Utopia in Gulliver Travels and Paradise Lost Essay -- comparison compa

The Inconceivable Utopia in Gulliver Travels and Paradise Lost In Jonathon Swifts Gulliver Travels and in John Miltons Paradise Lost, the reader is presented with two write downs representing utopias. For Swift this land is an island inhabited by horse like creatures called Houyhnhnms who rule over serviceman like beasts called Yahoos. For Milton, the Garden of Eden before the Fall of man represents Paradise. In it, Adam and Eve are pure and innocent, untested and faithful to God. The American Heritage Dictionary defines utopia as an ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects. And while Houyhnhnm Land and the Garden of Eden may bet like ideally perfect places, they are not. Indeed, they contradict our ideas of utopia. Our fascination with utopias stems from our regard to and pursuit of progress within our own rules of order. We study utopias with the hope that our orderliness volition someday evolve into one. But what often goes unnoticed is that if our ordination improves enough to become utopian, it wont be able to improve any longer. Hence, it will be rigid and unchanging, the complete opposite of what it was as it evolved to its elevated state. This is an appalling truth for us because we place value and virtue in the ideas of inclination and progress. Our reason tells us once in an ideal land, desire cannot scarcely cease to be, because desire is part of our human nature. And our reason is right. An ideal society should accentuate our human nature, not suppress it. As we desire a perfect society we know that a perfect could not constitute without our desire. And as long as we desire, we hope for progress. The idea that an utopia wouldnt allow such progress to occur is enough to make us stop accept in utop... ...ames Holly. Milton and the Art of War. John Milton, Poet and Humanist essays by James Holly Hanford. Cleveland promote of Western Reserve U, 1966. 185-223. Lock, F. P. The Politics of Gullivers Travels. Oxford, Great Britain Oxford University Press, 1980. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Roy Flannagan. New York Macmillan, 1993. Patrides, C.A. Milton and The Christian Tradition. (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1966) Revard, Stella Purce. The War in Heaven. Ithaca and London Cornell University Press, 1980. Rodino, Richard H. The Study of Gullivers Travels, Past and Present. detailed Approaches to instruct Swift. New York AMS Press, 1992. Swift, Jonathan. Gullivers Travels. Mahwah, NJ Watermill Press, 1983. Tuveson, Ernest. (Ed.) Paradise Lost A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964.