ABSTRACT
The disorderly energies that Jonathan Swift so actively invokes in his fictional explorations of women must be repressed or denied to be endured. Swift's consciousness of the absurdity of his position produces an ironic detachment that serves to protect him from the hysterical implications of his misogyny. Swift represents in his fictions a system of sexual strategies that allow repressed juvenile fantasies to be both explored and contained. Swift's fascinated revulsion towards the physical becomes even more axiomatic when he confronts 'the Sex'. The sage, Swift reminds his readers in a note, is Pythagoras, infamous for his own personal and philosophical attempts to purify the body. Such notorious asceticism would appear to sit well with Swift, and finds its way into the clean, bracing regimen of the Houyhnhnms, whose nature is so very easily satisfied. Swift presents here a physical nature irrepressible and gross. Swift employs images of devouring equally troubling in much of Gulliver's Travels.
