The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag

This article builds on Marjorie Nicolson's well-known argument about Lemuel Gulliver as microscopic specimen in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It contends that Swift inflects Gulliver in Brobdingnag more specifically as a pocket-sized instrument in the hands of enormous female consumers, not unlike the fashionable "pocket-microscopes" of his day. "The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag" shows that Swift's portrayal of an English adventurer turned objectified "little man" underscores the emasculating effects of the commodification and perceived feminization of Enlightenment science in the new bourgeois culture.