ABSTRACT
Michael McKeon demonstrates that Jonathan Swift satirizes the "nave empiricism" of the Royal Society, encouraged in travelers by the Society's questions called the "General Heads for a Natural History of a Country", in his analysis of Gulliver's Travels. As the horses assume the privileged position of the natural philosopher, Gulliver begins to lose his superiority and distance as observer of the Yahoos, and "animal" becomes the term used for whatever is subordinated. Swift suggests that the empiricism that Gulliver treasures is implicated in power relations. "Matters of fact" are determined by who is gathering the information and who is being described. Swift is quite remarkable in illuminating the relationship between the Royal Society and the psychology of an English national pride increasingly based on color and interlaced with colonial ambitions. Gulliver's Travels makes it evident that studies of skin color in the Royal Society contributed to the production of whiteness as a national trait.
