Gulliver’s Travels: the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos

Gulliver’s Travels is such a rich book. I’ve been thinking about Part 4—there are so many different ways of interpreting it.

On the most basic level, it’s a reverse of the horse-human relationship in real life: on this island, horses (Houyhnhnms) are the ones with reason and language, humans (Yahoos) are bestial; horses subjugate and use humans for draught and carriage, and later decide to castrate them; Swift makes one think about how we treat horses, and animals in general.

If you think about it in terms of politics, especially racial politics, the Houyhnhnms are slaveowners and the Yahoos are slaves—Gulliver, being in the house, getting taught language, and receiving different treatment, is an equivalent of a “house Negro”. 

Among themselves, the Houyhnhnms also have a caste system that is racial in character: 

“… that among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-grey, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-grey, and the black; nor born with equal talents of mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural.” (P.4, ch.6) 

This sounds like anti-miscegenation and eugenics: 

“In their marriages, they are exactly careful to choose such colours as will not make any disagreeable mixture in the breed. Strength is chiefly valued in the male, and comeliness in the female; not upon the account of love, but to preserve the race from degenerating; for where a female happens to excel in strength, a consort is chosen, with regard to comeliness.” (P.4, ch.8) 

The book goes further. Having no word for “opinion” because they are ruled by reason, the Houyhnhnms have no disagreements, and they hold an assembly for one debate, the only debate in their country: “whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the face of the earth?” (P.4, ch.9). 

Does that not make you think of Nazis, the Final Solution, and extermination camps? 

But if you look at it from a different angle, the Houyhnhnms that Gulliver idealises sound very much like the concept of noble savage: 

“The Houyhnhnms have no letters, and consequently their knowledge is all traditional. […]

They calculate the year by the revolution of the sun and moon, but use no subdivisions into weeks. They are well enough acquainted with the motions of those two luminaries, and understand the nature of eclipses; and this is the utmost progress of their astronomy.

[…] Their buildings, although very rude and simple, are not inconvenient, but well contrived to defend them from all injuries of cold and heat. They have a kind of tree, which at forty years old loosens in the root, and falls with the first storm: it grows very straight, and being pointed like stakes with a sharp stone (for the Houyhnhnms know not the use of iron), they stick them erect in the ground, about ten inches asunder, and then weave in oat straw, or sometimes wattles, between them. 

[…] They have a kind of hard flints, which, by grinding against other stones, they form into instruments, that serve instead of wedges, axes, and hammers.” (P.4, ch.9) 

Primitive, unsophisticated, incurious, oblivious of the world and the universe, but happy, morally good, uncorrupted by civilisation—does that not sound like the myth of the noble savage?  

If you think of it in terms of philosophy, Part 4 raises some uncomfortable questions about humanity: the Yahoos are essentially human beings without clothes, without language, without the veneers of civilisation—stripped of all the lendings, is man no more than this? Greedy, lecherous, filthy, depraved, vicious brutes?  

The King of the Houyhnhnms, whom Gulliver calls his master, thinks: 

“That our institutions of government and law were plainly owing to our gross defects in reason, and by consequence in virtue; because reason alone is sufficient to govern a rational creature…” (P.4, ch.7) 

At the same time, the Houyhnhnms show the other extreme—ruled by reason, they have no love, no family bonding, no joy, no grief—they also have no concept of opinions—this utopia is a totalitarian society where everyone conforms and submits. Does anyone want such a dreary society? Gulliver does, but I doubt the same for Swift. 

Such a rich, complex novel.