‘The Fear You Had for Your Eyes’: The Terror of Sight Loss in Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

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‘Sir, Some Friend of mine lent me a Comedy, which I am told was written by you: I read it carefully, and with much Pleasure, on Account both of the Characters, and the Moral.’

Writing from the Deanery House on Christmas Day 1737, Jonathan Swift addresses Michael Clancy (c. 1704–76), physician, playwright and later blind author, whose comedy The Sharper had recently crossed his desk in manuscript. Swift’s letter offers an ingress into eighteenth-century thinking about visual impairment, satiric influence and literary afterlives. This paper begins with a disability-studies reading of Gulliver’s Travels, centred on the Lilliputian proposal that Gulliver be punished by having his eyes put out. The proposal acknowledges that ‘the fear you had for your eyes’ constitutes the greatest obstacle to Gulliver’s submission: sight loss is imagined not simply as bodily impairment, but as a form of terror through which liberty and futurity are threatened. Reading this episode alongside others in Gulliver’s Travels, I  examine the ways in which Swift’s satiric writing repeatedly figures the loss of sight as an existential threat. The paper then follows a possibly fleeting but suggestive connection between Swift and Clancy in order to consider how Swift’s satiric vision may have shaped a lesser-known mid-eighteenth century author writing after the onset of blindness. Clancy’s life writing resonates with Swift’s fearful presentation of sight loss, but it also departs from it. In his Memoirs, Clancy at times recasts blindness in ways that quietly resist the ableist assumptions of works such as Gulliver’s Travels. Bringing Swift’s satire into conversation with Clancy’s writing, the paper argues that blindness becomes a site at which the terrors of bodily change are negotiated rather than simply reproduced.

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