Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas

Abstract:

This article relates Swift's critique of science to his view of women by resorting to Lakoff and Johnson's theory on the function of metaphors in human conceptualization. Through the overarching conceptual metaphor NATURE IS A WOMAN, the gap between these two areas in Swift studies, which have remained largely isolated so far, is bridged. The analysis shows that Swift's strange aesthetic view of and peculiar attitude toward women were, through the conceptual metaphor, extrapolated to nature, which can explain his condemnation of science as not only "unaesthetic" and "indecent" but also futile and morbid.