In 1700, Queen Anne was on the throne. The Lillipution Empress is supposed to represent her. In the chapter where Gulliver saves the Empress and her burning palace, it is another example of satire. When the place is burning, Gulliver urinates on the palace to put out the fire. The Empress reacted to it by moving herself o the most distant side of the court and said that she did not want the buildings that Gulliver had urinated on repaired for her use. The satire is that despite saving her, Gulliver is to be punished.
The Lillipution is a tyrant. An example to show how cruel he is, is when he uses Guliver to capture all the fleets of Belfescu. This is cruel because he is only using Gulliver to his advantage. Another example of his cruelty is when he demand that Gulliver’s eyes are to be poked out to make him blind. When he does this, he expects Gulliver to be thankful that this is the only punishment he is getting. To any normal person, this punishment would seem very hard, but to the Emperor, he feels that he is being lenient. Swift satirises George I through the Lillipution Emperor. It portrays George I to be a very cruel and horrible person.
An example to show how the Emperor was obsessed with ceremonies is when he holds the “Leaping and Creeping day” This is when people have to jump over or crawl under a stick that either the Emperor, his first minister or both hold. The three who were best at it would get threads to wear around their waist. Swift is Satirising this aspect of the monarchy by showing that they hold ceremonies for the most ridiculous things. He shows through sarcasm how such petty things do not need ceremonies.
Swift hated the way that people were promoted through flattery. In the book, he satirises it by showing some of the ridiculous things people had to do to get promotions. The Lilliputions had to dance on rope which was twelve inches from the ground. This was roughly twice their height. In the book it says that many had broken limbs when attempting to do this. This is an example of satire because it overexegerates the things that people would do just to get promotions. An example of flattery is just before Gulliver has to agree to the articles. When introducing the Emperor, they say “the most mighty Emperor of Lilliput, Delight and Terror of the universe…” shows how much ego boosting the Emperor gets. This technique that Swift uses to satirise this is the fact that it is yet again over exaggerated.
Swift is critical of Queen Anne and George I. He created imaginary characters to satirise them because if he used their names, he could have been tried for treason. It was obvious that he s talking about them, yet he did it in such a way that it wasn’t too obvious it was almost as if he was teasing them because he was making a mockery out of them.
Also, if he used their names, he could have been done for blasphemy, because at that time the monarchy were thought to be very religious. He wanted to make sure he satirised the monarchy simply because felt that he didn’t like them or the things that they did. This satire is still the monarchy are criticised for the ridiculous amount of money they waste on things that can be cheaper. The monarchy are also criticised about the fact that they don’t have much involvement with the population of the country. I think that people still need to do reduce things to get promotions and a lot of them do things like suck up to their managers, and do extra work for them.
Swift satirises long pompous speeches. An example of this is when the emperor of Lilliput talks for two hours long. By the end of the talk, nobody has any idea at all about what the emperor was talking about. “His imperial majesty spoke often to me, and I returned answers, but neither of us could understand a syllable. After about two hours the court retired …” This quote tells the reader that Gulliver thought that the emperor was ranting on about nothing at all for two hours. This is satirical because he says how people with high authority are allowed to talk about absolutely nothing, and how nobody does anything about it had doesn’t ask for them to explain.
At the time when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, England had been involved in war with which lasted from 1702-1713. This war was known as The War of The Spanish Succession. It was also known as Queen Anne’s war. The trigger of the war was when King Louis XIV wan to put his grandson on the English throne when the Spanish king died. Spain took this as an insult and the English didn’t want this France already had a big population compared to England.
