Degree Year
1970
Document Type
Thesis - Open Access
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Advisor(s)
Robert Longsworth
Keywords
Gulliver's Travels, Body image, Jonathan Swift, Body
Abstract
Of all the imagery available to the writer the body's imagery is perhaps the most powerful and immediate. Using arms and legs and eyebrow in his work he insures himself of a bond with his reader, for each reader has his own arms and legs and eyebrows to identify with in his mind and experience. No one can read Swift's terse sentence, "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse" without feeling a shudder of horror and sympathy in his own body. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, better known as Gulliver's Travels, is full of body images. Gulliver himself is a very fleshly human being; he is primarily interested in the people he finds. We, the readers, are first entranced by Gulliver because it tells us about people like ourselves only somehow different. It is this likeness with and difference from ourselves that makes Gulliver the powerfully intriguing book it is.
Repository Citation
Erbaugh, Mary S., "The Embodying Image: A Design for a Computer-Aided Analysis of Distorted Body Imagery in Gulliver's Travels" (1970). Honors Papers. 758.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/honors/758
