Chapter 13 - A Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms

Summary

When a female Yahoo makes sexual advances to Gulliver in Part IV of the Travels, he is forced to acknowledge that he ‘was a real Yahoo’. This recognition has disturbed readers as much as it appalled Gulliver. Is Swift a misanthropist? Or does he recommend a middle ground between Yahoo and Houyhnhnm? So many people found the last part of Swift’s Travels both unfathomable and distasteful that it was frequently omitted from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions, especially those intended for children. Part III suffered the same fate. Neither book seems to fit with Swift’s imaginatively appealing tales of little and large people. Yet it is likely that he conceived all four parts to work as a whole. This chapter argues that rather than being the spot of solid ground onto which the shipwrecked reader can crawl and from there look back over the rest of the text to find it resolves itself into an order that points at one clear meaning, Part IV leaves many readers baffled and discomforted – and that is the point. While animal fables generally end with an explanatory ‘moral’, Swift obliges readers to work through the complexities and conundrums of his text.