This essay begins with a question posed by the late Frank Brady in 1978 and (more recently) by William Kinsley in 1982. What do we make of Gulliver's apprenticeship, at the opening of the Travels, to "my good Master Bates"? Brady noted that it "is easy to find" such "jokes (errors? misstatements?) in Gulliver; what is difficult … is to determine whether they are (1) accidental, (2) incidental (local, restricted), or (3) significant?"¹

Let us apply Brady's criteria to the "Master Bates" construct, developed in the opening three paragraphs of the work: in the first readers learn of Gulliver's apprenticeship to "Mr. James Bates" and later "Mr. Bates" who becomes, in the second paragraph, "my good Master Mr. Bates" or "Mr. Bates, my Master" and, in the third, simply "my good Master Bates."² To use Brady's first criterion, is this chain of references merely "accidental"? Pointing to Swift's use of "anticipatory variations" here and of "repetition and overspecification with a vengeance," Kinsley finds these elements alone convincing proof that the pun is deliberate,³ and his contention is sound, though at least one objection remains: was the word "masturbation" even current in Swift's day? Milton Voigt, assessing Phyllis Greenacre's attempt to make the pun mean something, argues that it was not; and on the basis of the OED, which cites the earliest written use of the word in 1766, he is right. Brady tried to remove this objection by locating an earlier occurrence of the word, in Florio's Montaigne (1603).⁴ But there were also some more current uses that (1) suggest the pun is not "accidental" and (2) supply, at the very least, an "incidental" context for the joke.

In A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), published two years before the Travels, Bernard Mandeville relates that one of the "Ways by which lewd young Men destroy their natural Vigour, and render themselves impotent" is by "Manufriction, alias Masturbation." Dr. Mandeville then lists a host of ailments arising from this "lewd Trick" and argues that to "prevent young Men from Laying violent Hands upon themselves, we must have recourse to the Publick Stews."⁵ In advocating the brothel as a cure for those he calls the youthful "Onanites," Mandeville was not alone. In The Oeconomy of Love (1736), another doctor, John Armstrong, counsels young men to "hie / To Bagnio lewd or Tavern, nightly where / Venereal Rites are done" rather than practice that "ungenerous, selfish, solitary Joy."⁶ And earlier in the century, in his Treatise of Venereal Disease (1709), Dr. John Marten offers vivid case histories which seemingly support such claims. Here, we learn about "a very comely Gentleman … whose Case was lost Erection, by Masturbation in his Youth." Equally unfortunate, Marten adds, was a young student who, "deceiv'd by others, used daily Masturbation, as he [later said] lamenting and sorry, and thereby had contracted so great a weakness of his Seminal Vessels and Testicles, that although he lived afterwards continently, yet he was troubled with a Gonorrhea … and whereas he was before of a lively colour and strong, afterwards he grew pale, lean, weak, &c."⁷ Along with the pre-Gulliver uses of the word "masturbation," the context of such remarks sheds light on the Travels in 1726. That context is the pervasive early eighteenth-century anti-masturbatory craze sparked, at least in part, by a pamphlet titled ONANIA; OR, THE Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, AND ALL its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES, Considered, WITH Spiritual and Physical Advice to those, who have already injur'd themselves by this Abominable Practice (London, c. 1709-1710).

Early in this pamphlet, the author confesses that to "expose a Sin so displeasing to God, so detrimental to the Publick, and so injurious to our selves, requires no Flights of Wit."⁸ And the work that ensues—an often tedious compendium of moral and pseudo-medical advice (though not without a certain prurient appeal)—indicates that he is largely correct. In elucidating the frightful consequences of the "SIN OF SELF-POLLUTION" (among them, sterility, blindness, sloth, madness, gonorrhea, death, "Lying," "Forswearing," and even "Murder"), ONANIA raised masturbation to the status of a "collosal bogey."⁹ In a 1724 edition of the work, which advertises itself as "The Tenth EDITION Above Fifteen Thousand of the former Editions … Sold," we discover that the secret sin has reached contagious proportions in Britain. Indeed, it "has now become almost as frequent amongst Girls, as Masturbation is amongst Boys." It is especially prevalent in the schools, where "licentious Masturbators" initiate unsuspecting youths into "that cursed School-Wickedness of Masturbation."¹⁰ P.-G. Boucé notes that ONANIA enjoyed an "amazing success." Judging from the number of editions it ran through and the host of imitations it sparked, ONANIA (as Lawrence Stone adds) "clearly struck some hidden area of anxiety in early eighteenth-century Europe."¹¹ In the mid-1720s alone, for example, if the reader did not see ONANIA directly or, say, Mandeville's Publick Stews, he could consult Eronania: On the Misusing of the Marriage-Bed by Er and Onan (London, 1724). He could then move on, in the same year, to The Crime of Onan (together with that of his brother Er, punished with sudden death): Or, the hainous Vice of Self defilement (London, 1724). Four years later, he could read Joseph Cam's A Practical Treatise on the Consequences of Venereal Disease (London, 1728), the first part considering that dreaded specter, "onanism."

When Gulliver, in 1726, is apprenticed to "my good Master Bates" there are some historical reasons, therefore, for assuming that Swift's chain of references is far from "accidental." But is it only "incidental," that is, in Brady's terms, a "local" or a "restricted" joke? If so, we could end this essay here and simply say that, by introducing this pun—particularly within a larger discussion of Gulliver's schooling—Swift is playfully alluding to a context familiar to his readers.

Another Scriblerian work furnishes additional substance for investigation. In a book Swift contributed to—the Memoirs of Scriblerus—Martinus uses his "sagacity in discovering the distempers of the Mind" to solve the case of a young nobleman, who has cut himself off from others and "converses" with almost "none but himself." Martinus concludes that the young man must be "desperately in love"; and an interview with an aunt confirms the object of this "amorous inclination":

Whom does he generally talk of? Himself, quoth the Aunt. Whose wit and breeding does he most commend? His own, quoth the Aunt…. Whom is he ogling yonder? Himself in his looking-glass.… Have you observ'd him to use Familiarities with any body? "With none but himself: he often embraces himself with folded arms, he claps his hand often upon his hip, nay sometimes thrusts it into—his breast."

The prognosis is poor. If the young man's self-love is not cured, we are told, he will be "condemn'd eternally to himself" and perhaps "run to the next pond to get rid of himself, the Fate of most violent Self-lovers."¹²

Important here is a cluster of associations linking masturbation to the "distemper" (i.e. madness) of self-love and to the greatest self-lover of them all. The young man's rejection of others, his fascination and "Familiarities" with his own body, his attempts to embrace himself, the closing evocation of the destructive pond—all suggest the story of Narcissus. Given this Scriblerian context, it is perhaps not surprising that a book which begins with its hero apprenticed to "Master Bates" ends with him "condemn'd eternally to himself and with a vision that also evokes the tale of Narcissus: "When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain," Gulliver tells us near the end of his tale, "I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self" (4.10). It is within this larger pattern, suggestive of Gulliver's Narcissistic movement from self-love to self-hatred, that the opening play on "Master Bates" becomes—in Brady's third criterion—"significant."

"Narcissism" in Swift's day did not necessarily mean what it means to us—the word itself was probably coined by a German in 1899.¹³ It instead meant myth, specifically Ovidian myth,¹⁴ and the traditional interpretations of the mythographers. He is known for the "hard pride" (dura superbia) with which he scorns the love of others.¹⁵ He especially dislikes the company of women.¹⁶ Despising all others in comparison with himself, he will not let others love him and tells all who attempt to do so, "embrace me not."¹⁷ He who will not let others love him is doomed to a hopeless love himself; he gazes at the deceptive reflection, mistakes a shadow (umbra) for a substance, and blindly falls in love with an idealized vision of himself, a nothingness created by his own imagination: "quod petis, est nusquam."¹⁸ As he attempts to grasp the "adored image," it "ever elude[s] his Embraces." Transported "by selfe-love" and wasting away "with that madnesse," he spends the remainder of his days isolated from the world and attended by a few flatterers who reaffirm his delusion.¹⁹ These traits (among others) were attributed to Narcissus by Ovid's commentators from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century. Many of the same characteristics appear, as well, in the Scriblerians' case of the young nobleman in the Memoirs—and in Swift's portrayal of Lemuel Gulliver.

We know from "Baucis and Philemon" or "The Fable of Midas" that Swift enjoyed playing with Ovidian types and themes.²⁰ The similarities between Gulliver and the Narcissus of the Ovidian tradition, and the evocation of the same myth in Book IV of the Travels, point to some larger transformations of the tale. Three Ovidian themes in particular, which link Gulliver to the Narcissus figure, shed light on his opening apprenticeship to 'Master Bates" and his closing rejection of self and species.

The first theme suggests itself in Gulliver's response to those who love him and his own experience with his beloved Houyhnhnms. This theme, the "frustrated love," had been seen for centuries as a central motif of the Narcissus tale.²¹ The story in Ovid is not simply the story of Narcissus, but also of Echo and the others who tried to love him. At a key moment in Ovid's account, Echo sees Narcissus and, "inflamed with love," races up to "throw her arms around" him. He immediately "flees her approach," yelling "Hands off! embrace me not!" (Metam., Bk. 3, line 390). In Book IV of the Travels, the same scene is comically re-enacted in Gulliver's encounter with the Yahoo woman who, "inflamed by Desire," came "running with all Speed" up to him and—his account continues—"embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could … whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost Reluctancy, and leaped upon the opposite Bank, where she stood gazing and howling" (4.8).

This version of the "frustrated love"—with Gulliver playing Narcissus to a Yahoo Echo—is picked up later in a series of embrace scenes that are not as comic. When Gulliver arrives home, he tells us that "my Wife took me in her Arms, and kissed me; at which, having not been used to the Touch of that odious Animal for so many Years, I fell in a Swoon for almost an Hour" (4.11). As in his encounter with the Yahoo Echo, Gulliver's rejection here is explicitly sexual. During his association with "Master Bates," Gulliver had been advised "to alter my Condition" by marrying (1.1). Now, finally returning home, he laments that "by copulating with one of the Yahoo-Species, I had become a parent of more; it struck me with the utmost Shame, Confusion, and Horror" (4.11). He does not let this happen in the future and continues to scorn his wife's embraces right up to the time he writes the book; for Gulliver assures us that, in the five years he's been home, he has let no one in his family even "take me by the Hand" (4.11). Gulliver, in other words, commits himself at the end of the work to the Narcissistic isolation evoked at the opening, in his situation with "my good Master Bates." In Ovid's story, Narcissus shows his "hard pride" in rejecting not only Echo, but everyone else who attempts to love him. This theme also appears in another embrace scene in Book IV, this one with Pedro de Mendez, who has treated Gulliver with great humanity. "He took kind Leave of me," Gulliver comments, "and embraced me at parting; which I bore as well as I could" (4.11). In his proud rejection of Pedro de Mendez no less than of his wife, Gulliver's posture is summed up by the boy's words in the tale: "Hands off! embrace me not!"

The "frustrated love" works both ways. As Ovid and his commentators remind us, he who will not let others love him is doomed to a hopeless love himself, and to be tortured by the "unattainability of an idealized self-image."²² That image in the Travels is embodied in Gulliver's "Love and Veneration" (4.7) for the Houyhnhnms, who reject him just as he rejects the others.

Along with the "frustrated love," two other Ovidian motifs are pertinent here. The first is the "reflection" theme, seen in Narcissus's preoccupation with himself in the pond. In their adaptation of the myth in the Memoirs, the Scriblerians connect the "reflection" to the young man's masturbation and "Familiarities" with himself, to his absorption in the "looking-glass," and ultimately, to a larger movement from self-love to self-hatred.

All these elements are at work in the Travels, where Swift uses the same theme to suggest Gulliver's simultaneous fascination with, and rejection of, his own body—or, one-half of his being. Indeed, the opening play on "Master Bates" is only the first in a long series of references to Gulliver's "Familiarities" with himself. Early in Book I, for example, Gulliver reports (1.3) that when "some of the younger Officers" of the Lilliputian army pass under his tattered breeches, they look up not simply with "Laughter" but "Admiration." Elsewhere in the same book, he vividly describes relieving himself and then feels the need to apologize for it: "I would not have dwelt so long upon a Circumstance … if I had not thought it necessary to justify my Character in Point of Cleanliness to the World" (1.2). In a parallel passage in Book II, he tells us about relieving himself again and again asks the reader to "excuse me for dwelling on these and the like Particulars; which however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar Minds, yet will certainly help a Philosopher enlarge his Thoughts and Imagination" (2.1). How this is so is unclear. What is clear is that Gulliver dwells "on these and the like Particulars" throughout the entire work. And the particulars he provides—his later defense, for example, of his own smell (2.5) or the "Shame" with which he views his sexual acts (4.11)—reveal a strange preoccupation with, and progressive hatred of, his own body. This same pattern suggests itself in the growing number of references to "mirrors," culminating in Gulliver's stark rejection of his human form in Book IV:

When I happened to behold the Reflection of my own Form in a Lake or Fountain, I turned away my Face in Horror and detestation of my self; and could better endure the Sight of a common Yahoo, than of my own Person (4.10).

In a passage that directly evokes and also modifies the Narcissus myth, Gulliver—here as elsewhere²³—tells us he hates his "Reflection" in mirrors. A similar modification of the myth appears in the Fables of La Fontaine (1621-95), where in "The Man and His Reflection" a Narcissus appears who avoids mirrors:

Thinking himself one with whom none could compare,
A man supposed himself the handsomest of mankind
And found fault with every mirror anywhere,
So that in time he had become morally blind.
…
What could our Narcissus do but stay away,
In the kind of place in which he would be safe all day
From any mirror that might catch him unaware?²⁴

The reason this Narcissus avoids mirrors is that they show him he looks like everybody else and detract from his idealized self image. Gulliver has similar motivations. Mirrors reflect the human form he has now rejected, a rejection arising, in part, from the Narcissistic fascination with himself adumbrated throughout and in the opening play on masturbation.

Mirrors also detract from Gulliver's idea of what he wants to become. What he wants to become is a rational horse. (As Brady quipped, "Gulliver was not unusual among eighteenth-century squires in preferring his horses to his family, but his reasons for doing so seem unique."²⁵) Thus, in the same passage in Book IV, Gulliver immediately turns away from his human "Reflection" to focus on another image—the Houyhnhnms—on which he looks "with Delight" (4.10). When he first found himself "gazing" at that image "for some time" (4.1), he had wondered soon afterwards whether his "Brain was disturbed" and had "rubbed my Eyes often" to see if "I might be in a Dream" (4.2). But the "Truth" of this image—and the possibility of a purely rational life—had since "appeared so amiable" to him that he has "determined upon sacrificing everything to it" (4.7). This is the image evoked again at the end of the Travels, where we find Gulliver living "in great Amity" (4.11) with two "Stone-Horses": stallions to most people, but to Gulliver idols of his beloved Houyhnhnms. Gulliver's fixed obsession with this image and his vain attempt to embrace it point to another theme, "illusion," which figures prominently in the Narcissus story.

In Ovid, Narcissus ignorantly (inprudens) mistakes an illusion for a reality and worships an insubstantial image that nonetheless "appears" to him "like a statue" (Metam., Bk. 3, line 419). "What you seek is nowhere"—quod petis, est nusquam—the narrator laughs (Bk. 3, line 433). Because the illusion has no correspondence in reality, and cannot be attained, the boy is destroyed. Later interpreters link Narcissus's illusion to, among other things, the (a) folly of worshipping an image, to the (b) blindness that arises from pride, and—from the late sixteenth century onward—to a (c) self-pleasing delusion, a mental aberration created by his own imagination. The first two threads are suggested, for instance, in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels: Or, The Fountain of Self-Love (1601), where Echo wishes that Narcissus had picked a "truer Mirror" in which to view his real self. "But self-love never yet could look on truth / But with blear'd beams" (i.ii). The third—taking Narcissus's error as a delusion—is prominent in La Fontaine's later Fable, where Narcissus avoids outward mirrors because they interfere with his private vision of himself.

All these strands appear in Gulliver's worship of the Houyhnhnms. At the end of the work, we find Gulliver attempting "to behold my Figure often in a Glass" in order "to Habituate my self by Time to tolerate the Sight of a human Creature" (4.12). But, like La Fontaine's Narcissus, Gulliver already has an image of himself, a private mirror, he likes better. This is the image he gazes at when he turns away from his human reflection in a lake, or when he enters the stable with his groom to view those two "Stone-Horses." This image pleases him because it allows him to deny that human form he has rejected, and to dream the dream of a purely rational life. Just as important, it enables him to "pretend to some Superiority" over the rest of the human race (4.12). That the Houyhnhnm ideal is a delusion is strongly suggested by the disparity between what Gulliver wants to become and what he is. Attempting to escape his body, he ends up enmeshed in it, enjoying the fumes of his groom while unable to tolerate the smell of his own family. Attempting to live a life of pure reason, he loses it altogether. The references to madness abound. In short, like the boy in the story, Gulliver is deluded by a hopeless love for an unattainable image—in his case, the Houyhnhnms, who become an idealized projection of his own pride.

That Gulliver writes the book to convert us to this same image suggests another interpretation of Narcissus's "illusion," taking it as a mental aberration of a specific type. In a popular emblem book reprinted as late as 1784,²⁶ Andrea Alciati equates Narcissus with the proposer of "new doctrines," one who mistakes his own idea for truth (Figure 1). The image this Narcissus sees is an imaginary construct (phantasias) created by his own intellect, a construct he falls in love with and then attempts to impose on the rest of us.²⁷ Like Alciati's Narcissus, Gulliver has found what he takes to be the truth. And being (so he often claims) a lover of truth, he writes the book with the stated intent of teaching us this truth, learned among the Houyhnhnms (4.12). Like the man in the emblem, however, this "truth" is a delusion. Indeed, in his blind love for his delusion and his attempt to get us to embrace it as truth, Gulliver is yet another version of Alciati's Narcissus—and of the "projector" who pervades Swift's works, but with one difference, of course: Gulliver's project is the grandest one of all, no less than the immediate reformation of the entire human race. Whenever someone proposes a new system, Swift tells us in the Tale of A Tub, "the first Proselyte he makes, is Himself."²⁸ In Swift's projector Lemuel Gulliver, as in Alciati's Narcissus, the root of such proselytizing can be found in self-love.

This points to the larger eighteenth-century discussion of self-interest and also, perhaps, to another reason why Gulliver is apprenticed to "my good master Bates." As a Christian and a moralist, Swift inherited a tradition that regarded self-love as a "main cause of psychological distortion," of "prejudice, misperception, misunderstanding, and worse, delusion, in one's thinking about oneself and everything else."²⁹ In the figure of Lemuel Gulliver, all of these are at work. As a satirist, Swift—like his favorite La Rochefoucauld or his contemporary, Mandeville—delighted in puncturing inflated claims to purely altruistic acts. As Frederick Keener points out in The Chain of Becoming, when Gulliver announces at the opening that he has fled "the corruption of fellow surgeons in London," he becomes one of a number of eighteenth-century heroes who "present themselves as extraordinarily selfless in motivation…. " But, Keener adds, "as quickly as these motives" are announced, the reader is set "thinking about the origins of such professions" (79).

Keener's insight can be extended, in Gulliver's case, to the act of writing itself. As we have seen, he consistently claims that he "strictly adhere[s] to Truth" (4.12). But the truth he adheres to is a Narcissistic delusion. Gulliver also says that he writes "for the noblest End" and that "my sole Intention was the PUBLICK GOOD" (4.12). This can be challenged, too. If Gulliver is so eager to share his truth, why does he wait so long to do it? Given the present mess in Gulliver's stable and the utter impossibility of becoming a rational horse, the reason is obvious: Gulliver has been unable to turn his own immediate world into a Houyhnhnm Utopia, or to embrace the ideal himself. In these terms, the book becomes a futile attempt to adjust the outside world to his own private vision.³⁰ Modern psychologists would call this an exercise (among other things) in fantasy and wish-fulfillment. Augustinian Christians would call it the sin of similitude, evoked most memorably in Milton's allegory of Satan and the creation of Sin and Death. Like Satan—or Narcissus, for that matter—Gulliver is attempting here to replicate an image of himself. Thus, underlying a stated aim to serve the public is Gulliver's unstated desire to serve himself.

If, of course, Gulliver cannot embrace his idea in life, or alter the world to suit his fancy, he does have at least one outlet: to create another world that, while unattainable in life, can be found on the page, in language itself. A modern example of such an activity appears in the "villanelle" scene in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, where Stephen imagines an ideal woman. Because he cannot embrace his ideal, he writes about it, in a process that metaphorically becomes an act of masturbation.

Theorists like Roland Barthes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have also sensed a connection between logos and eros, suggesting (in the latter's words) that a "good part of eroticism is on paper."³¹ To find writing imaged this way, we don't need to search for modern analogues, however. In Swift's Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, for example, the narrator coarsely describes the height ("Orgasmus") of the charismatics' rites, during which the spirit is said "to flag of a sudden" and the group is "forced to hasten to a Conclusion." Soon after this, the narrator himself abruptly ends the work with a sudden announcement—or, should we say, ejaculation: "the Post is just going, which forces me in great Haste to conclude." This conclusion is consistent with the rest of the work, which considers a process for "ejaculating the Soul"—a subject (the narrator boasts) "sparingly handled … by any Writer."³² Swift evokes here what Pope would call "necessary Writing." For "there is hardly any human Creature past Childhood," Pope tells us in The Art of Sinking (1728), who hasn't had "some Poetical Evacuation" or enjoyed the "Discharge of the peccant Humour, in exceeding perulent Metre."³³ In these works, masturbation becomes a metaphor for writing that finds its sole basis in self. The same point suggests itself in Gulliver's apprenticeship to "Master Bates." Swift would certainly agree with Glanvill's assertion that "every man is naturally a Narcissus."³⁴ But he would also argue the need for the writer to go beyond this natural condition, to reach out and embrace the larger orders around him. It is Gulliver's failure to do this, to have intercourse (in any sense of the word) with the world around him, that leads him, in isolation, to fall in love with an idealized image of himself and to write this book.

In his study, Literary Loneliness, John Sitter has perceptively noted the gradual isolation, in the mid-eighteenth century, of the writer from his world.³⁵ Within this larger movement, it is perhaps significant that less than twenty years after the Travels Edward Young would invoke Narcissus as a positive ideal and compare virtue to

Swift seems to have foreseen this movement and in the Travels worked out some of its less charming implications. Indeed, as a type of Narcissus and a prototype of the Modern author, Lemuel Gulliver is apprenticed, from the very beginning of the work, to "my good Master Bates."

Notes

¹ Frank Brady, "Vexations and Diversions: Three Problems in Gulliver's Travels, " Modern Philology 75 (1978), 350.

²The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert David (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939-1968), XI, 19-20. All further references are to this edition.

³ William Kinsley, "Gentle Readings: Recent Work on Swift," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (Summer, 1982), 443. Irvin Ehrenpreis has also pointed to Swift's veritable "addiction to word-games." See Dean Swift, Vol. III of Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 141.

⁴ See Milton Voigt, Swift and the Twentieth Century (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1964), 158; Phyllis Greenacre, Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (New York: International University Presses, 1955), 99-100, 115; and the OED, S.V. "masturbation." The OED, defining "masturbation" as "The practice of self-abuse," cites the earliest written occurrence of the word in Onanism: Or a Treatise upon the Disorders produced by Masturbation (1766), forty years after the publication of Gulliver in 1726. For the 1603 occurrence, see Brady, 350n.

⁵ [Bernard Mandeville], A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (London, 1724; reprint ed., Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1973, No. 162), 30-31. The Defence also went through a second edition, in 1725.

⁶ John Armstrong, The Oeconomy of Love: A Poetical Essay (London, 1736), 8-10.

⁷ John Marten, A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease in both Sexes, 6th ed., corrected and enlarged (London, c. 1709), 398-99. I thank P.-G. Boucé for calling this to my attention. Information on this book, which managed to get Marten prosecuted, is available in David Foxon's Libertine Literature in England 1660-1745 (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1965), 13.

⁸ONANIA; Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and All its Frightful Consequences (London, 1724; reprint ed., Boston, 1724), 3. The author takes his title from the story of Onan in Genesis (38: 8-10) and is perhaps the first to use the term, "onanism." However, as often pointed out, both the title and the term are based on a probable misreading of the biblical text.

⁹ See Edward H. Hare, "Masturbatory Insanity: The History of an Idea," The Journal of Mental Science, 108 (1962), 2.

¹⁰Onania, 1724, 16-17. For the same talk of "licentious Masturbators " and "that cursed School-Wickedness of Masturbation," also see the London, 1725 edition of ONANIA, 19-20. A 1756 edition of this work, owned by the Kinsey Institute, includes letters written by an "afflicted Onan" in "Dublin, Dec. 31, 1727" (24) who found ONANIA an inspiration; and from a similarly-troubled youth in "London, Dec. 31, 1729" who regrets his past involvement in what he calls "The Sin of Masturbation" (88). The letter from Ireland suggests ONANIA's presence there, as does the copy of the book in the personal library of a longterm Dublin associate of Swift's, John Putland, the stepson of Swift's friend and Dublin physician, Richard Helsham. (See item No. 1490 in Putland's manuscript list of his own library, Bibliotheca Putlandia, National Library of Ireland, MS 4186). Swift knew Putland well enough to loan him £1500; Putland also apparently ended up with several medical books owned by Swift and left to Helsham. See The Account Books of Jonathan Swift, eds. Paul V. Thompson and Dorothy Jay Thompson (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1984), cxxv, 310, 312, 313; and William LeFanu, A Catalogue of Books Belonging to Dr. Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 1988), 2.

¹¹ See P-G. Boucé, "Aspects of Sexual Tolerance and Intolerance in XVIIIth-Century England," British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980), 176; and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England: 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 514. For more information, also see Robert H. MacDonald, "The Frightful Consequences of Onanism: Notes on the History of a Delusion," Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 423-31; R. P. Neuman, "Masturbation, Madness, and The Modern Concepts of Childhood and Adolescence," The Journal of Social History, 8 (1975), 1-27; J. H. Plumb, "The New World of Children in 18th-century England," Past and Present, 67 (1975), 64-93; Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), esp. 25-29; M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, trans. R. H. Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), vol. I, esp. 27-29; Theodoré Tarczylo, Sexe et Liberté au Siècle des Lumières (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1983); G. S. Rousseau's review of this work in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 19 (Fall, 1985), 116-20; and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., "The Disease of Masturbation: Values and the Concept of Disease," in Sickness and Health in America, eds. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 13-21. Such works are starting to confirm Jean Hagstrum's suspicion that fears of "onanism" and the like "haunted the mind of eighteenth-century man no less than the Victorians" (Sex and Sensibility [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980], 224n.) There are several helpful collections of essays on the subject, including P.-G. Boucé's Sexuality In Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1982).

¹² Jonathan Swift, et al., Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950), 134-36.

¹³ Havelock Ellis, "The Conception of Narcissism," in Studies In The Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1936), vol. I, 355-56. Though some similarities exist between eighteenth-century views of Narcissus and modern concepts of narcissism, I wish to differentiate the two, as much as possible. For an interesting exploration of Swift and "narcissism," in a modern sense of the term, see Thomas B. Gillmore, "Freud, Swift, and Narcissism: A Psychological Reading of 'Strephon and Chloe,'" in Contemporary Studies of Swift's Poetry, eds. John Irwin Fischer and Donald C. Mell (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1981), 159-68. On problems of applying modern, psychological terms to eighteenth-century texts, see Christopher Fox, "Defining Eighteenth-Century Psychology: Some Problems and Perspectives," in Psychology and Literature In the Eighteenth Century, ed. C. Fox (New York: AMS Studies In the Eighteenth Century, 1987), 1-22.

¹⁴ Though other classical accounts of Narcissus exist, the most influential appears in bk. 3 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, lines 339-510. All references are to Vol. I of F. J. Miller's translation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936).

¹⁵ See Ovid, Metam., bk. 3, line 354 and Natalis Comes, Mythologiae (Venice, 1567; reprint ed., New York: Garland Press, 1976), 285-86.

¹⁶ See Henry Reynolds MYTHOMYSTES … TO which is annexed the Tale of Narcissus briefly mythologized (London, 1632): "Narcissus is fained to eschew and flye the companie of all women" (107).

¹⁷ See Ovid, Metam., bk. 3, lines 390-91; Marlowe's Hero and Leander (First Sest. 75-76), where Leander is compared to Narcissus who "despising many / Died ere he could enjoy the love of any"; and Bacon's Wisedome of the Ancients (London, 1619): "Narcissus was exceeding faire … but wonderful proud and disdainfull; wherefore dispising [sic] all others in respect of himselfe, hee leads a solitary life" (11).

¹⁸ See Ovid, Metam., bk. 3, lines 417, 433-34; George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures, eds. K. K. Hulley and S. T. Vandersall (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1970), 159; and Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels: Or The Fountain of Self-Love, The Works, ed. W. Gifford (London, 1816), vol. II, 236.

¹⁹ See Richard Steele's Spectator No. 238 (Dec. 3, 1711) in The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. II, 427; Sandys, 160; and Bacon's Wisedome, where we learn that those afflicted with the disease of Narcissus "leade for the most parte" a "private and obscure life, attended on with a fewe followers, and those such as will … like an Eccho [sic] flatter them in all their sayings" (12-13).

²⁰ See The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. I, 110, 156. Narcissus is not the only Ovidian tale evoked in the Travels. For instance, the captain who rescues Gulliver at the end of bk. II compares him to "Phaeton"—"although," Gulliver tells us, "I did not much admire the Conceit" (2.8). Why Gulliver didn't is perhaps suggested by the title alone of an earlier work, by Thomas Hall: Phaeton's folly, or, the downfal of pride: being a translation of the second book of Ovids Metamorphosis where is lively set forward the danger of pride and rashness (1655) (1655). (See Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry [New York: Norton, 1963], 337).

²¹ See Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature, trans. R. Dewsnap and L. Grönlund (Lund: Gleerups, 1967), 15.

²² Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in The Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967), 68.

²³ When, for instance, the Queen of Brobdingnag "used to place" Gulliver "towards a Looking Glass, by which both our Persons appeared before me in full View," he disliked it intensely (2.3). He subsequently tells us that "I could never endure to look in a Glass after mine Eyes had been accustomed to such prodigious Objects; because the Comparison gave me so dispicable a Conceit of my self (2.8). Mirrors here accentuate the littleness of Gulliver's body and assault his pride. Later, he will reject that body altogether. For other comments on the "mirror" in Gulliver, see, especially, W. B. Carnochan, Lemuel Gulliver's Mirror For Man (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), 139-40, 175-81.

²⁴The Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Marianne Moore (New York: Viking Press, 1952), 22-23. The Fables appear (as No. 502) in the sale catalogue of Swift's books. See A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS, [IN] THE LIBRARY of… Dr. SWIFT (Dublin, 1745), 13; reprinted in Harold Williams, Dean Swift's Library (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932).

²⁵ Brady, 360.

²⁶ For a publication history of Alciati's work, and his influence—both of which are extensive—see Henry Green, Andrea Alciati and His Books of Emblems: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study (London: Trübner and Co., 1872); and Vinge, 177-78, 180, 204.

²⁷ See Andrea Alciatus, Emblemata … CVM COMMENTARIIS… PER CLAVDIVM MINOEM (Antwerp, 1581), 261-70; and Figure I. Vinge (141) gives the following translation of Alciati's motto:

²⁸A Tale of A Tub. To which is added the Battle of the Books, and the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, eds. A. C. Guthkelch and David Nichol Smith, 2nd ed., rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 171.

²⁹ Frederick M. Keener, The Chain of Becoming (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 79. Keener's chapter on self-love (55-85) and his analysis of Gulliver (89-126) are both relevant to my discussion, as are considerations in A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), 9-66; Anthony Levi, S. J., French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), esp. 215-33; Lester Crocker, The Age of Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959), 202-17, 256-324; and A. O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1961), esp. 217-45.

³⁰ That Swift is attempting here to evoke a private world may account for one enigma often noticed: that is, the Travels' seeming lack of explicit allusion. A related point is the connection Swift and others made between pride and madness. In his influential Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (Pordage trans., London, 1683), Thomas Willis, for instance, asserts that "Ambition, Pride, and Emulation, have made some mad" (203). In studying Swift's Tale, Michael DePorte has traced the importance of the madness/pride association, and its relation to a corresponding loss of self and assumption of a delusional identity. (See DePorte's "Vehicles of Delusion: Swift, Locke, and the Madhouse Poems of James Carkesse," in Psychology and Literature In the Eighteenth Century, ed. C. Fox [New York: AMS Studies In the Eighteenth Century, 1987,] 69-86). A similar case could be made for Gulliver as one who goes mad through pride, and loses his identity while attempting to become something he is not. In discussing the "manner of ravings" of the insane, Willis notes that "Fabulous antiquity scarce ever thought of so many metamorphoses of men, which some have not believed really of themselves"; some (Willis adds) have even "believed themselves to be Dogs or Wolves, and have imitated their ways and kind by barking and howling" (Two Discourses, 188). Near the end of bk. IV, Gulliver declares that by

conversing with the Houyhnhnms, and looking upon them with Delight, I fell to imitate their Gait and Gesture, which is now grown into a Habit; and my Friends often tell me in a blunt way, that / trot like a Horse; which, however, I take for a great Compliment: Neither shall I disown, that in speaking, I am apt to fall into the Voice and manner of the Houyhnhnms, and hear my self ridiculed on that Account (4.10).

When he first saw the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver thought they must be "Magicians" (presumably "men") who had "metamorphosed themselves" into horses (4.1). In Gulliver's subsequent attempt to make the same transformation, to neigh and trot like the horses and imitate "their ways and kind," could we be witnessing yet another "metamorphosis"—in Willis's sense of the term? I have explored this question in a forthcoming essay, "Of Logic and Lycarthropy: Gulliver and the Faculties of the Mind."

³¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1964), 310. Also see Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975); and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976). Derrida tells us that Rousseau's "masturbation … cannot be separated from his activity as a writer" (155). If this statement were applied to the narrator of the Mechanical Operation, Swift, I suspect, would agree.

³²The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, in A Tale, 288-89, 267.

³³ Alexander Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, ed. Edna L. Steeves (1952; reprint ed., New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 12-13.

³⁴ Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 119.

³⁵ See John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982).

³⁶ Edward Young, The Complaint; Or, Night Thoughts, bk. 8 ("Virtue's Apology") in The Poetical Works (London: Aldine, n.d.), vol. I, 210. At about the same time Young was seeing Narcissus as a positive ideal, others, in a related move, were challenging the traditional view of pride, turning the first of the medieval sins into a modern virtue. "[N]othing," said Hume, "is more useful to us in the conduct of life, than a due degree of pride" (A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], 596).