The Secret Memoirs of Lemuel Gulliver: Satire, Secrecy, and Swift

[W]hoever has . . . desire of some knowledge of Secrets of State, must compare what he hears from severall great men, or from one great man at severall Times, which is equally different.

—Jonathan Swift, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift

I.

What is the relationship between satire, secrecy, and secret history? Jonathan Swift suggests a partial answer to this question in one of the most famous scenes in Gulliver's Travels, although its similarity to seductions in secret histories has not been sufficiently noted.¹ Readers of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood will recognize the amatory conventions: the weather is excessively hot; a young woman goes to a river bank or garden and removes her clothes, unaware of the gaze of a desiring male who, inflamed by desire, catches her in a surprised embrace from which she struggles to escape. In Manley's Secret Memoirs . . . From the New Atalantis,

[t]he beautiful Diana . . . passed her down into the gardens. She had nothing on but a petticoat. . . . It was the evening of an excessive hot day. . . . A canal run by which made that retreat delightful. . . . [T]he dazzling lustre of her bosom stood revealed, her polished limbs all careless and extended. . . . Rodriguez . . . stole close to the unthinking fair . . . throwing himself at his length beside her. . . . Her surprise caused her to shriek aloud."²

Gulliver, in a reverse of gender roles, reports his near-rape by a "libidinous and mischievous" would-be lover:

[T]he Weather exceeding hot, I entreated him to let me bathe in the River . . . I immediately stripped myself stark naked, and went down softly into the Stream; It happened that a young Female Yahoo . . . saw the whole Proceeding; and inflamed by Desire . . . embraced me after a most fulsome Manner; I roared as loud as I could . . . whereupon she quitted her Grasp, with the utmost reluctancy, and . . . stood gazing.³

Manley had set a precedent for reversing gender roles for the purpose of satire in the seduction scene between the Duchess (Lady Castelmaine) and Germanicus (Henry Jermyn) in The New Atalantis. Should we make something or nothing of this coincidence?

Satire has been affiliated with the founding of the public sphere; participation in political debates and in other critiques of power would seem to place satiric discourse in the open. However, secrecy plays an equally crucial role in satiric theory and practice.⁴ What is a satirist if not a purveyor of confounding hidden truths, a restless malcontent who rakes the filth from dark corners, removes the ink from blotted lines, uncovers the "Secrets of the Hoary deep" in order to flash them before the reader's eyes or to whisper them in the reader's ear?⁵ From the Book of Revelation to Fahrenheit 9/11, the satiric impulse is to focus on the very things many would wish most to conceal. Secret history raises another set of contradictions. It has been affiliated with the rise of the private pleasures of domestic fiction, as well as with the public ramifications of early modern liberalism. Erica Harth, Ros Ballaster, Annabel Patterson, and Robert Mayer are among those who have begun to explore these different tendencies; various approaches and conclusions suggest the critical possibilities of this relatively neglected minor genre.⁶

The historical overlap between the production of great eighteenth-century satire in English and the production of myriad secret histories, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, is no mere coincidence. This essay will define the relationship between the two modes of representation generally and will argue for the specific importance of this relationship in the work of the period's exemplary satirist, Swift. Satire and secret history, I will show, share a tendency to destabilize meaning by activating contending versions of truth through such means as irony and alternative narratives of the same events. Despite evidence that increasing access to information led to the rise of democratic institutions at the end of the eighteenth century, further evidence supports the thesis that the brokering of political, social, and religious power required a clandestine "other." A treaty might be signed in one room...