In Gulliver’s Travels, excrement symbolizes the crude reality of human flesh, a fact Gulliver faces most prominently in the filthy, feces-flinging bodies of the Yahoos. Yet excrement occurs in every other one of his other adventures too: in Lilliput, Gulliver defecates on the floor of his Lilliputian home and urinates on the Lilliputians’ burning palace; in Brobdingnag, flies defecate on Gulliver’s food and maids urinate in front of him; in Laputia, the projectors attempt to transform human feces back into food. The recurring appearance of excrement anchors the novel in the body’s demands, limits, and inelegances, refusing to let its characters float off into the heady realm of purely elegant abstractions.