Satire’s Mirror: Exposing Death Denial in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
In: Death, Dying, Culture: An Interdisciplinary InterrogationSearch for other papers by Larissa Fitzpatrick in
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Literature has long pondered the capacity for both good and evil in human nature, and Jonathan Swift is no exception with his mock travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels. More than two centuries after Gulliver’s Travels was written, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker theorized that repressed death anxiety drives much of human behaviour, especially the capacity for evil. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker speculates that by repressing their anxiety of death, humans deny mortality through cultural symbols. Becker believes that we invest ourselves in immortality symbols, or anything we feel to be more meaningful and permanent than our own person. However, believing too firmly in an illusion can lead to varying levels of intolerance, including violence, when the views of others do not match our own. Like Becker, Swift continually dissected the devastation humans can cause from adhering to constructed illusions. Satire has the potential to alleviate some of death denial’s negative effects. By using humour, exposing idealized images of ourselves and drawing on paradox, satire can promote self-reflection and understanding. Becker’s theories are a useful way of re-examining some of our literary classics; conversely, Gulliver’s Travels is an ideal literary vehicle for exploring Becker’s theory because it not only highlights exaggerated immortality symbols and therefore satirically question their values, but reading it alerts us to our own death denial and its possible consequences. By holding a mirror to society, satire exposes the danger of denial that can, too often, bring about destructive violence.