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Representations of the East in English and French Travel Writing 1798-1882 with particular reference to Egypt Representations of the East in English and French Travel Writing 1798-1882 with particular reference to Egypt by John Spencer Dixon M.A. for The degree of PhD at The University of Warwick in the Graduate School of Comparative Literary Theory and Literary Translation September 1991 Table of Contents 1) Introduction 1 2) Chapter 1: The Orientalist Debate 18 1) The Problem of Terminology 2) An Outline of Western thought and Ideology in the nineteenth century (i) The Scientific Spirit (ii)The Self-Other Dichotomy in the Context of East-West Relations A: The Western Sense of Self B: The Orient as the West's Other 3) Chapter 2: Visual and Literary Representations of the Orient 50 4) Chapter 3: The Decline of 'The Orient' as Pure Fantasy 74 1) Napoleon's Expedition to Egypt 2) Earlier Western Interest in the East 3) Aspects of Late-Eighteenth-Century Thought relevant to Travel Writing 4) Europe and the Age of Mohammed Ali 5) Chapter 4: Travel Writers in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century 113 1) The British View of the East (i)The Curious Case of Lady Hester Stanhope (ii)Other British Travellers in the Age of Mohammed Ali 2) The French View of the East French Travel Writing in the Age of Mohammed Ali 6) Chapter 5: British Travellers After Mohammed All 149 7) Chapter 6: The Egypt of Gautier. Nerval and Flaubert 179 8) Chapter 7: Towards Colonisation: The Europeanisation of Egypt 211 Conclusion 9) Bibliography 229 Primary Sources: Consisting Principally of Travel Writing in the Period 1798-1882 Secondary Sources 10) Appendix 1) Principal Travel Guides Consulted 2) Reviews of Interest S e ifi R f rence in Bi lio ra h ource 1) British 2) French Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Susan Bassnett for her close attention to the various drafts this thesis has passed through on its way to completion. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank her for assistance with my M.A. work in Translation Studies, an area in which I have a continuing interest which she has helped to develop and encourage. I would like to thank her assistant Dr. Piotr Kuhiwszak for his help, and the secretarial staff of the Graduate School over the period of my studies at the University of Warwick. The thesis could not have been undertaken without the financial assistance of the British Academy, for which I am extremely grateful. The libraries from which I have received particular help are the University of Warwick library, (in particular the inter-library loans service), The Bodleian library, Oxford, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. In addition I have to thank the British Library, and the University of Birmingham library for their help. Among colleagues and friends in the Graduate School I must mention Amar Al-Jundi for his invaluable help in discussing approaches to this complex area of study, and for his awareness of recent critical work in this field. Both Amar and Kamil Aydin are pursuing doctoral work in related areas and I wish them both well in their future studies. Finally I would like to thank Pauline Wilson at the University for her generous help with word-processing problems, and Rachel Parkins and John Rhodes in Computer Services for their assistance. Declaration None of the work in this thesis has been previously published or used in any earlier thesis or dissertation. Summary The aim of the thesis has been to offer a comparative analysis of discourses within English and French travel writing in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of how the East was represented in this type of literature than that offered by Edward Said in his book Orientalism. The thesis considers the degree to which the latent racism and imperialism of western attitudes was universally expressed in this type of writing. While dates have been set for this study, the main reason for this has been to limit the vast body of archive material potentially relevant to its theoretical base. On occasion it has been necessary to step outside these dates in order to examine earlier eighteenth-century work or point out the relevance of this type of study to more recent western approaches to the East. The thesis shows a decline in the nineteenth century in popular belief in a fiction of the Orient as an imagined site of luxury and sensual indulgence, as travel writing countered this image with reports of real countries and peoples. The place of the aesthetic in French writing is considered here, as it offers a challenge to the more political perspective offered by Said. The thesis concludes by suggesting that there were other discourses in travel literature in this period which lie outside specifically racist and imperialist constructs, and therefore deepens and broadens the investigations undertaken by Said with reference to British and French travel writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dedication This thesis is dedicated to my mother and father Simon and Janelle and the Zauhas of Idaho 1 I,Que son el Oriente y el Occidente? Si me lo preguntan, lo ignoro. Busquemos una aproximacion. J-L Borges. Introduction This thesis proposes to set a detailed comparative analysis of English and French travel writing on Egypt in the period 1798-1882 within the framework of a debate about western perceptions of the East, focusing in particular on the idea of the creation of a myth of the Orient as an expression of the West's desire to set itself off against a specifically non-western Other. This Other typically reflects those elements within western society which it regarded as taboo or wished to suppress, and in the nineteenth century public knowledge of the East was sufficiently limited to enable western Europe to project a fantasy of the Orient onto real countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, as well as India and later China and Japan. The main reason for the focus on this particular period in Egypt's history is that English and French involvement in the transformation of Egypt, from being a part of the Ottoman Empire to being a country on the verge of independence, is marked out by Napoleon's Expedition to Egypt in 1798 and the colonisation of the country by the British in 1882. These events provide a convenient framework for detailed analysis of a body of archive material, but do not in any sense suggest that western attitudes prevalent in the nineteenth century were somehow swept away by such momentous events. Indeed the colonisation of Egypt by the British was a piecemeal affair, and the events of 1882 were like a rubber stamp on the slow accumulative process by which the British (constantly aware of the political interests of other major powers) came to have influence in the country. English and French direct political involvement in the affairs of Egypt was intermittent between these dates - from 1830 France became more interested in North Africa - but 2 indirect interest in the country was constant. It is this indirect interest that is manifest in the works of travel writers in this period, and analysis of travel writing reveals those strands of western ideology which it was reluctant to express too openly within the framework of domestic political thought. The thesis takes up the challenge offered by Edward Said's Orientalism, in which he attempts to show how western scholarly and amateur interest in countries such as Egypt in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hid a deep-rooted desire both to dominate those countries and to work out neuroses endemic in western societies. He describes western Orientalism as "...all aggression, activity, judgement, will-to-truth, and knowledge" 1 . He also points out the specifically racist nature of apparently innocent interest in 'the Orient' 2, while Rana Kabbani and Ashis Nandy have both extended this idea by emphasising the sexism of western dominance. 3 What the western travel writing in this period actually did, as I hope to demonstrate, was reveal more about the workings of the western psyche than it did about the eastern. This thesis proposes to test Edward Said's emphasis on an absolute division between East and West, created in the West, by a more detailed analysis of travel writing than Said himself offers in one of the areas he focuses on, namely French and English involvement with Egypt. What needs to be examined is whether western travel writers were universally imperialist and racist in their attitudes towards Egyptians in the period under consideration, or whether in the detailed examination of texts there is evidence of other discourses, undercutting the idea that travel writing, as a body of knowledge about the East, contributed to institutionalised imperialism and racism. While taking on board Said's general idea, following Foucault, of the fluid inter-relation between discourses produced in different contexts ,4 and the development of a fabric of social knowledge (which may constitute e.g. 'the western view of the East' and allow people to use such a term without fear of contradiction), this thesis questions the absolute consistency of the Self/Other split along West/East lines.