A Feminist Reading Of Gulliver's Travels

From the date of publication, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels has attracted the critics and the readers around the world to interpret it from different perspectives. Among these perspectives, biographical approach and historical approach, regarding it to be a satiric fiction, are most widely favored. Yet with a careful study of previous articles, few of them are found to interpret the writing from the perspective of feminist criticism. Owing to this, it is worth writing this thesis. Analyzing from the perspective of feminist criticism, this thesis attempts to solve two problems. One is in what way the writing reflects patriarchal ideology which is the main target for the feminists. The other is how the writing connotates patriarchal ideology between the lines. This thesis is based on the feminist theory, focusing on woman's image criticism which was studied a lot by American feminists in the 1960s.The third chapter focuses on exposing how the narrator distorts the female images in the text under patriarchal ideology. Gulliver, the narrator, shows his misogyny by attacking women's physical appearance, degrading women's social status and insulting female's nature of sexuality. Even when they are described as loyal and dutiful as the image of Mary who is the mother of Jesus in The Bible, their images are created to meet male's imaginations and needs.The fourth chapter concentrates on solving the problem of what tactics the narrator utilizes to show his misogyny and oppression to women. By adopting the theories of narratology, the thesis focuses on narrative techniques of unreliable narrator and narrative voice, which are analyzed in detail in this chapter. Taking the advantage of the first-person narrative, the narrator casts his authority on telling the story and keeps other characters silent. This authority, according to W.C Booth and his student James Phelan, is unreliable. Such unreliable authority also can be found in narrative voice. Susan Sniader Lanser's theoretical terms of"personal voice"indicates that autodiegetic narration has superior voice and controls other characters'voice. Through controlling and silencing female characters'voices, the narrator marginalizes them into"the other"of the silenced group. Applying the first-person narrative and"personal voice"to his narration, Gulliver is endowed with absolute authority in narrating which eventually turns out to be unreliable. To the author of this thesis, the cause of the unreliable narrative is rooted from the powerful bias of patriarchal ideology, and the result of such unreliability strengthens patriarchy. Through Gulliver's narration, Swift manages to satirize the powerful bias of patriarchy, which, as he exposed, results in the discrimination and oppression against women. All in all, this thesis attempts to argue that the narrator Gulliver defends patriarchal ideology by distorting female images and defining the female as"the Other"for the sake of male's eternal superior status. And the narrative techniques he applies successfully help him to reach the goal.