ABSTRACT
In his analysis of Gulliver’s Travels, Michael McKeon demonstrates that Swift satirizes the “naïve empiricism” of the Royal Society, encouraged in travelers by the Society’s questions called the “General Heads for a Natural History of a Country” (1666). Laura Brown illuminates the mixture of misogyny and antiracism in Book Four. However, neither explores Swift’s attention to the request for information on skin color in the “General Heads” and subsequent reports sent to the Royal Society. Gulliver anxiously tries and eventually fails to distinguish himself from the Yahoos by noting their complexion. Thus Swift attacks the Society’s interest in skin color as motivated in large part by the desire of the English to assert their superiority over those they describe. In this chapter, I will consider studies of skin color in the Royal Society in terms of the role of perspective in accounts of complexion in the novel. I hope to show that Swift satirizes those in the Royal Society fixated on skin color, whether they flirt with polygenesis or assert a high-minded monogenesis. Through Gulliver’s encounters with pygmies and giants in his travels, as well as the Yahoos, Swift targets emerging accounts of race-difference, accepted by only a small minority of Europeans. In the process of doing so, Swift deflates the difference between the delicacy of the European lady and the sensuality of non-European women determining accounts of reproduction in the Philosophical Transactions. Swift’s work makes visible a transitional period in which travel narratives written in response to the Royal Society began to be accompanied by longer and more complex considerations of color, a scientific discourse that contributed to the development of modern scientific racism in the late eighteenth century.1
