Swift satirizes the ugliness of female body, with which the women generally take a mighty pride, in Gulliver’s account of the giant women’s breast and Gulliver simply confesses that “no object ever disgusted me as much as the sight of her monstrous breast.” To Gulliver, who has a microscopic view of the woman, the breast, which stands prominent six feet and is some sixteen feet in circumference, is a most disgusting sight because all the physical details, such as freckles, discolorations and pones are magnified to his sight – “The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varied with spots, pimples and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous:” The disgusting and nauseating sight of the enormous breast makes Gulliver reflect that the skin of the fairest English ladies, if viewed so closely or “through a magnifying glass”, the result would certainly be a disgusting one – “that the smoothest and white skins look rough and coarse and ill colored.”
In this detailed description of the giant’s body, Swift uses Gulliver’s disgust at the sight of the skin of the Brobdingnagians to support that, we too are quite as disgusting physically as are these giants, who, after all, do not seem disgusting to each other. Thus, it is only pour pride that deludes us into thinking that we are beautiful: if we see our actual physical beauty, which is ugliness we find that our pride has weak foundations.
Swift satirizes the ladies and their behavior in Gulliver’s account of the sexual play of the Brobdingnagian Maids of Honor. Gulliver is a great favorite of the Maids of Honor of the Queen’s court and one of their chief amusements is to strip the little man naked and lay him at full length on their breast, a practice, which disgusted him because of his extreme sensibility to the odors given off by even the cleanest Brobdingnagian flesh. He reflects that the most fastidious English ladies would smell as bad to a keen enough nose. In fact, Gulliver recalls that a Lilliputian friend of his once told him that he smelled bad on an occasion when he had exercised vigorously.
Gulliver is offended further that these Brobdingnagian girls dress and undress in front of him as if he is “a creature who had no sort of consequence.” He is far from delighted at the sight of their naked bodies and their bodies are in no way “a tempting sight” because of the defects magnified to his sight. Their physical sight is far from arousing any “emotions than those of horror and disgust” because their skins are “so coarse, and uneven, so variously colored.”
In Gulliver’s account of his disgusting experience with the Maids of Honor, Swift launches a swipe/ an attack at the moral behavior of the ladies of the English court. It represents, also, another attack on human pride; it is an attack based upon the feelings of disgust Swift arouses in us at our own physicality. Seen closely, we are not far from beautiful; nor do we smell nice.
In the Gulliver’s conversation with the Master-Horse in Book-IV, Swift attacks the female frivolousness and laziness. Thus Gulliver tells the Houynhnm master that “this whole globe of earth must be at least three times gone round, before one of our better female Yahoos could get her breakfast on a cup to put it in.” Again the characteristic proneness of female to dressing and make-up is satirized in the same book. Gulliver inform the Horse master that the dressing of a man is the culmination of “the workmanship of a hundred tradesmen” but the number increases when a lady is at the center of the case of dressing – “and five time (i.e., five hundred tradesmen), the number to adorn my wife.”
Swift is not a misogynist; he does not despise the womankind rather he is simply presenting a witty exposure of the dirty habits and lack of good sense of certain types of women of his time. He does not attack the whole female race, rather those who ate full of vanity relating their physical beauty. He shows, in effect, that our physical beauty or physicality is not such an exquisite thing as we are prone to think it to be; it id far from an attractive thing.
