Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Excrement
While it may seem a trivial or laughable motif, the recurrent
mention of excrement in Gulliver’s Travels actually has a serious
philosophical significance in the narrative. It symbolizes everything
that is crass and ignoble about the human body and about human existence
in general, and it obstructs any attempt to view humans as wholly
spiritual or mentally transcendent creatures. Since the Enlightenment
culture of eighteenth-century England tended to view humans optimistically
as noble souls rather than vulgar bodies, Swift’s emphasis on the
common filth of life is a slap in the face of the philosophers of
his day. Thus, when Gulliver urinates to put out a fire in Lilliput, or when Brobdingnagian flies defecate on his meals,
or when the scientist in Lagado works to transform excrement back
into food, we are reminded how very little human reason has to do
with everyday existence. Swift suggests that the human condition
in general is dirtier and lowlier than we might like to believe
it is.
Foreign Languages
Gulliver appears to be a gifted linguist, knowing at least
the basics of several European languages and even a fair amount
of ancient Greek. This knowledge serves him well, as he is able
to disguise himself as a Dutchman in order to facilitate his entry
into Japan, which at the time only admitted the Dutch. But even
more important, his linguistic gifts allow him to learn the languages
of the exotic lands he visits with a dazzling speed and, thus, gain
access to their culture quickly. He learns the languages of the
Lilliputians, the Brobdingnagians, and even the neighing tongue
of the Houyhnhnms. He is meticulous in recording the details of
language in his narrative, often giving the original as well as
the translation. One would expect that such detail would indicate
a cross-cultural sensitivity, a kind of anthropologist’s awareness
of how things vary from culture to culture. Yet surprisingly, Gulliver’s
mastery of foreign languages generally does not correspond to any
real interest in cultural differences. He compares any of the governments
he visits to that of his native England, and he rarely even speculates
on how or why cultures are different at all. Thus, his facility
for translation does not indicate a culturally comparative mind,
and we are perhaps meant to yearn for a narrator who is a bit less
able to remember the Brobdingnagian word for “lark” and better able
to offer a more illuminating kind of cultural analysis.
Clothing
Critics have noted the extraordinary attention that Gulliver
pays to clothes throughout his journeys. Every time he gets a rip
in his shirt or is forced to adopt some native garment to replace
one of his own, he recounts the clothing details with great precision.
We are told how his pants are falling apart in Lilliput, so that
as the army marches between his legs they get quite an eyeful. We
are informed about the mouse skin he wears in Brobdingnag, and how
the finest silks of the land are as thick as blankets on him. In
one sense, these descriptions are obviously an easy narrative device
with which Swift can chart his protagonist’s progression from one
culture to another: the more ragged his clothes become and the stranger
his new wardrobe, the farther he is from the comforts and conventions
of England. His journey to new lands is also thus a journey into
new clothes. When he is picked up by Don Pedro after his fourth
voyage and offered a new suit of clothes, Gulliver vehemently refuses,
preferring his wild animal skins. We sense that Gulliver may well
never fully reintegrate into European society.
But the motif of clothing carries a deeper, more psychologically complex
meaning as well. Gulliver’s intense interest in the state of his
clothes may signal a deep-seated anxiety about his identity, or lack
thereof. He does not seem to have much selfhood: one critic has called
him an “abyss,” a void where an individual character should be.
If clothes make the man, then perhaps Gulliver’s obsession with the
state of his wardrobe may suggest that he desperately needs to be fashioned
as a personality. Significantly, the two moments when he describes
being naked in the novel are two deeply troubling or humiliating
experiences: the first when he is the boy toy of the Brobdingnagian
maids who let him cavort nude on their mountainous breasts, and
the second when he is assaulted by an eleven-year-old Yahoo girl
as he bathes. Both incidents suggest more than mere prudery. Gulliver
associates nudity with extreme vulnerability, even when there is
no real danger present—a pre-teen girl is hardly a threat to a grown
man, at least in physical terms. The state of nudity may remind
Gulliver of how nonexistent he feels without the reassuring cover
of clothing.
