Bookmarked Musings: Viewing Women through the Eyes of Gulliver

In this essay, Pragya Ranjan explores the misogynistic perspective Jonathan Swift employs to depict women across all four books of Gulliver’s Travels.

Most of us grew up reading Gulliver’s Travels as children’s fiction. However, apart from giving a very interesting account of Gulliver’s adventures to strange places, it is also a satire on the political, religious and scientific changes taking place in 18th CE England. Hence, this book holds as much importance to adult readers as it does to children. In this article, I will try to explain how women are represented in Gulliver’s Travels. 

Gulliver’s Travels was written by Johnathan Swift and published in 1726. It is a fantasy fiction divided into four parts. The protagonist, Gulliver, describes his adventure in as yet unexplored regions of the world and the strange creatures he meets. But even in these fantastical lands which figments out of Swift’s imagination, he still couldn’t manage to give women any position which is not dependent on their male counterpart let alone any authority.