Mrs Gulliver's Travels: Minor‐Character Elaboration in Theory and Practice

Mary Burton, a hosier's daughter from London, married a 20-something seafaring surgeon from Nottinghamshire in 1688. Eleven years later, her husband undertook the first of four voyages to several remote nations that later became the basis of bestselling memoirs. This book is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), a prose satire that has been abridged, adapted and reworked for different audiences ever since. Mary barely features in Travels, and even then Lemuel mostly refers to her in passing as 'my Wife' (on nineteen occasions). A faint paranarrative can be salvaged from such asides. By the third voyage, we detect marital conflict in the casual remark that the 'only' difficulty Lemuel faces in undertaking the latest journey entails securing his wife's consent.1 For each voyage, the narratorial imperative demanded Gulliver's wanderlust over familial dutifulness: 'I stayed but two Months with my Wife and Family; for my insatiable Desire of seeing foreign Countries would suffer me to continue no longer'.2 In moments of despair, Gulliver can engage our empathy: 'I slept about two Hours, and dreamed I was at home with my Wife and Children, which aggravated my Sorrows when I awaked and found my self alone in a vast Room'.3 More often, Swift's characters service comedy: 'My Wife ran out to embrace me, but I stooped lower than her Knees, thinking she could otherwise never be able to reach my Mouth'.4 And finally, after living with the Houyhnhnms he so greatly admired, Lemuel rejects his kin and kind: 'During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable'.5 Here, the satire darkens into a misanthropic comment on the hypocrisies of civilised society. When brought to the surface, the paranarrative of the domestic lives of the Gullivers undermines critical assumptions about the extent to which Travels can be understood in the formal context of 'the novel'. In that specific context, Gulliver fulfils a narrative function that anchors the prose satire and is not what John Frow calls a quasi-person.6 Novelistic elements nevertheless haunt the pages of the mock-memoirs. To unravel the puzzle of the novelistic non-novel, we should turn our attention to other aspects of form or genre, such as secondary characters. Even though she does not appear in Travels as such, Mary Gulliver's quasi-personhood is more readily assured by the coherence of her implicit role as the loyal wife and mother waiting in London. And yet the gendered limitation of such a specific archetype, in subservience to a neglectful male protagonist, has enticed secondary authors to round out the character more fully in recent reworkings. What is post scriptum fulness of character, and how is it achieved? Not only is Mary given direct speech in modern novels and short stories, she also revises the fantastical voyaging that has saturated global culture for almost 300 years. At turns, she comments on her husband's travelogue (whether a recently published or not-yet-complete document) while fulfilling her current life at home, retraces Lemuel's steps overseas (thereby redoing or undoing the prior narrative), and even journeys far beyond the remote nations with which readers and audiences have long been familiar (thereby extending the already complete original). A case study of minor-character elaboration, this essay examines the figuration and function of different versions of Mary in Davy King's 'The Woman Gulliver Left Behind' (1978), John Kessel's 'Gulliver at Home' (1997), Karen Joy Fowler's 'The Travails' (1999), Alison Fell's The Mistress of Lilliput, or The Pursuit (1999) and Lauren Chater's Gulliver's Wife (2020). I have three aims. First is to demonstrate the diversity of approaches in the modern practice of minor-character elaboration and, by extension, literary adaptation. Second is to champion a formalist approach to analysing literary characters across texts. And third is to consider the role creative engagement can play in the ongoing reception of familiar works of fiction. Jeremy Rosen defines minor-character elaboration as 'a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new ones'.7 Such conversion should equate to being 'demonstrably transformed' yet recognisable, not 'merely extended'—or, what adaptation theorists call repetition with variation.8 Mary Gulliver provides an extreme case with which to test this framework. Some authors have given her extra children or grandchildren, as well as additional love interests, or even changed her biographical particulars (including her place of birth). And yet, as the named wife of Gulliver, even when liberated from him, she remains a nominally subsidiary character in a teleological sense. Mary is all but absent in the source text and yet constructed within its boundaries. We solve the contradiction through doubleness: modified characters remain functions of a canonical work and yet act as if they have an autonomous existence. A social formalist would go so far as to suggest injustices have been committed against Mary as though she's a real woman.9 Indeed, the principal convention of the genre, Rosen continues, has become 'the conversion of a formerly minor figure into a narrator-protagonist who "tells her own story"'.10 Mary is ideally suited for such fictions as her story has literally not been told, even if her reactions have been incompletely captured by her author-explorer husband. Even when she is belatedly allocated speech by Swift's circle, as in supplementary poems written in her name by Alexander Pope for the second edition of Travels in 1727, she continued to fulfil a subsidiary function. Doubleness of character can therefore come belatedly, as Mary's case proves, in the more clearly defined minor-character elaboration genre. While this revisionist mode has extensive precedents, as Rosen shows, it emerged most distinctly in the late 1960s and has become particularly visible since the late 1990s. In the latter phase, the range of reworkings has extended beyond an initial writing back to the literary canon to include elements advisedly catalogued as homage, historical fiction, and humour.11 The recuperative paradigm of feminist scholarship that features prominently in this mode of writing remains most closely associated with Jean Rhys's elaboration of Edward Rochester's mistreated first wife, Bertha (Antoinette Mason), in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Shakespeare's Gertrude and Ophelia, among many others, have gained powerful voices in more recent novels. We therefore might compare our Marys against the benchmark of the repurposed Bertha and other maligned female characters. Or, to historicise the genre more narrowly, we might analyse the 1990s Mary Gulliver fictions in the context of a boom in feminist amplifications that appeared around that time, including Marina Warner's influential reimagining of The Tempest (1611), Indigo (1992), in which Prospero's daughter Miranda takes a central role. Most closely analogous to our present case study would be Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer (1999), in which tangential references to the wife and child left in Nantucket by Captain Ahab in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) expand into a 650-page novel. The constant production of such works renders the theoretical project a perennially outdated one. Instead, tracing a single minor character across different texts helps ground the genre as it has been (and could be further) practised today and thereby solves, locally, Rosen's concerns for the inherent openness of minor-character elaboration.12 As Rosen concedes, the genre's 'relatively stable center' rests on the overt appropriation of recognisable characters, as well as plots and settings that we might presume can be tracked. This is not to say that even the niche category of Mary Gulliver elaborations can be closed. Elaborations keep appearing. Erga Netz has just begun a multibook series from the perspective of a slightly renamed Mary Burton-Gulliver. The first published book in the series, Oh, Gulliver! Mrs Gulliver and the Secret of Size (2023), fixates on the discrepancy between the original author-explorer's farcically sexualised adventures in Lilliput and the real-world travails of the woman he has left behind (not least of all the miscarriages she suffers alone, a counterfactual detail entirely omitted in the official record). Tracing different versions of a single character also provides sufficient evidence required to test Rosen's assumption that the 'basic structure' of the genre requires taking 'a typological minor character and expanding upon that structure, elaborating it to produce the referential sense of a full, imaginary person'. Rosen continues: 'minor-character elaborations perform in fiction the mental work that generates realist characters'.13 The new Mary Gullivers do tend to be realistic, even within the limitations of the historical context in which their stories are set. Sometimes they have surreal tendencies, in keeping with late-20th- and early 21st-century literary trends. Sometimes their realism is heightened by the unreality that surrounds them, including Lady Mary, the sentient doll with whom Mrs Gulliver shares narratorial duties in The Mistress. To account for the staunchly destabilising perspectives from which The Mistress and Gulliver's Wife are narrated, in formalist terms, we might buttress Rosenian realism with Christian Moraru's distinction between counterwriting and underwriting in contemporary literature.14 Counterwriting entails rupture, even full-on dissent: one finds this most compellingly expressed in the persistent critique of Lemuel Gulliver's unabashed neglect of his family. Underwriting more deferentially endorses the host text, expanding its heterocosm (literally, other world) within implied parameters or else carefully demarcated alternative universes. Of the writers considered here, Fell and Chater most blatantly mingle both approaches. And each develops complex tonal shifts in order to understand a character that hardly existed in Swift's Travels and which therefore can only become a palimpsest of distinct, non-definitive reimaginings. As we shall see, each of the works by King, Kessel, Fowler, Fell and Chater latches onto specific aspects of Swift's paranarrative of Mary's life in England, either by expanding on the farcical elements of the limited interactions with her transformed husband or exacerbating the emotional neglect felt by someone in her position. So far, these engagements have grounded Mary in a familiar but metafictional approximation of 18th-century English society. Within the much larger category of creative responses to and expansions of Gulliver's Travels produced over the past three centuries across the globe the eponymous lead character—or a clonish namesake of Lemuel—has been taken on multiple further voyages, sometimes beyond the stars, centuries into the future.15 Some replace him with an entirely new character, whether an invented son or a modern imitator. Mary Gulliver refocalisations have instead kept the new lead in her own century; this conforms to the emphasis placed on historical fiction in Rosen's framework, as well as a humanist view of character that relies on biographical plausibility. Fell even takes us back to the site of the first voyage, filling in implied gaps in Lemuel's memoirs from Mary's perspective.16 Chater, most recently, contrasts Mary's life independent of and with her conniving husband. Expanding the domestic plot, Chater also switches the true romantic interest to Richard Sympson. In the 1735 revision of Travels, Swift had confined an additional character, Sympson, to the paratextual matter that, chronologically speaking, came after Gulliver's adventures. Under the cover of Gulliver's Wife, Chater actually splices two minor-character elaborations together by rerouting us towards novelistic practices (multiple plots, dialogue, time jumps and more). That is, Mary and Sympson become characters subjected to romantic tendencies and other human-like matters; this not only expands their original functions (as at-home wife and apologetic publisher, respectively) but radically retrofits them for a different formal setting (the modern novel). This is counterwriting in action. There is also underwriting: Mary, and to an extent Lemuel in his newly diminished role, is more 'fleshed out' in Fell's and Chater's novels than the eponymous lead of the original Travels. I make this distinction not in terms of quality, as though there were an ideal 'Gulliver', whether referring to the original narrator or his spousal or any other replacement. Literary characters are often defined by their flaws, for one thing; for another, they tend to drive problematised plots. Rather, this distinction demonstrates the different formal strategies taken by Jonathan Swift and the modern novelists who have adopted his creations. Claude Rawson insists Swift's Gulliver is not a novelistic character because he lacks intellectual or moral consistency; and this services the contextual needs of his satiric function (whether to mock the superficiality of a two-party political system in Lilliput, expose colonial cruelty when in Brobdingnag, and so on).14 Robert C. Elliott similarly notes that Gulliver's character does not 'develop'; 'it simply changes' across the four separate voyages.15 This changeableness, for David Fishelov, renders this 'chameleon-like figure' an 'ad-hoc character' at best.16 Denis Donoghue posits an unsolvable paradox: Gulliver is one of the most memorable characters in all fiction precisely because he has virtually no character, that is, no inner life.17 Taking Gulliver's characterlessness as read, Lionel Basney reduces him to the in-text function of a 'friendly camera'.18 Such denials of Gulliver's ontological presence rest on the assumption that literary characters 'have to be deep, well-rounded, psychologically complex, or unified to count as characters', in the words of Rita Felski.19 Far from being a consistent entity, Gulliver is reborn in different character formats across Travels: he's an idle monster in Lilliput, a child's plaything in Brobdingnag and a gentle Yahoo in Houyhnhnm-land. Gulliver is and is not a character, depending on the reading or viewing context. Ironically, even though Mary is only tangentially present in Travels, her character has an implied wholeness. That is, her stereotypical experiences at home can be—and have been—extrapolated fairly straightforwardly. A complication arises when we factor in the official extensions of Mary's story published in the second edition of the book, which appeared as early as 1727. Here, we find 'Mary Gulliver to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver; An Epistle', one of five supplementary poems attributed to Swift's main literary ally, Alexander Pope.20 Desperate to reunite with her husband, Pope's Mary publicly declares herself willing to indulge his hippophilia and other habits: 'I'd call thee Houyhnhnm, that high sounding Name, / Thy Children's Noses all should twang the same'.21 Taken as an extension of Lemuel's account of the fourth voyage, Mary's poem upholds the primary satirical impulse of the book. The poem eschews novelistic character development, even if there is a partial shift in the generic framework. Pope 'recasts Gulliver's misanthropic repulsion toward his wife as bawdy farce', in David Brewer's words, as Mary begs affection from an auditor who cannot respond ('What, touch me not? what, shun a Wife's Embrace?').22 Read in the purview of what we might call anti-Gulliver Gulliveriana, alternatively, Mary exposes her husband's dereliction of duty: 'to see / The Groom and Sorrel Mare preferr'd to me!' Either way, the point remains: Pope's Mary, yet more emphatically than Swift's, serves a primary function not of plot but of comedy. In the Travels proper, Swift silenced Mrs Gulliver; or rather, he neglected to give her a voice because the narratorial imperative for wanderlust did not seem to require it. At the end of a revised version of a book paratextually committed to detailing her husband's prior voyages, Pope's Mary only has a one-way verse communication, an elaborate crude joke masquerading as a frustrated dramatic monologue. When wedded to Swift's original, and perhaps Pope's extension, secondary authors face a formal challenge today. A silenced, or unvoiced, character presents a predominately blank page. For many creatives, this blankness might be enticing. But implied characters such as Mary still arrive within prescribed parameters that would need to be retained or expressly ejected, particularly if we accept the premise of Rosen's theory of minor-character elaboration, which relies on biographical plausibility. For now, we will assume Mary's story has to take the form of a response to her husband precisely because of his globally recognised status among audiences of all ages. The precedent for adopting a varied literary form for that response was set by Pope and sanctioned by Swift, namely a poem. First-person memoirs mimicking Lemuel's would provide the most like-for-like retaliation. Variation in form allows for flexibility of focus, too. Mainly written in the third person, Fell's Mistress contains free indirect discourse and extensive dialogue, allowing for emotional insights or dramatic exchanges between the Gullivers as needed. One way to unbox Mary from a Gulliver-centric mode of writing would be to expand her relationships with other characters, whether with existing characters (such as Richard Sympson), their children (Betty and John, who also lack voices), or new ones (including an additional lover, the semi-real French botanist Antoine Duchesne). The spate of Mary Gulliver fictions that have appeared in recent decades have indeed blatantly adapted characters or repurposed character dynamics in highly inventive ways. With the more guarded exception of Fowler's 'The Travails', each short story or novel in this mode signals the prominence of Lemuel Gulliver in its title seemingly in order to reduce him to a different type of husband, explicitly a well-meaning and thence tragic or (more commonly) a selfish, even villainous one. To differing degrees, the new texts quote or at least heavily paraphrase from Travels, though they adopt markedly different positions on the status of the original. For some of the Marys, her husband's book proved immensely popular; for others, the book did not yet exist and therefore could be corrected in real time. Turning to our first modern example, a 1978 first-person short story, Davy King's 'The Woman Gulliver Left Behind' begins as a lament from an abandoned wife but grows into an angry critique of an unreliable husband. Mary uses Lemuel's words against him, quoting from and then commenting on Travels. She even wears the label of 'female Yahoo' with ironic honour, and plans but does not yet undertake her own travels, having also taken up the pen. While set in the same historical period and setting as Swift's original, the diction and tone are deliberately modern. This inaugurates a comical, even flippant mood. Her dawning sense of self is more tongue-in-cheek than retaliatory: 'I was a fleeting appearance, occasionally glimpsed, very much a bit-part, an unimportant extra in a cast of thousands'.23 Her husband's failings, initially, seem farcical more than callous: 'I was left literally holding the baby. It was my lot to explain to the kiddies why their daddy never came home in the evenings'.24 Scenes replayed from Travels seem increasingly stupid: 'He bent down & hugged my knees', after the return from Lilliput.25 But, as the story progresses, her situation is more than inconvenient, it's illogical: 'I lived in quiet domestic reclusion—a widowed mother—apart from interludes of ecstatic reunion with my absentee husband'.26 As a lover she candidly criticises Lemuel: 'If anything, his travels made him less keen on sex, (so much so that since his final return he refuses to touch me)'.27 Gulliver's returns lack comfort, at best: 'in a sense he had died, for he was no longer the old Lemuel I knew'.28 Gulliver the ad-hoc character haunts this text. No longer lovers, the Gullivers become rival authors of sorts. 'He's given his side of the story', she reports.29 'It's bound to be a bestseller & I can't help feeling a certain sense of pride in his achievement'. But, she argues, the book will make Gulliver famous 'on the strength of deserting me & the kids, while I, the abandoned wife, who faced my responsibilities without complaint (till now), get hardly a mention & no praise'. Discounting the wonders recounted in Travels, Mary fixates on an equally persistent theme of her husband's published story: 'He talks about female "lewdness, coquetry, censure & scandal" & "the caprices of womankind"'. 'Presumably in his estimation', she notes, 'I am one of the "ranting, lewd, expensive wives" he refers to'. Having appropriated his misinformed words in scare quotes, her response can be definitive: 'I have to set the record straight'. This is dissent that relies on the host text, even while it openly challenges it. King's Mary, a 1978 iteration, conforms to the early type of minor-character elaboration identified by Rosen: she tells her story. As an aspiring author in her own right, this Mary also admits to her shortcomings: 'It's a pity that what I've been able to put into words is clumsily-expressed & deficient in the satirical perspicacity that he displays'.30 But she believes in the power of the writing cure, if nothing else: 'this commentary is not so much a way of getting my own back as an attempt to come to terms with my experience, to sort matters out in my own mind'. And, unlike her husband, she hopes to help others: 'If any of this ever gets further than my locked drawer, perhaps my little excursion into the world of letters will serve as a warning to young ladies with illusions about wedded bliss'. As a character, she seizes self-control by relinquishing her reputation as the wife of the celebrated author-explorer: 'So goodbye Mrs Gulliver! Godspeed Mary Burton! This female Yahoo intends to do some travelling of her own'.31 Ironically, of course, she remains entirely tethered to the world created by her estranged husband. The short story cuts off before the travels begin and therefore before any proper counterwriting can ensue. Judged against the criteria of a minor-character elaboration, in which modified characters should be demonstrably changed yet familiar, and not merely extended, this Mary appears to be stuck in a unfulfilled sequel masquerading as a revision. Another first-person short story from Mary's perspective appeared in John Kessel's 1997 collection The Pure Product: 'Gulliver at Home'. Rather than address unmarried women, this Mary addresses her (new) granddaughter, Eliza, daughter of the Betty mentioned in both Swift's original and King's refocalisation. Despite the ominous tone at the outset—'No, Eliza, I did not wish your grandfather dead'—Kessel's Mary insists 'I love him'.35 The new Mary also quotes (even more extensively) from her husband's book, seemingly in approving admonishment of herself: '"Seven months," he says, "were a sufficient time to correct every vice and folly to which Yahoos are subject"'. And the newer Mary expresses greater sexual interest in her 'stallion' of a husband.36 The attraction seems mutual (an omission in or a flagrant rewriting of the source text): 'Whenever Lemuel returned from these voyages he wanted me, and I do not hesitate to say, I him'.37 This version of Gulliver, it turns out, has honest, familial motives: 'Lemuel hoped to improve our fortune by doctoring to sailors'.38 The youngest child hero-worships his father: 'When other of the townschildren mocked Lemuel, calling him a madman, Johnny fought them'.39 Such a Gulliver would be unrecognisable to readers solely of Travels, but it makes sense within the remit of a more clearly signalled refocalisation. Here we see the disruptive tendencies of counterwriting within minor-character elaboration. Gulliver's words are used against him in the new story, however, including the pompous boast made on his behalf by Richard Sympson in the publisher's notice prefixed to the first and subsequent editions of Travels. 'It's as true as if Mr. Gulliver had said it', Mr Trent jeers in the local shop one day, causing wide laughter.32 In this instance, Gulliver the author inadvertently affects Gulliver the character at home. And the tragico-farcical actions of Travels seem even more ludicrous from Mary's point of view in the modern reading context, without Gulliver's detailed account of life among the Houyhnhnms: 'Sarah was staring at a man who had entered on all fours, peering up, his head canted to the side, so that his long hair brushed the ground'.33 Mary remains empathetic, happy to go from 'widow to wife in a single instant'. On other occasions, she freely articulates different emotions in a manner denied to us in Swift's monological original: 'I was angry, and I wept'.34 Increasingly, the 'young stallion' loses interest in his wife: 'He shudders at my touch'.35 Refusing to blame Gulliver for his irrepressible wanderlust, Mary blames circumstances instead: 'As a young man his heart was full of hope, but his heart has been beaten closed'.36 Like King's Mary, Kessel's Mary acknowledges the success of her husband's Travels ('It is all they speak of in London').37 But, unlike her more immediate forebear, she keeps her misgivings to herself and Eliza. Providing comfort for the broken traveller is all she has. Has that become Mary's character function? Not quite. Inspired by Kessel's story, so she telegraphs beneath the new story's title, Karen Joy Fowler's 'The Travails' (1999) gives yet more voice to Mary's frustrations. In other words, Fowler's text appears at the outset to be an elaboration of Kessel's expansion. Formally, however, the new text reveals noticeable differences. Kessel's Mary addresses her granddaughter, not Lemuel. When discussing her husband's life and experiences, she acts as if he is not well-known yet ('The third of five sons, Lemuel hailed from Nottinghamshire, where his father held a small estate').38 Her audience is really the casual reader of Swift's Travels, a point made clearer by the end, where Mary concedes that 'His book has been a great success'.39 'The Travails' instead comprises eight intimate letters signed by Mary to her husband ('Dear Lemuel').40 Written across a 16-year period, from 28 September 1699 to 13 November 1715, her letters correspond with Lemuel's adventures overseas. (By his own claim, in Travels, Lemuel had begun his initial voyage on 4 May 1699, and was shipwrecked on the coast of Lilliput by 5 November. He finally arrived home, after intermittent returns, on 5 December 1715).41 The letters capture some of her shifting moods over such an extensive period. Initially, she is full of love and hope: Mrs Nardac 'thinks you will not come Home this time and she wishes me to know she thinks this. But I know otherwise!'42 Seven years later, she feels emotionally estranged: 'We no longer seem to fit together, you and I'.43 Her feelings fluctuate, as they do in the real world. Nine years after that, Mary still expresses affection for her husband, despite his absenteeism: 'So much Time has passed since I had any Word of you, I fear the Worst'.44 This is not to suggest that 'The Travails' merely speaks back to Travels, in highlighting more emphatically the plausibly emotional fallout experienced by the neglected housewife, a common feature of feminist minor-character elaborations since the 1960s. Expanding the paranarrative of the domestic life of the Gullivers in Travels, Fowler's epistolary short story describes in meaningful detail the now complex relationships of the canonical children, Betty and Johnny. Kessel had also addressed the fallout of the feckless voyager's actions on the children left behind, but such fleshing out centres solely on Lemuel's reputation (Johnny 'worshipped him as a hero').45 Fowler instead gifts them independent lives, if not quite agency. Some of the detail, particularly in the beginning, highlights their decorative functions as children of the period: 'Johnny is growing out of all his Clothes, and Betty and I are kept forever sewing'.46 But they grow into young adulthood across the text. 'Betty has a Beau in Mrs. Balnibarb's middle boy, William', a farmer's son whom Mary describes as clean and polite.47 Betty does not speak, but her body betrays her youthful inexperience ('She colours if his Name is spoken but makes no effort in his Presence to delight him').48 The courtship evidently proves successful: in less than two years, and within two pages of the text, they are engaged. That relationship also proves violent, however, as Mary infers from bruises on her daughter's wrists and neck. There is a telling dramatic irony in the fact that the only words spoken by Betty are on the first page, as an infant—'"There is Papa", she said, pointing to a Crumb of Bread'.49 Betty has an enhanced paranarrative in the new expansion, but it becomes a grim one. Meanwhile, Fowler's Mary fears Johnny will copy his father, a common enough trope in Gulliverian imitations since Le Nouveau Gulliver, ou Voyage de Jean Gulliver, fils du capitaine Gulliver (1730). 'I do request that you discourage Johnny from going to Sea', she writes to Lemuel. 'I fear your Stories have had the opposite Effect'.50 A new character created in the margins, Betty's own daughter, Anne, may also be a victim of domestic abuse. A once exuberant child, she now 'hides in the Stables, preferring Beasts to People' in what amounts to a dark homage to her increasingly misanthropic grandfather at the denouement of his own memoirs.51 This Mary, too,