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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Swift recognized that “slavery” was an ambivalent term: on one hand, slavery can be seen as a biological imperative—a natural condition of the innately servile; on the other hand, slavery can be seen as a political accident— a circumstance imposed from without by those with the will and power to oppress. Swift consistently characterized the Irish as “slaves” and called the relationship of Ireland to England “slavery.” In the case of the Irish, Swift feared that their slavery, which may have begun as external oppression, would eventually become an intrinsic part of Irish character. If Swift's observations on slavery in Ireland are applied to the slavery of the Yahoos to the Houyhnhnms in Book iv of Gulliver's Travels, the question of whether slavery is a matter of nature or nurture also arises, for there is evidence in Book iv to suggest that the Yahoos were as rational as Gulliver when they arrived in Houyhnhnmland.
1 The idea that the Yahoos might be types of the “old Irish” has been expressed in modern criticism—first perhaps by C. H. Firth, “The Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels” (1919-20), rpt. in Essays Historical and Literary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938) and most recently by D. T. Torchiana, “Jonathan Swift, the Irish, and the Yahoos: The Case Reconsidered,” Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975). In contrast to this view, I think the Yahoos represent the potential nadir of any oppressed group, a category into which Swift put the “colonized” Anglo-Irish. The moral and physical debasement of the Yahoos, I will show, makes a comment on all levels of Irish society (or any society under brutal tyranny).
2 Gulliver's Travels, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957-63), xi, 295. All further references to The Prose Works will appear in the text.
3 For the background on Swift's attitudes toward Ireland I am greatly indebted to Oliver Ferguson's Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 1962).
4 “Verses Occasioned by the Sudden Drying Up of St. Patrick's Well near Trinity College, Dublin,” in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Sir Harold Williams (Oxford : Clarendon, 1963), iii, 791, ll. 21-22. All further references to The Poems will appear in the text.
5 The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Sir Harold Williams (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), ii, 342.
6 I would like to thank my students for giving me the basic idea for this paper and Maurice Johnson, Mary Allen, Robert Hume, and Henry Kelly for helping me express it more clearly.
