Because these women are so much bigger than him, not only do they smell unpleasant to him but they also look fairly unpleasant. “Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads; to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons.” Even though the author obviously put his main character in this situation for comical purposes, if you put yourself in Gulliver’s shoes it is actually quite frightening. In this passage, the author may have tried to show that what is beautiful to one is nauseating or frightening to another. In this situation, Gulliver is like a magnifying glass and if you think about it, constantly looking at people through magnifying glasses would grow to become quite disturbing.
I think that this passage is also in the book because this is the moment where Gulliver realises what he might have looked and smelled like to the Lilliputians. He recalls a moment spent on the island in his first voyage “I cannot forget that an intimate friend of mine in Lilliput took the freedom in a warm day, when I had used a good deal of exercise, to complain of a strong smell about me, although I am as little faulty that way as most of my sex : But I suppose his faculty of smelling was as nice with regard to me, as mine was to that of this people.” This is a very efficient way for the author to reverse the situation for Gulliver.
In this extract, Gulliver also finds himself at the execution of a criminal. This is another example of beauty taking another shape. An execution is already in itself quite a painful spectacle to watch but when you are about the same size as this criminal’s finger, it is simply traumatising. This whole passage seems to be going way too much into detail, into the private and personal that shouldn’t be looked at so upclose. In this case, Gulliver sees the spraying of blood bigger than a fountain “his head cut off at a blow with a sword of about forty foot long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great Jet d’Eau at Versailles was not equal for the time it lasted; and the head when it fell on th Scaffold floor, gave such a bounce, as made me start, although I were at least half an English mile distant.”
Overall, I think that this passage and perhaps Brobdingnagians in general represent, for Swift, the private and personal side of human beings as they are examined up very close. The inhabitants of Brobdingnag do not only represent a bad side of human beings as some of them are kind and generous. They are also the only people he meets on his voyages who don’t really abuse of him.
