The Will to Madness: Pride and the Meaning of Gulliver's Madness

With Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift descends upon Humanity like a surgeon upon a cadaver, ruthlessly cutting and digging to uncover and display the internal mechanisms behind external actions. Most of this painful operation occurs in Houyhnhnmland where Swift lays bare the components of human nature. As part of his lecture, Swift offers Houyhnhnmland as a representation of the human mind which he saw as being "furnished like the middle Region of the Air" thus capable of glimpsing the light of reason when not clouded by the "Vapours ascending from the lower Faculties." The utopian Houyhnhnms symbolize the light of reason while the ravenous Yahoos embody instinct, appetite and the resulting vices. Despite these extremes, the psychology presented by Houyhnhnmland is an ideal for here reason successfully restrains and harnesses the bestial impulses. Unhappily, Swift would assert that the reverse is true of the human world; Humanity utterly refuses to use its faculty of reason to control passion or correct vice, preferring instead to wallow eternally in its own corruption. To get at the actual core of human nature and thereby explain Humanity's irrational behaviour, Swift must turn his attention toward the affable and ordinary narrator wherein exists the one component of human psychology not adequately exposed by the Houyhnhnmland model. This hidden component and the culprit behind incorrigibility is pride. Swift illuminates this faculty by placing Gulliver in a situation where his pride has no choice but to rise to the surface in the form of madness.