indeed, he tends to categorize women, in his writings, as ladies, whores, servants or virgins, never presenting them as a whole person. Seldom does he write of them as mothers or as someone with minds and morals equal to men. However, upon closer examination he can perhaps best be seen, first as a man who was probably ignorant and fearful of women, half the human race. He was a man who perhaps would rather forsake wife and family then take the chance of being rejected by someone he loved (Greenacre 27). In addition, his writings may reflect an unthinking absorption of the society’s ideas of women in his time.
To understand Swift’s views and relationship with women, we must first understand how he was raised and how his young adult life influenced his later years.
Swift was born 7 or 8 months after his father’s death, but “came time enough to save his mother’s credit” (Pilkington 57).In other words his mother was married to his father and the time of his conception which saved her reputation. His mother hired a wet nurse who “amicably kidnapped him,” (Murry 13). His nurse took him from where he was born in Ireland to England. He was kept by the nurse for approximately three years because when his mother found him, she sent instructions to “not hazard a second voyage till he was better able to bear it” (Murry 14). Most mothers, by contrast, would be willing to go to any lengths to have their child returned to them, even if it meant going on a long ocean voyage to get the child themselves.
By most accounts, the nurse took good care of Swift and he was returned to his mother when he was approximately four years old. He lived with his mother and older sister, Jane, for a time before his mother and sister left for Leicester and he want to live with his Uncle Goodwin who enrolled him soon after in a boarding school in Kilkenny (Greenacre 24). Swift did not see his mother or sister again till he was 21 and it was he who sought her out and not the other way around. Between his birth and going off to boarding school, he lived with his only immediate family for only approximately three years. This was hardly enough time to establish his identity as part of a family nor could he have had time to be “suffused with a warm maternal glow” (Ehrenpreis 32).
It is in these early years when boys usually start getting their knowledge of the opposite sex and form their mental and emotional model of women through the formation of their first love relationship a woman, their mothers. In a normal family, consisting of both mother and father, boys start to understand that women are more than one dimensional people. Swift was not exposed to this having lost his father to death and his mother to abandonment.
Swift probably had little exposure to the opposite sex in the sense that he wouldn’t have seen them except as a finished product. Even though his Uncle Goodwin had many children, and assuming that approximately half would be girls, he only lived there a short time before being sent to boarding school where he lived with other boys (Greenacre 24).
Swift’s school holidays were brief. Most boys get their first glimpse of a woman’s anatomy by spying on their mothers or sisters. Not being raised by his mother or living with his sister, Swift would have never had the chance to see an adult women when she first got up in the morning, when she was sick or nursing another child. This is the way most boys learn about women and Swift had little chance for this. He also would have little chance to understand how women think or speak and thus would have ambiguous feelings after the rejection of his first love, Varinia.
The women in Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels are occupied by queens, whores, nurses, nursing women, ladies of the court, a young sex crazed Yahoo and a benevolent but distracted nag. In Lilliput, the queen is autocratic and infuriated when Gulliver urinates on her apartment to keep it from burning and avows revenge (38). In Brobdingnag there is a queen who saves him, the maids of honor who toy with him and his little nurse, Glumdalclitcg, the only female character significantly, to actually have a name, who loves him but still takes the opportunity to laugh at his expense (Swift 100).
In Laputa, a wife is someone who would rather prostitute herself than stay with her neglectful husband (Swift 139). In Houyhnhnms there is a young female Yahoo who is “inflamed with desire” at the sight of Gulliver (Swift 233).
Nowhere in Gulliver’s Travels are women more than one dimensional. They are gross, lusty, sexual, benevolent and disgusting. They are ladies, whores, caretakers, saviors or autocrats. 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.
In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver on occasion observes women in terms of their breasts but unlike practically all the rest of his gender, he can find little in them to appreciate. He writes, for example, “I must confess no object ever.” isgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast” (71). “There was a woman with cancer in her breast swelled to a monstrous size, full of holes” (Swift 90) in Brobdingnag. In Houyhnhnms describing female Yahoos, “their dugs hung between their fore feet and often reached almost to the ground as they walked (Swift 193).
Elsewhere, in Swift’s poem, “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” Swift writes about Corinna as she gets ready for bed, “Pulls out the rags contrived to prop/ her flabby dugs and down they drop.” Or he describes their bodily functions as in “Steprhon and Chloe, “The bride must either void or burst” (Swift 544) or in Cassinus and Peter” that the great secret is “Caeliash” (Swift 550). This leads Suzanne Grubar to write that Swift had a “horror of female physicality” and that he equates “female youth and beauty with crumbling, inadequate material” (140).
Firstly, however, this, to me, speaks more to his confusion regarding women than misogyny; that he is attracted to women on one hand but repelled by them on the other. Women’s artifice and smells, to Swift, must have been both erotic and disgusting. The contradiction of their modesty and sexuality, the appearance of delicacy against the reality of biological necessity; the idea that women prattled and appeared vapid yet were perceptive and intuitive seem to have further confused Swift. Given that there was no one central female figure when he was growing up to help him reconcile these contradictory views, it is no wonder that had to categorize women to try to understand them.
Interesting, Swift was twenty-three years when his mother Abigail Swift visited him at his boarding house, passing herself off as his lover. This was noted as an example of Abigail’s liking of practical jokes, which purportedly Swift inherited (Greenacre 23). However, I think it speaks more to the relationship between Swift and Abigail and by extension to his relationship and ideas of other women.
We can neither bring Swift back from the dead to speak to him as Gulliver talks to the dead in Glubbdubdrib (167) nor can we retrospectively psychoanalyze him; we can however make certain assumptions based on the patterns shown in his writings and his personal life.
Swift never married but did have three serious relationships with women. He proposed marriage to Jane Waring (Varina) who was seven years his junior and was hurt by her rejection (Murry 60). Later, when Varina changed her mind, Swift rejected her (Murry 60 – 61). He also had a serious relationship with Esther Johnson (Stella) who was fourteen years younger than he. This relationship or friendship lasted till she died. During his friendship with Stella, he also entered into a relationship with Vanessa or Esther Van Homriglis a woman twenty- one years younger than himself.
Whether Swift was in love with Stella or Vanessa or secretly married to Stella is anyone’s guess. Murry writes that Sift wanted to marry Vanessa (276) but instead married Stella to give her a “feeling of security” (280). On the other hand, Ehrenpreis writes that Vanessa’s “wheedling and coercion left him chilled” (20) and the more assertive she became in showing her attraction for him the more he withdrew (Quintana 210). His strange relationship with Vanessa did not end till her death in 1723. We do know that what these three women had in common was that they were all fatherless and in poor health and that Swift enjoyed the upper hand in these relationships even as he distanced himself from them (Ehrenpreis 22).
He also enjoyed tutoring both Stella and Vanessa as Gulliver was tutored in all his voyages. Prior to his final break-up with Varina, he wrote “Resolutions when I Come to be Old”. Two of these resolutions were not to enter into marriage with a younger woman and not to be flattered or think that he could be loved by a young woman (Murry 65).
Ehrenpreis thinks that Swift picked these increasingly younger women so that he could give them the family and himself the childhood they and he never had (22). It seems likely, though, that he was afraid of women’s sexuality and in his relationship with increasingly younger women, he could control that fear by controlling them. This fear is shown by Gulliver in his reaction to the young Yahoo in Houyhnhnms After all, man fears most that which he cannot understand.
Secondly, Swift wrote about women in accordance to societal ideas of women in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-century.
In Gulliver’s Travels, we hear men telling Gulliver about their society and commenting on English society, laws, politics and the education of children. In Lilliput, we hear the diminutive king who is filled with his own self importance. In Brobdingnag we hear the benevolent king who gives Gulliver a disparaging, but accurate opinion of England (Swift 107 – 108) In Laputa we hear from Munodi, a great lord (Swift 148) who’s thinking is at odds with the rest of his society. In Glubbdribnib, Gulliver meets and questions famous men from history (Swift 167).
We never hear the voices of the women 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. Gulliver dines frequently with the queen in Brobdingnag who saved him from the farmer and notes that she enjoyed his company (Swift 84); however what they talked about is not mentioned. In Lilliput, Gulliver is visited often by a “great lady” (Swift 46). However, what they talk about during those visits is also not mentioned. In Laputa, he notes that he only had conversations with “women, tradesmen, flappers and court pages” (Swift 147), but the topic of the conversations are never mentioned. The conversations that he had with the queen, the lady and the women in Laputa are not brought up because it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Women’s voices were not important in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Richard Brathwaite writes that it would be equally unbecoming for a woman to “discourse of state matters” as it would be “dispute of high points of divinity” (Fraser 244).
In the time of Swift, women had no voices of their own. They were considered the legal responsibility of their fathers or husbands (Hufton 57) Married woman had to be careful what they said in the presence of their husbands, for if a wife maligned or made unfounded accusations, she was considered foolish, irrational or silly, but her husband could be charged with slander (Hufton 56). Whatever a woman said in public was a reflection of the ideas of her father or husband. The ideal wife was obedient, for if not their husbands were allowed to (within reason) physically discipline them (Hufton 56).
Another reason women did not have voices was that because they were considered to be devoid of reason or rationality. Crampe- Casnape quotes Montesque “Reason is never found . . . among those with beauty. When beauty asks to rule, reason sees to it that the request is denied” (328). If women possessed any reason at all, it was not equal to a male’s powers. Women were granted an imagination, but not conceded the ability to carry out an idea. According to Swift’s society, the ability to weigh the pros and cons of a decision, to make judgments or to generalize were lacking in women’s minds (Crampe- Casnabet 330).The only mental quality granted women was the capacity to be an obedient and faithful wife who brought up children (Crampe- Casnabet 329). “Obedience and chastity makes them first dutiful daughters, then loyal wives (Desaive 265). Like the young Yahoo, in Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, women were also supposed to be filled with lust and “suffers from limitless desires” (Crampe-Casbanet 326).
Nevertheless, to characterize Swift as a misogynist would be to ignore his consistent acts of respect toward them. For example, he hired Mary de la Riviere Mandley after she was released from jail for libel, to write political pamphlets. Swift respected her as a “fellow writer” (Gelbart 422). He thought women should be educated if only to be a companion and of interest to their husbands when their beauty faded (Swift 212). In “Voyage to the Houyhnhnms,” In the Houyhnhnms, equal education is given to both male and female horses, but of course the female receive education in domestics. The master horse is appalled that English society gives a lesser education women then to men: For the general view of women in his time was for rigid standards.
Swift tried to achieve an insight into women that he was not exposed to in his youth. I do not approve of course of the way Swift depicts women in their roles as nurses, ladies, queens or whores without voices to tell us what those times were like from their perspective and what it felt like to be a women who had no control over her own life, However, it is a reflection of the times that Swift lived in. The paucity of love in his childhood and the little exposure he had to women when he was growing up also attributed to the corrosive and probably excruciating personal isolation Swift suffered as a natural extension of the badly distorted views he had of women.
Works Cited
Crampe-Casnabet, Michele. “A Sampling of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy.” Arthur Goldhammer, trans. Davis, Natalie Zemon and Farge, Arlette, eds.
A History of Women in the West III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.
Davis, Natalie Zemon and Farge, Arlette, Eds. A History of Women in the West III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.
Ehrenpreis, Irvin. Swift, The Man, His Works, and the Age. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Ehrenpreis, Irvin. The Personality of Jonathan Swift. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1958.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
Greenacre, Phyllis, M.D. Swift and Carroll. New York: International University Press, Inc., 1955.
Gubar, Susan. “The Female Monster in Augustan Satire.” Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect Before Her, A History of Women in Western Europe 1500 – 1800. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Montesquie, The Spirit of Laws, bk. 16, chap. 12. Davis, Natalie Zemon and Farge, Arlette, eds. A History of Women in the West III. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.
Murry, John Middleton. Jonathan Swift: A Critical Biography. New York: Noonday Press, 1955.
Nokes, David. Jonathan Swift A Hypocrite Reversed. A Critical Biography. New York: University Press, 1985.
Quintana, Ricardo. The Mind and Art of Jonathan Swift. Massachusetts: Oxford University Press, 1936.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. The Confessions. J. M. Cohen, trans. Davis, Natalie Zemon and Farge, Arlete, eds. A History of Women in the West III Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver Travels.. Robert Greenberg and William Bowman Piper, eds. The Writings of Jonathan Swift. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1973.