Everything about Houyhnhnm totally explained
Houyhnhnms are a race of intelligent horses described in the last part of
Jonathan Swift's satiric
Gulliver's Travels. The name is pronounced either or /ˈhwɪnəm/.
Houyhnhnms contrast strongly with the
Yahoos, savage
humanoid creatures: whereas the Yahoos represent all that's bad about humans, Houyhnhnms have a stable, calm, reliable and rational society. Gulliver much prefers the Houyhnhnms' company to the Yahoos', even though the latter are biologically closer to him.
Interpretation of the Houyhnhnms has been vexatious. It is possible, for example, to regard them as a veiled criticism by Swift of the
British Empire's treatment of non-whites as lesser humans, and it's similarly possible to regard Gulliver's preference (and immediate division of Houyhnhnms into color-based hierarchies) as absurd and the sign of his self-deception.
Book IV of
Gulliver's Travels is the keystone, in some ways, of the entire work, and critics have traditionally responded to the subject of whether Gulliver is insane (and therefore just another victim of Swift's satire) or not by questioning whether or not the Houyhnhnms are truly admirable. Gulliver loves the land and is obedient to a race that isn't like his own. The Houyhnhnm society is based upon reason, and only upon
reason, and therefore the horses practice
eugenics based on their analyses of benefit and cost. They have no religion and their sole morality is the defense of reason, and therefore they're not particularly moved by pity or a belief in the intrinsic value of life. Gulliver himself, in their company, builds the sails of his skiff from "Yahoo skins." Examples of the Houyhnhnms' lack of passion surface mainly during their annual meeting. A visitor apologizes for being late to the meeting as her husband had passed away shortly before and she'd to make the proper funeral arrangements, which consists of burial at sea. She eats her lunch like all other Houyhynms and isn't affected at all by her loss, rationalizing that gone is gone. A further example of the lack of humanity and emotion in the Houyhnhnms is that their laws demand that each couple produce two children, one male and one female. In the event that a marriage produced two offspring of the same sex, the parents would take their children to the annual meeting and trade them with a couple who produced two children of the opposite sex. This latter part was viewed by some Swift scholars as his spoofing and or criticizing the notion that the "ideal" family produces children of both sexes.
On the one hand, the Houyhnhnms have an orderly and peaceful society. They possess
philosophy and have a language that's entirely pure of political and ethical nonsense. They possess, for example, no word for a
lie (and must substitute a phrase —
to say a thing which is not). They also have a form of art that's derived from nature. Outside of
Gulliver's Travels, Swift had expressed longstanding concern over the corruption of the
English language, and he'd proposed language reform. He had also, in
Battle of the Books and in general in
A Tale of a Tub, expressed a preference for the Ancients (Classical authors) because their art was based directly upon nature, and not upon other art.
On the other hand, Swift was profoundly mistrustful of attempts at reason that resulted in either
hubris (for example, the Projectors satirized in
A Tale of a Tub or in Book III of
Gulliver's Travels) or immorality (such as the speaker of
A Modest Proposal, who offers an entirely logical and wholly immoral proposal for
cannibalism). The Houyhnhnms embody both the good and the bad side of reason, for they've the pure language Swift wished for and the immorally rational approach to solving the problems of humanity (Yahoos); the extirpation of the Yahoo population by the horses is very like the speaker of
A Modest Proposal.
After Gulliver makes it out to the shipping lanes he's rescued by a Portuguese sea captain, a level headed individual albeit full of concern for others. The captain's temperament was considered the perfect medium between that of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos, and Gulliver had remembered that he was the man he'd gotten along best with. When Gulliver returns to
England at the end of
Gulliver's Travels, he finds the smell and look of his countrymen intolerable. He regards all around him as Yahoos, and he spends much of his time in the stables near his horses, with whom he converses, although he did say he's a friendship with the stable boy due to his love of horses.
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