Chapter 41 - The Body

Summary

Swift excels where abstract philosophy collides with concrete forms. The first two sections of this chapter focus on Gulliver’s Travels, in which airy discourses on principles and abstract intellectual scenarios are inevitably perforated by the coarse realities of the body. His painstaking attention to corporeality unravels the polite discourses that help people distance themselves from the embarrassing ailments, extrusions, flaws, and failures that their bodies always comprise. The final section of the chapter shifts to Swift’s poems on female beauty, which, this chapter argues, revel in bodily disaggregation.