Utopia In Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift wrote his book Gulliver’s Travels in the first half of the 1720’s. At the time he was writing much more of the “new world” had been explored and colonized, giving Swift with the ability to create a traveller to poke fun at and critique the men who had previously made themselves out to be heroes by creating a fiction often more believable than the supposed truths. Gulliver’s admiration for other societies resembles that of Hythloday and his experience in Utopia. Both of these book show how writers back in Europe wished the explorers would have been more earnest in their descriptions of societies in the new world. Swift especially used his book to comment on the current state of Europe and its politics in the new world.
Gulliver’s

story starts the way most pre-modern explorers stories did, he was raised in a wealthy family and then decided to become an explorer. Gulliver’s ship wrecked and he alone makes it ashore, where six-inch tall people, called the Lilliput capture him (Swift, 43). When Gulliver eventually convinced the Liliput’s to free him he quickly earned their trust, learned their language, and the protected them from their enemies (Swift, 66). This behaviour, being nice to the natives and treating them as equals, is not something that real explorers had done before Swift created Gulliver. The act of attempting to assimilate into the societies Gulliver encounters is something he does at all places his visits, the repetition of this idea of treating those in other societies is a comment on the way Europeans conducted their exploration of the new world. Whenever explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries found “new” lands, they would attempt to conquer the people and force them to behave the way Europeans did, they never treated the natives as other humans but as savages. They also saw the languages of other people as more barbaric than those of the Europeans, and did not seem to put effort into understanding their languages. Gulliver is always described as respecting the culture and social norms of the society he visits, in once instance he changed his clothes because he realized they did not fit the customs of the people of Laputa, clothing and “nakedness” was often a topic of writing for the earlier explorers, though they looked down on the clothing the natives wore and would never have worn their clothes (Swift, 156).
While the perceived superiority of European societies is extremely evident in the writings of Columbus, Vespucci, and other explorers of their time, Gulliver describes the exact opposite of the places he visits.

In his travels, Gulliver found that other societies were better than European societies, especially that of the Houyhnhnm’s. Gulliver admires the Houyhnhnm’s, and believes their virtuous society is better than that of Europe, especially their lack of vices (Swift, 224). This admiration, of other societies has not been seen in the writings of real European explorers but the mythic Hythloday in More’s Utopia expressed it in More’s Utopia. Utopia and the Houyhnhnm’s societies had are similar in that they both express the writers idea of how a better society could be ran and are critiquing European society at the time. Both of these writings focus heavily on the virtues in foreign societies and the abundance of vices in European society. The lack of illness in the Houyhnhnm’s society is another way Swift uses his writings to discuss his frustration with the world (Swift, 231). In multiple societies Gulliver visited he saw cases where doctors were either working to fix illnesses or where there was no illness at all (Swift, 173) (Swift, 231). If Gulliver were to have come across Utopia in his travels he would have described it in a similar way to the way he described the Houyhnhnm’s, with respect and

admiration.
As a Traveller, Gulliver respects Hythloday in many aspects. He spends his time travelling the new world, rarely coming back, but when he does he feels a great deal of discontent with the way European society is constructed and ran. He believes that other societies are better ran than European societies and that quality of people and the focus of life is more virtuous in these far off lands than they are in his home. Swift portrays Gulliver heroically to put him in direct contradiction with the real explorers, men who did not care nor respect the cultures they visited but simply went to impose their ideas on the native people a free them of their natural resources. By creating Gulliver, Swift was creating the explorer he wished was representing Europe in the world.