Compare the Houyhnhnms society with Gulliver's (England's, ours)?
Unlike both eighteenth-century English society and twenty-first century US society, the Houyhnhnm culture is peaceful and rational. The Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who control a population of degenerate humans called Yahoos, have created a harmonious, almost ideal society.They don't lie or cheat each other, nor do they hate or envy one another. They don't have armies, and they don't fight war. Everyone is taken care of.
All of the above is good, but on the downside Houyhnhnms lack emotion. They marry rationally, to combine the best sets of genes together, not for love. They don't seem to feel passionate love for one another or much attachment to children or family. They don't experience much grief. Their harmonious society comes at the expense of the emotions that can make human beings feel most alive.
Gullivers goes overboard in his adoration of the Houyhnhnms. Meanwhile the Master Houyhnhnm looks down on the humans. Gulliver records the Master saying to him that European humans
had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions; that, as to myself, it was manifest I had neither the strength nor agility of a common Yahoo . . .
Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, in which Gulliver lands in the realm of the Houyhnhnms, is the most complex section of the book, containing Swift's most trenchant criticisms of human failings. It's also an episode rich in ironic implications.
The Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses, are ostensibly intended as the antithesis of everything negative about human beings. They are peaceful and benign, much like actual horses in the real world. Unlike men, the Houyhnhnms don't keep standing armies and make war. Nor are they plagued by the destructive emotionalism of humans. Instead, they're devoted to reason.
This last point is decisive in how we answer the question: what precisely is Swift's (not Gulliver's) view of the Houyhnhnms? Is he really presenting them as ideal beings? Yes and no. These horses, who are supernaturally intelligent, are deliberately contrasted with the savage, animal-like humans, the Yahoos, who exist in their world. But part of Swift's point is to show that rationality is not enough to live by. There is a sterility, a meaninglessness to what we can see of the Houyhnhnms' mental world. Much has been written about Swift's own dysfunctional personality, including repeated assertions about his fear of intimacy and sexuality. Supposedly this unemotional Houyhnhnm world is one he considers ideal. But Swift's own life and personality contradict this.
If any writer of his time was passionate and prone to outrage and emotional outbursts, it was Swift. The anger expressed (with irony, of course) in A Modest Proposal is not that of a man devoted to peaceful rationality. Also, though this, too, has been challenged by hostile critics, Swift was a religious man—a devout Christian in a time when other intellectuals like his friend Alexander Pope were leaning towards deism. The concept of pure rationality doesn't square with Swift's piety.
Swift does intend the Houyhnhnms as positive beings, as a corrective to man's worst tendencies—but not as the ideal creatures a superficial reading would indicate. We might argue that their "perfection" is presented, in part, ironically. So, to an extent, is the savagery of the Yahoos. Gulliver's horror when a female Yahoo throws herself at him is comical. Though (again) armchair psychoanalysts have had enormous fun at Swift's expense, saying that this scene portrays without irony Swift's own fear of sexuality, I would argue they are misreading him. Swift's thought, expressed here and in other works, is much more complex than these commentators would have us believe.
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