REPRESENTATION OF DISABILITY IN 18TH CENTURY TRAVEL BOOK, BY JONATHAN SWIFT’S GULLIVER’S TRAVELS

सार

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726 gave him the recognition of history’s most famous misanthrope by literary giants like Thackeray who denounced the book as “past all sense of manliness and shame: filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging obscene” (quoted in Hogan,1979:648) Since then, few literary works have been so dissected, discussed and disagreed upon.

Still, the Travel Book remains the magnum opus of one of the English language’s greatest satirists; written like the typical travel book of the day: but far from offering a relaxing escape from the real world, it brings us face to face with reality in all its complexity. The author achieves the necessary comic distortions, thereby transforming the familiar into the ridiculous as he takes readers to strange territories, introduces them to caricatures, ill-formed, ugly, too tiny or dis-shaped or even species difficult to identify in the form of horses.

My paper will look into how Swift succeeds in reflecting our visage through all the four travel books that work as a mirror to show human as crude or vulgar and wise or intelligent, portrayed as caricatured ridiculousness or utopian perfection.

The Disabled persons are perceived as inferior beings who are at best perceived as passive objects of concern, lacking subjectivity and agency, dependent on others. It is admirable to see the author presenting disabled characters narrated, described through contemporary fellow countrymen, Gulliver who reacts to people, situations that amuses as well as perplexes, even shocks. There is no doubt that he manipulates the fictional world, using disabled characters to suit his satirical purposes and in so doing he violates our expectations.