Syphilis, Satire and Swift's Gulliver's Travels

梅毒、諷刺文、《格列佛遊記》

10.6153/2012.27.01

林熒嬌(Ying-Chiao Lin)

《格列佛遊記》 ； 約納丹．史威弗特 ； 梅毒 ； 諷刺文 ； 身體 ； 厭女症 ； Gulliver's Travels ； Jonathan Swift ； syphilis ； satire ； body ； misogyny

NTU Studies in Language and Literature

27期（2012 / 06 / 01）

1 - 23

英文

本文主要之論點乃是，約納丹．史威弗特的諷刺文作品《格列佛遊記》中對於女人以及亞虎人種的令人作噁和染病身體的描寫，事實上是作者以一種醫學的角度，對於英國十八世紀當時社會狀態的隱喻敘述，特別是針對一種曾經衝擊歐洲社會極劇的傳染病之寫照－梅毒。本文認為《格列佛遊記》是一本關於疾病的敘述作品，尤其是作者在書中呈現的女性及亞虎人種之形象乃是不淨與污穢的「他者」。這一描述正吻合招致梅毒傳染病的感染原因，乃被十六世紀醫者如派拉塞爾瑟斯（Paracelsus）等認定是外在的「他者」不潔之物入侵所致，而非傳統古典醫學理論中，蓋倫（Galen）的腺體學說觀點，是由內在腺體分泌不均所致。身為諷刺文作家，史威弗特如同一位解剖師，藉著如解剖刀的諷刺文，來層層剖開十八世紀時，如同染患疾病般的個人主體，甚至社會體。諷刺文又如當時治療梅毒之猛劑，對讀者／病患施以劇烈鞭撻，用以治療該症。在十八世紀的歐洲社會，女人一直被認為是性病之主要散播者，而史威弗特對此觀念深信不疑，這點顯現於《格列佛遊記》第二書中，乃對於巨人國中患疾之女性巨乳描寫。在此景中，主角格列佛置身其中，如同被其吞沒，他似乎被消滅於此疾病／性病的意象中，此種對女性之極度負面描述或許是他的厭女症之名的由來原因之一。而梅毒的意象，深刻地表達於書末中，當格列佛返鄉卻失去神智，視馬為唯一近親時，他的內在心智表徵，正是一種內化的感染梅毒後期的症狀呈現，是一種無可救藥的心智上的斷肢殘臂及自我厭惡，而這等梅毒式地瘋狂心智狀態，正是作者要彰顯當時期的文化主體狀態。

Taking Jonathan Swift as a surgeon-satirist who dissects both the human body and the social or communal ”health” with his satiric narratives, this paper argues that Swift's abject images of women and Yahoos in ”Gulliver's Travels” reflect his fears regarding social dangers, especially his fear of the current syphilis epidemic. These images of the microorganisms that spread the sexual disease were closely associated by Swift, a neurotic misogynist, with the barbarous and grotesque bodies of women and Yahoos, and together these represented for him the contagion of uncontrolled desire and the invasion of ”foreign bodies.” Like the surgeon who peels away the body's outer surfaces to expose its inner structure, the satirist uncovers the interior, the ”substance” of the satirized people, institutions, societies. Using his satire as a ruthless remedy for social evils, Swift ”treats” his ”patients” in something like the way the prison-hospital for syphilis inmates in eighteenth-century in Paris treated its patients: it beat and whipped them in order to cure their disease. While female bodies were commonly seen, in eighteenth-century Europe, as being responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, Swift was especially interested in the medical discovery that syphilis is caused by invasive viruses from the outside, and in his obsessively detailed, shockingly close-up ”views” of naked human bodies, most obviously those of Yahoos and Brobdingnagian women, we see the focus of the newer medical practice on external signs and symptoms rather than on ”interior examination.” In the novel's final scene Gulliver, now back home, is suffering from a form of ”syphilis madness” that causes a mental disorder corresponding to the corporeal disfigurement of syphilis. Swift the satirist will identify this horrid psychic condition with that of his Augustan contemporaries.

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