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

The Inconceivable Utopia in Gulliver Travels and Paradise unconnected In Jonathon Swifts Gulliver Travels and in John Miltons Paradise Lost, the reader is presented with two lands representing utopias. For Swift this land is an island inhabited by horse like creatures called Houyhnhnms who rule over man like beasts called Yahoos. For Milton, the tend of Eden before the Fall of man represents Paradise. In it, Adam and Eve atomic number 18 pure and innocent, untested and faithful to God. The American Heritage Dictionary defines utopia as an ideally hone place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects. And while Houyhnhnm Land and the Garden of Eden may seem like ideally perfect places, they are not. Indeed, they contradict our ideas of utopia. Our fascination with utopias stems from our attraction to and pursuit of progress within our own society. We study utopias with the hope that our society will someday evolve into one. But what often goes unnoticed is that i f our society 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 idealistic state. This is an awful truth for us because we place value and virtue in the ideas of desire and progress. Our reason tells us once in an ideal land, desire cannot simply 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 exist without our desire. And as long as we desire, we hope for progress. The idea that an utopia wouldnt allow such progress to come to pass is enough to make us stop believing in utop... ...ames Holly. Milton and the Art of War. John Milton, Poet and Humanist essays by James Holly Hanford. Cleveland Press of Western Reserve U, 1966. 185-223. Lock, F. P. The administration 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. Critical Approaches to Teaching 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.