The Finale of Gulliver's visit to Brobdingnag and Laputa

There are many interesting things that happen towards the end of Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag. The most interesting were possibly his "minor scrapes" with the wild life of the island's giant people. At one instance, he is taken captive by a most maternal monkey who forces already chewed food into his throat. The strangeness of the lack of maternal figures in this novel has struck me more than once before.

Although back in England he has a wife, we never hear more than a few words about her, or about any other affairs that Gulliver has had with women. Therefore striking out the "feminine touch/maternal notions" from the text. The fact that he finds a womanly form in an animal leads us in the direction of his views of women. Often the Brobdingnagian women are described as ugly, disgusting, and having offensive odors, not unlike our common conceptions of monkeys.

He also goes on to speak of a woman later, from Laputa, who begs the king for a pass to the metropolis, and not wanting to leave, reduces herself to the status of a beggar, pawning all her clothes just to remain. He then tells us that she was finally captured and returned to her home, where her ever-forgiving husband accepted her back with open arms, from which she proceeded to turn away from and run-off with another man.

Gulliver's stories of women cast us as animalistic, ugly whores, but does it in such a way that it seems our only folly is giving into the whimsy of our weak feminine minds. One does not hear of the Queen or Glumdalclitch's inquiries about his homeland, of the politics, music or mathematics, which both the king from Brobdingnag and Laputa ask of. There are no representations of women as sensible, rational beings in Gulliver's writings to speak of. I must therefore claim that Gulliver attempts to be discreet in his misogyny, but utterly fails.