In August of this year, the online magazine Salon published an autobiographical story about a young wife who realized that her husband was a misanthrope, descriptively titled, “I Married A Misanthrope.” Her story is about how she realized it and why it makes her unhappy. Now, she had known throughout their short dating relationship that he was not a very social fellow, and had problems connecting with others. In fact, she loved him even more for it, because his love for her meant that she was one of the few people he could connect with. In her words, “it was flattering to be one of a very select few on someone’s list of bearable others, to make the cut and thus be needed so intensely.” But she hadn’t realized she would be an entire world to someone because he could not connect to others, and it made her feel burdened. Not only that, but his refusal to go to parties and social events made her feel that she was leaving him out and that “she was having fun without him.”
The story is altogether strange, because none of her descriptions of her husband would lead the reader to believe him a misanthrope. A comment left by a reader on the story summed it up perfectly: “This guy's not a misanthrope; he's just socially awkward. He doesn't dislike people; he merely dislikes the inconvenience attendant to social interaction.” That reader is right. Misanthropy takes a certain amount of hate for the human species, a pessimism of the abilities (or lack thereof) of humanity, a disdain for the trappings of human nature. “I Married A Misanthrope” is not about a misanthropic husband, but a socially-handicapped one. And there is a not-so-fine line distinguishing between the man who hates humanity, and the man who hates interacting with humanity.
If there is any story that indicates its author’s misanthropy clearly and distinctly, it is Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Whether religion, social mores, or human nature itself, Swift attacks them all in a paradous fashion throughout his books which make up Gulliver’s Travels. This is clear even in how he breaks up his stories, or the worlds through which Gulliver travels. In the first book, Gulliver is shipwrecked in the empire of Lilliput, where he finds himself a giant among a diminutive people. The Lilliputians are small, toy-like, cute - yet vicious and mean beyond their stature. Gulliver is much like Swift in British society, a giant amongst small, bickering people. In the second book, Gulliver finds himself in a land of giants, creatures ten times as large as Europeans. Though he is worried that they will be giant monsters, the reverse proves to be the case. But even as Gulliver begins to recognize that the place is very much utopian, he refuses to recognize this view, holding as he leaves the land that Europe is superior to Brobdingnag. Between the two books, Swift is commenting that it is easy to recognize the smallness in others, but it is not so easy when we are the small ones! These are very much attacks on social and political problems inherent in the human society of Swift’s time. In the third book, to Laputa, Swift is chiefly concerned with attacking extremes of theoretical and speculative reasoning, whether in science, politics, or economics. The point is that Swift believes it a fool’s errand to attempt to speculate about things such as metaphysics, for we’ll never know for certain. This is a limitation of the human mind. In the last book, book four, Gulliver is set between a race of horses, Houyhnhnms, who live entirely by reason except for a few well-controlled and muted social affections, and their slaves, the Yahoos, whose bodies are obscene caricatures of the human body and who have no glimmer of reason, but are mere creatures of appetite and passion. In the first three books, Gulliver saw himself in relation to humans, but here he is suddenly forced into comparison not with human beings at all but animals, and two orders of animals. The obvious moral symbolism which is present throughout the fourth book is that sometimes horse could be better than humans; on the other hand people may, by forfeiting their humanity, becomes bestial. So, the four books represent at least four strong critiques of humanity.
Indeed, even the way that Gulliver arrives at each place is either a mistake or malice by someone. In the first voyage, accident, or at worst the carelessness of the lookout, accounts for the shipwreck. In the second, Gulliver is left alone in a strange land through the cowardice of his shipmates. In the third, he is captured and later abandoned by pirates. In the fourth, his crew of cutthroat mutineers seizes his ship and leaves him to starve on a nearby island. When it is malice, it is because Swift is trying to impart that when push comes to shove, people watch out for their own skin while sacrificing other. People are not fundamentally good. When it is an accident or carelessness, these are also human faults in that they had not prepared fully beforehand, which caused deaths of others. Humans like to say, “To err is human,” or “People make mistakes,” but these are just ways of making ourselves feel good for some things that happen all the time because of our recklessness.
Another aspect of Swift’s use of literary tools to malign humanity is seen in his creation of a sense of realism and verisimilitude that contrasts sharply with the fantastic nature of the tales. The style and tone of the book is one of a common travelogue, something fairly common in Swift’s time. There are all kinds of nautical terms and jargon, and sounds very factual and real. As Tuveson points out in his essay in , "In Gulliver's Travels there is a constant shuttling back and forth between real and unreal, normal and absurd...until our standards of credulity are so relaxed that we are ready to buy a pig in a poke."
Gulliver, as the protagonist, is even used literarily to show Swift’s misanthropy for the human race. As Orwell points out in his essay “Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels,” Swift changes Gulliver’s personality throughout the various voyages to reflect the most contrast between humans and the people he meets. So in the first voyage, he is a typical 18th century explorer, but strong, a man with children. Spectacles as a symbol of wisdom are mentioned several times here. He is the ship’s surgeon (although that wasn’t a particularly skilled job back then). This is so as to be a contrast to the petty and small people of Lilliput. But then, in the second voyage, he changes, ever so slightly. Suddenly he is a bit silly. As Owell puts it, “... at moments when the story demands it he has a tendency to develop into an imbecile who is capable of boasting of ‘our noble Country, the Mistress of Arts and Arms, the Scourge of France’, etc., etc., and at the same time of betraying every available scandalous fact about the country which he professes to love.” This, too, is to give contrast between the imbecilic humanity, represented by Gulliver, and the wise people of Brobdingnag. In Laputa he changes again to be almost wise, moving up the social scale as an observer of the foolishness of speculation. And lastly, he becomes completely different, almost a religious recluse whose only wish is to meditate on the on the goodness of the Houyhnhnms. All these inconsistencies of character are for the literary purpose of contrast, in order to show humanity’s frailties.
In overview of the book, we see that even in its broadest sense, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a most pessimistic book about humanity. But the details of the stories are all pointed attacks on humanity. One attack is about social mores. For example, the Emperor of Lilliput's palace catches fire, and Gulliver puts it out by urinating on it. Orwell writes, “Instead of being congratulated on his presence of mind, he finds that he has committed a capital offence by making water in the precincts of the palace…” This is an attack on the social more that people don’t care that a problem was fixed, and fixed well, they care rather about how it was fixed. Orwell points out that a similar problem happened to Swift himself, writing “part of the reason for Swift's failure to get preferment was that the Queen was scandalized by the Tale of a Tub — a pamphlet in which Swift probably felt that he had done a great service to the English Crown, since it sacrifices the Dissenters and still more the Catholics while leaving the Established Church alone.” Although he supposedly helped the Queen, he was punished, so to speak, because of his method of putting down others. Swift found this a fault in human society. Another common social problem Swift maligns here is that we don’t care, we even laugh, when others are hurt, yet it starts to matter when it begins to affect us. Gulliver watches amusedly as the Lilliputians fight amongst themselves. Their small stature, yet vicious nature, is a contrast that is comedic. Yet, when they turn their attentions to him, he suddenly cares. Especially in Swift’s time, there were carnivals and weird people and animals for people to pay money and see. The Lilliputians immediately make Gulliver into a racket - something weird and fascinating for people to come and see. This is a comment on our fascination with the strange, as well as our ability to make a human into a zoo animal in order for us to make money.
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