In Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver is abandoned by his mutinous crew in the Land of the Houyhnhnms, a country ruled by rational horses but also inhabited by human-like brutes called Yahoos. Gulliver says of the Land of the Houyhnhnms:
I had not yet
been a year in this country before I contracted such a love and veneration for
the inhabitants, that I entered on a firm resolution never to return to
humankind, but to pass the rest of my life among these admirable Houyhnhnms, in the
contemplation and practice of every virtue, where I could have no example or
incitement to vice.
Clearly,
Gulliver believes he lives in a utopia – but is he correct? Is the novel proposing that the Land of the
Houyhnhnms is a utopia? A dystopia? Is it satirizing the entire concept of a
utopia? Or is something else going
on? And what is the role of the Yahoos
in your interpretation?
No comments:
Post a Comment