“The Whole Scene of This Voyage”: A Primal Scene Reading of Gulliver's Voyage to Brobdingnag

Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels have been subjected to a good deal of amateur and professional psychoanalysis. The amateur efforts, typically judgmental and critical, focus on Swift's notorious anality, his “excremental vision,” as Middleton Murry (1954) catchily called it. “Swift's greatness,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1929, “lies in the intensity, the almost insane violence of that ‘hatred of the bowels’ which is the essence of his misanthropy and which underlies the whole of his work” (p. 105). For Murry, echoing D. H. Lawrence, this alleged preoccupation, “so perverse, so unnatural, so mentally diseased, so humanly wrong,” (p. 440) is not only the source of much of his power but importantly related to his ultimate mental breakdown. Unlike Huxley, however, for whom the fecal obsession is primary, Murry perceives it as Swift's attempt to explain away his genital inadequacy and failure by imputing a revolting filthiness to the female body and sex. In this he is somewhat closer to the professional psychoanalysts who have examined the great satirist and his Travels. For both Sandor Ferenczi (1926) and Phyllis Greenacre (1955) virtually bypass the anality of that work, which they implicitly identify as a relatively minor factor, to concentrate on the more essential genital and oedipal fantasies that dominate Gulliver's Travels. That is a considerable advance, but it is not the whole distance. The question of etiology, the source of the pervasive castration fears and genital inadequacy, has only partially been answered. Ferenczi, without employing biographical material, speaks generally of punishment for incestuous desires. Greenacre, whose concern with Gulliver is chiefly as a reflection of Swift, speaks