ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM: ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Parminder Kaur Johal

San Francisco, California

August 2018 Copyright by Parminder Kaur Johal 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in

Romantic Poetry by Parminder Kaur Johal, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thes’s submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

------Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English

Lawrence Hanley, Ph.D. Professor of English ROMANTICISM AND ORIENTALISM: ORIENTALIZING THE ORIENT IN ROMANTIC POETRY

Parminder Kaur Johal San Francisco, California 2018

This thesis examines Eastern representations in the works of Romantic poets that contributed to Orientalism. Even though there were many provocateurs that fueled stereotypes of the East, my study hones in on the poems Dy Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Through a literary analysis of Coleridge's Kubla Khan and Sheliey’s Ozymandias, efforts are made to reach the conclusion whether Coleridge and Shelley misrepresent the Orient. 1 argue that the works of these highly celebrated poets adhere to the underlying stereotypes popular during the Romantic Era, thus raising issue with the reliability—or raiher unrenai'-liiy—of their works. In addition to analyzing representations, I examine travel literature within the cultural and historical context of their lives to better understand influences that shaped their perspectives and informed their writing.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the conteni of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is believed in the Punjabi culture that with the blessings of your elders, all things are attainable. Which is why, I would like to give many thanks to my elders—my grandparents, and parents—it is your blessings and encouragement that has made this day possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to my brother and friends for their continuous support and unfailing faith in me. Further, my sincere thanks to my professors for their guidance, motivation, and reassurance through this entire process; it hasn’t been easy, but definitely worth it. My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to my best friend, my humsafar—Baba Ji—you are my light. Thank you. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter One: Historical Context...... 7

Chapter Two: Orientalizing the Orient in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan ...... 17

Chapter Three: Orientalizing the Orient in Shelley’s Ozymandias...... 42

Work Cited...... 63 1

Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in Romantic Poetry

Introduction:

Now, this is the road that the White Men tread When they go to clean a land- iron underfoot and the vine overhead And the deep on either hand We have trod that road—and a wet and windy road Our chosen star for guide. Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread Their highway side by side!" —Rudyard Kipling, A Song o f the White Men

Barbaric. Exotic. Grotesque. Sublime. The East has captured the attention of the

West for centuries, but rarely in a pcs: ve light. In his acclaimed text Orientalism,

Edward Said describes the phenomenon of making claims about the East by the Wesi as

‘Orientalism’. In a detailed description of Orientalism, Said calls it a ‘corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, and ruling over it: in short,

Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restricting, and having authority over the

Orient’ (3). The West undeniably builds its identity by creating binaries in which the East is always portrayed antithetical to the West. The results of such a creation are transparent: 2

a ‘man-made’ history that has turned the East into a strange land occupied by mysterious, primitive savages.

Prominent traces of Orientalism, according to Said, can be found in mul pie discourses in the 18* century. The provocateurs that embraced and fomented the binaries were many, such as ‘poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators’ who used the East/West dichotomy ‘as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient’ (2-3). The conjuring of these generalizations was not merely for what Said calls ‘necessity of imagination’, rather, it was a calculated attempt made by the Empire to dominate the East. In analyzing the relationship between the Occident and the Orient, the

Occident’s hegemonic control over the Orient is transparent. According to Said, ‘one cannot posjibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, mil "arily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively’ (3). Certainly in controlling the production of knowledge, the Occident was not only able to maintain hegemony, but also claim cultural superiority over the degenerate Orient

In examining the Orient in Orientalism, Said makes an interesting point substantial to my thesis, as he notes: ‘the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either’, rather the history of the

Orient and Occident is man-made (4-5). This is most apparent in the East/West 3

dichotomy created by the Empire and its provocateurs as they falsified an entire region and its population for their political, socio-economic, and monetary advantage. Therefore,

Said claims, ‘Orientalism... is not an aiiy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable maten ii investment’ (6). As noted above, Said gives a through list of agents that produce such investments—my research hones in on one of them, poets from the

Romantic Era

My aim in this thesis s to bring under the scope works of Romantic poets who, i iformed by English interest in foreign cultures, reproduce the Orient in their respective poems. The Orient was a flourishing discourse in the 18th and 19th century, and the

Romantic writers were avid readers of the material in addition to being active constituents in its production evident in the works of acclaimed poets as Lord Byron,

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and more. Shaped by a premeditated Western power discourse, the poets approached the subject of the

Orient not as merely writers, but also as potential Orientalists. In this thesis, I analyze and expose misrepresentations of the Orient in the works of Romantic poets Samuel Taylor

Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I argue that these celebrated poets imported stereotypes of the Orient without regard to the effect it had on their subjects, thus qualifying them as Orientalists in Saidian terms 4

Poetic works of these two writers that promote stereotypes of the Orient are multiple, but for this study, I consider two of their most notable poems: Coleridge’s

KublaKhan (1797 1816) and Shelley’s Ozymandias (1818). As mentioned previously, the timeframe surveyed for the study is the British Romantic Era, which lasted roughly from 1770-1835. The British Empire was thriving during these years, becoming an irreconcilable global power that controlled over 450 million people—a fact Coleridge and

Shelley likely knew, A more specific timeframe analyzed coincides with the poets' life span—Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley (1792-1822) —in an effort to establish their respective life histories and examine their works in the context of those histories.

The methodology used to yield results in my research is a literary analysis coupled with a biographical analysis. Before I move forward to a literaiy analysis, I explore influences in Coleridge and Shelley’s biographies to showcase how they were shaped by their life experiences. In my examination of the poets’ biographies, I place great emphasis on cultural and historical influences, or rather promoters as I call them, to gain a better understanding of their surroundings that fueled misconceptions of the East.

After grounding the foundation of this thesis through an examination of biographical, cultural and historical contexts, I move forward to the literary analysis of the poems.

Here I embrace Said’s approach where in addition to investigating poetic devices as imagery, metaphor, poetic language, setting, and style I place Coleridge and Shelley’s poems in juxtaposition to the Orient. By doing th", Said recommends, we are better able 5

to investigate the writer’s intent through ‘the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text—all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf (20). Through this method, a better understanding of the writer’s position is gained.

Informed Purpose

I have approached this research with a purpose—an intention to investigate and expose Orientalism further in an era that hosts some of poetry’s finest authors. There are many critics, theorists, and scholars who precede me that have laid open the constructs of

Orientalism, but not many have applied their research to the influx of literature infused with flawed representations of the Orient. In their respective works, Edward Said in

Orientalism and Rana Kabbani in Imperial Fictions, the authors call for the next generation of scholars—the Orient—to carry the research further, to talk back. In

Orientalism, Said calls for the ‘contemporary’ generation to rise to the challenge, as he states: ‘For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to policymakers, I have written with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that has not been done, two, to criticize—with the hope of stirring discussion’ (24). No doubt Said’s work has stirred plenty discussions, debates, and even criticism, but for the ‘contemporary’ generation as I, it has filled the gaps in our knowledge by answering questions that we so desperately seek answers for. 6

In Imperial Fictions, Kabbani makes a similar statement—a request—that strikes a chord. Kabbani writes: ‘Would I have written the pages that follow any differently today? Yes, I would have made them fiercer than they are. But this is a task that awaits another generation - that of my children, perhaps - who will have to live in a world of

‘blowback’ - a world in which extremists on both sides set the rules’ (16). To supersede impressive scholars as Kabbani and Said is nerve-racking, yet their words of encouragement ignite an unwavering will to continue efforts to bring the Orient and

Occident to the forum. Using this thesis as a medium, I have tried to shed light on a period and its constituents that often go unnoticed for their contributions to Orientalism. 7

Chapter One: Historical Context

There is a difference between knowledge o fother peoples and other times that is the result o f understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge—if that is what it is—that is part o fan overall campaign o f self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understandfor purposes o fco-existence and humanistic enlargement o f horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes o f control and external dominion. —Edward Said, xiv

Knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘knowledge’ as ‘The fact or state of having a correct idea or understanding of something’, thus placing rigorous emphasis on ‘fact’ and ‘correct idea’. Above, Edward Said’s sentiments regarding the entity mimics the acknowledged definition as he too calls forth a ‘careful study and analysis’ for generating ‘knowledge’, But, according to the literary critic, the so called

‘knowledge’ produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth century about the Orient was inconsistent with the ‘facts’ about the Orient; rather, it was an overall campaign of self- affirmation, belligerency and outright war/ The West’s conquest for ‘knowledge’ was sustained by imperial motives to dominate and exploit the Orient both politically and economically, since, remarks Said, ‘To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it’ (32). 8

In establishing the East/West—‘us’/’it’ dichotomy, the Occident was able to supplement the Orient with brute qualities in order to justify colonization while maintaining its innocence. In doing so. writes Kabbani in her work, ‘The image of the

European coloniser had to remain an honourable one: he did not come as exploiter, but as enlightener. He was not seeking mere profit, but was fulfilling his duty to his Maker and his sovereign, whilst aiding those less fortunate to rise toward h i lofty level’.1 But, the

Empire’s ‘honourable’ facade was quite problematic, and narcissistic. Said argues that even in documenting the Orient, the Empire was really documenting itself The production and advancement of a culture requires an opposition, or what the critic calls an ‘alter-ego’. Via the reinforcement of misrepresentations, the West created its ‘alter- ego’ in the East by supplementing it with disturbing insensitive images, hence an identity opposite of its own. Unfortunately, the influx of misrepresentations of the Orient aroused public imagination, creating space for elaborate misguided work.

Even though Said establishes me late 18th century as the rough start of

Orientalism in Europe, it could be traced back to earlier centuries. Prior to the European invasion, the East was an unexplored distant power with an admirable history. In their

‘Introduction’ to a collection of essays titled The Arabian Nights in Historical Context:

Between East and West, editors Saree Makdisi and Fe.. city Nussbaum give the reader a glimpse of the East’s splendor in addition to highlight ig the West’s perspective of the

1 Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth o f Orient (London 2008) 24-25. 9

power. According to the editors, ‘Europeans had been alternately interested in, fearful of, and obsessed with the Arab and Muslim world since at least the Arab conquest of Spain and Sicily in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Crusades brought Europeans into contact with what many of them ultimately came to think of as the vastly superior civilization of the Arab-Muslim world’ (3-4). The Orient was well deserving of being called a ‘superior civilization’ as it successfully controlled much of Asia, Africa, and even Western Europe from early as the seventh century. Ironically, Usama ibn Munqidh, a well-known medieval Muslim poet known for documenting the magnificence of the Banu Munqidh dynasty (1081-1157), noted that the East found the West atrocious, or in Arabic term, fra n f 2

Following the Crusades, Europe’s perception of the East changed dramatically as it entered the ' Age of Discovery’ in the fifteenth century. Makdisi and Nussbaum note that Europe ‘having assimilated, digested, and all but forgotten that earlier moment of contact with (and inspired by) Arab and Asiatic culture, seemed primed for something entirely new’ which was imperialism. Europe began with an extensive overseas exploration of lands it previously lacked physical contact with, such as the Americas,

Asia, Africa, and Australia. Through the guise of foreign trade, •: penetrated, dominated, colonized, and enslaved these continents, hence emerging as a global power. But,

Europe’s imperialistic motives were not that easily achieved when it came to the East.

7 Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West (New York 2008) 3-4. 10

The technique executed by the Empire required that ‘the Orient needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges’, and then only did Europe ‘finally destroyed the Orient’s distance, its cloistered intimacy away from the West, its perdurable exoticism’ (Said 92). Through an analysis of Coleridge and

Shelley’s poems, chapters two and three show how the poets take part in ‘re-creat[ing]’ the East.

Without a doubt the age of exploration had made a lasting impression on the

European population and culture during the Romantic era. As the British Empire expanded its territories, travelers ventured out to explore previously unexplored regions.

Travel tales, and travel journals became a thriving commodity, as a wider marketplace emerged for the popular genre. Thus, travel writing became a benefactor in shaping perspectives of the English audience as confirmed by Wallace Cable Brown: ‘The great vogue for writing and reading of Near East travel books between 1775 and 1825 naturally had a marked influence on contemporary thought and activity’ (qtd. in Oueijan 5). In this chapter, I place the poets within the cultural and historical context of their time in relation to travel literature to better understand the influences that shaped their perspectives about the East. The ‘Orient’ in these travel texts were not ‘merely there’, they had ‘a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary’ that was centuries in the making.

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York 1994) 4-5. 11

That ‘history’ is also explored since it helped promote the poets Orientalist frame of mind.

Travel Literature

Literature about the Orient in the Romantic period was not a new phenomenon, but due to the ‘Age of Discovery’, a new awareness had formed. Translations of multiple texts into Western language(s) incited public curiosity in addition to encouraging new social trends as ‘literature, painting, and engraving, home d6cor, and fashion, garden design, and architecture’, and travel literature.4 Not taking into consideration the mass influx of travel literature in the previous centuries, just between 1800 and 1950, more than 60,000 travel narratives were written (Said 204). In comparison, Eastern travel literature about the West was minimal—which Said notes, is where the West’s strength laid since it was able to conceive the Orient according to its own standards. So, what is travel literature and how rtd it influence and shape Coleridge and Shelley’s perspectives in regards to the Orient?

Kabbani best describes travel literature as ‘a mean of gathering and recording information.. .in societies that exercise a high degree of political power’ (17). In critically analyzing the genre of travel literature from its inception in the medieval times, travelers approached the East w«th an informed purpose—to serve the Empire. Kabbani asserts that, ‘The traveller begins his journey with the strength of a nation or an empire

4 Susan Taylor. “Orientalism and the Romantic Era.” Literature Compass 1.1 (2004) 2. 12

sustaining him (albeit from a distance) militarily, economically, intellectually and, as is often the case, spiritually’ (17). In his observations and writings about the Orient, the

Western traveler had to remain faithful to the colonial relationship that supported him. He was selective in producing and sharing information that reinforced his nation’s Orientalist tradition. Thus, the selectiveness imported stereotypes that supplied the East with

‘irretrievable state o f‘otherness’”.5

The stereotypes that became the groundwork for am sis as Coleridge and Shelley were not merely produced overnight, rather, they were centuries in the making via the apparatus of travel writing. As mentioned in earlier paragraphs, the West took interesl in the East as early as the Eight century, but unable to comprehend or contain the powerful

Islamic Empire, the Christian West adopted a polemic style of writing to deal with the

Orient. Europe’s aggressive polemic against Islam forged a ‘pattern of stereotyping... that was a guarantee of Western self-respect and a projection upon the rest of the world of

Western values. The medieval picture of Islam was replete with errors that were willful, and contained w-thin itself a high degree of mythomania’.6 An ideal example of such a polemic was the work of twelfth century historian/travel writer Gerard of Wales who described ‘Muhammed’s teachings to be concentrated on lust, thus particularly suitable for Orientals, since they ltved in a climate of change’.7 The dichotomy that emerged from

Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth o f Orient, 24. 6 Ibidem, 39 Ibidem, 36. qtd. in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making o f an Image (Edinburgh, 1960) 270. 13

such observations became conventional in literature during the middle ages and onwards, which was supported and transported by travelers as Alexander, Mandeville, Marco Polo,

Odoric and many more.

In moving forward, it becomes crucial to reiterate Said’s claim that the Orient was not simply a product of the imagination, rather, ‘the relationship between Occident and

Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony’ (5). In order to maintain hegemony over the Orient, the West controlled and manipulated the knowledge it produced and passed on. Hence, the stereotypes propagated in travel literature about the East in the Middle Ages were inherited by the Renaissance

England in full force. The Renaissance consumed, reinforced, and expanded upon the received knowledge by contributing mass travel literature of their own to the corpus.

Thus, the travel writing genre developed, or rather matured, as it now included ‘an amalgam of many literary genres, such as autobiography, fiction, journal, memoir, as well as dsciplines (cosmography, geography, ethnography, archaeology)’ (Mitsi 9). The influence on the public was substantial as travel literature attempted to fulfill the public’s keen interest in a world outside of their own. Elizabethan England capitalized on such knowledge, as Kabbani confirms:

The Elizabethan stage, preoccupied as it was with the melodramai 3, the

passionate and the violent, drew heavily on the available stock of Eastern

character so vivia in the public imagination. The Saracen, the Turk, the Moor, the 14

Blackamoor and the Jew were key villains in the drama of the period, crudely

depicted as such by lesser playwrights, but drawn with more subtle gradation by a

Marlowe or a Shakespeare. (44)

The ideas disseminated by the corpus created what Kabbani calls a ‘stock of Eastern character’. In order to satiate the public’s ‘imagination’, writers as ‘Marlowe’ and

‘Shakespeare’ made use of the ‘stock’ and brought to life characters from travel literature as the ‘Saracen, the Turk, the Moor, the Blackamoor and the Jew’ that were read by generations to come, including Coleridge and Shelley

In March 1768, renowned editor Ralph Griffiths wrote in ike Monthly Review, ‘Of all the various productions of the press, none are so eagerly received by us Reviewers, and other people who stay at home and mind our business, as the writings of travellers’.8

Griffiths statement echoed the sentiments of the 18th Century public as the genre of travel writing incited enthusiasm wh»e surpassing its predecessors by becoming more inclusive.

Due to ‘economic and technological’ advancements, travel became more accessible to the middle class, hence leading to more travel literature. In his book Pleasurable Instruction,

Charles Batten asserts that ‘Africa, India, the Spice Islands, and the Americas - places previously visited mainly by ships’ captains, adventurers, and explorers - now with growing frequency inspired travel descriptions from relatively new classes of people’ (2).

8 qtd. in Charles L Batten, Pleasurable Instruction: From and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 1. 15

The ‘new classes of people’ included novelists and poets as Defoe, Fielding, Johnson,

Byron, and more'

I have, until now, demonstrated how the genre of travel writing developed over the course of multiple centuries. As the imagined Orient got passed on from one period to the next, it became more powerful, resilient, and recurrent. By the eighteenth century, the popularity of travel literature was unparalleled as it became a significant part of everyday

life. Being avid readers and writers, poets as Byron, Moore, Keats, Coleridge, and

Shelley were shaped and inspired by the inherent Orient that was consistently present in their lives from a young age. Kabbani notes that being a travel literature enthusiast,

Byron encouraged poets as Thomas Moore and Coleridge to read travel literature infused with false Oriental descriptions ‘since he thought it would provide [them] with necessary meat for an Oriental poem’ (64). Byron was adamant that their work would be received well by the public, and it was since Lalla Rookh and Kubla Khan became the Romantic

Era’s most revered poems.

Edward Said calls the collection of knowledge about the Orient disseminated by

West as systematic. He asserts, ‘In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these’ (177).

9 Ibidem, 3. 16

In their work, Coleridge and Shelley assumed similar dispositions as they too grounded their writing on other works of travel. For instance, being a devout travel literature reader, Coleridge particularly held in high regard Purchas’ Purchas His Pilgrims (1625),

Chamber’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772) and Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source o f the N ik (1790). When writing Kubla Khan, Coleridge borrowed from all these texts, whether it be in regards to Kubla Khan’s history, landscape, or ‘pleasure dome’. Shelley read numerous travel accounts as well, but he particularly cherished

Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, Volney's LesRuines, ou Meditation sur les

Revolutions des Empires (1791), and Denon’s Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns o f General Bonaparte in that Country (1803). He drew on all three for his description of Ramesses n.

In this chapter, I have attempted to contextualize travel literature in relation to

Coleridge and Shelley’s life. In my review of the genre of travel writing, I have also aimed to depict how the stereotypes of the Orient were created and imported from one period to the next. It is apparent that the poets inherited the tradition of stereotypes from a complex colonial past, but how they employed them was premeditated. In addition to an analysis of Kubla Khan and Ozymandias, chapter two and three examine travel literature read by the poets when writing their poems to showcase how their perspectives were informed, and stereotypes formed, by the unstable texts. 17

Chapter Two: Orientalizing the Orient in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea. (1-5)

Du-ng a visit with Lord Byron on April 10,1816, essayist and poet James Henry

Le*3 h Hunt became spell-bounded when witnessing Coleridge’s reading of Kubla Khan to Byron. Hunt wrote, ‘I remember the other's coming away from him, highly struck with his poem, and saying how wonderfiilly he talked. This was the impression of everyone who heard him.’10 Similar to Hunt, Byron too was entranced by Coleridge’s enigmatic poem, as he became instrumental in encouraging the publication of it. On April 12,1816

Byron arranged for reputed publisher John Murray to publish Kubla Khan along with

Christabel and The Pains o f Sleep for the sum of 80 pounds. Kubla Khan, combined with the other two poems, came to be collectively published on May 25, 1816.

The work went through multiple editions as it became greatly admired by

Coleridge’s contemporaries as Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, and many more. Texts that were printed from 1816 to 1829 were published with a homage to Lord Byron who

Coleridge held in high esteem for his continuous support. The note reads: ‘The following

10 qtd. in D. Hogsette, ‘Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan.’” Romanticism on the Net, no. 5 (1997) 3. 18

fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity’, ‘poet’ being Lord Byron.11 During Coleridge’s life, Kubla Khan was published four times from

1816 to 1834. Yet, displeased by the fragmentary nature of the poem and to ward off criticism, the poet modified the title multiple times. Beginning with the 1816 pamphlet, he supplemented the poem with the subtitle ‘A Fragment’—the final adjustment made in

Poetical Works of 1834 where the subtitle was expanded to ‘Or, A Vision in a Dream. A

Fragment The only other known revisions made to the poem before its publication were discovered in the 1810 Crewe Manuscript.

Coleridge’s 1816 publication of the poem was accompanied by a Preface that explained the production of the poem. The Preface claims that the ‘Author’ received the poem in a daydream after he fell asleep consuming opium and reading the following passage in Purchas his Pilgrimage: ‘Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall’.1 The dubious nature of the Preface elicited numerous responses from his contemporaries and modem day critics, many denouncing the story of the poem’s origin.

In the Eclectic Review (June 1816), Josiah Conder raised doubt whether Kubla Khan was

‘composed during sleep’ since ‘there appears to us nothing in the quality of the lines to

11 qtd. in footnote— ‘Kubla Khar*', The Norton Anthology of English Literature (Norton 2006) 446. 12 J. C. C Mays, ‘The Later Poeby The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge (Cambridge 2002) 511. 13 There is a discrepancy between what the ‘Author’ quoted and what is written in Purchas's Pilgrimages. The passage Coleridge refers to is as follows: ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Patace, encompassing sixteene miles ofplaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightful1 Streames, and all sorts o f beasts ofchase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house o f pleasure, which may be removed from place to place. ’ 19

render this circumstance extraordinary.’14 In Kubla Khan and Orientalism, Nigel Leask echoes Conder as he concludes, ‘despite Coleridge’s disclaimer in the 1816 Preface that his fragmentary ‘Vision in a Dream’ was presented to the public rather ‘as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits’, it represents highly self-conscious and highly structured poetic achievement’ (1).

K.M. Wheeler makes the point that by focusing on the origin, the Preface distances the reader from the ‘imagery and content of the poem’—the Orient, and ‘away from factual details and concern for their accuracy’.15 In this chapter, my aim is to bnng the focus back on the ‘imagery and content’ as I question the legitimacy of Eastern representations in Kubla Khan. I will evaluate the Eastern representations in Coleridge’s poem to conclude whether Coleridge promoted stereotypes of the Orient. The task will commence by addressing the reception of the poem to confirm that the poet did perpetuate stereotypes reaffirmed by his contempora.;es. Moving forward, I will examine texts—Oriental in nature— mentioned in chapter one in the context of Coleridge’s life to showcase how they shaped his perspectives and influenced his poem. Lastly, I will analyze the representations in Coleridge’s poem to bring to light the misrepresentations of the Orient.

14 J R de J Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage (New York 1970) 212. 15 qtd. in N igel Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism: The Road to Xanadu Revisited. ’ Romanticism 4.1 (1998)2. 20

The Reception of Kubla Khan

In response to Coleridge’s reading of Kubla Khan that left a deep impression on

Leigh Hunt—he authored a piece praising the poem in The Examiner (October 21,1821) as part of h.3 ‘Sketches of the Living Poets’ series. Hunt convinced the readers of The

Examiner to have in their grasp a copy of Coleridge’s poems: ‘Every lover of books, scholar or not, who knows what it is to have his quarto open against a loaf at his tea... ought to be in possession of Mr. Coleridge's poems, if it is only for ‘ChristabeF, ‘Kubla

Khan’, and the ‘Ancient Mariner’.’ He especially urged the audience’s interaction with

Kubla Khan as it summoned the Orient:

‘Kubla Khan’ is a voice and a vision, an everlasting tune in our mouths, a dream

fit for Cambuscan and all his poets, a dance of pictures such as Giotto or

Cimabue, revived and re-inspired, would have made for a Storie of Old Tartarie, a

piece of the invisible world made visile by a sun at midnight and sliding before

our eyes... Justly is it thought that to be able to present such images as these to

the mind, is to realise the world they speak of. We could repeat such verses as the

following down a green glade, a whole summer’s morning.16

For Hunt, Kubla Khan evoked in him images of the exotic ‘world’. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the stereotypes of the Orient were ages in the making—passed on from one period to the next using literature as an apparatus. By referencing ‘Cambuscan’ and

16 qtd. in J R de J Jackson, Coleridge: The Critical Heritage. (New York 1970) 475-476. 21

‘Old Tartarie’ Hunt confirms that Kubla Khan summoned in him the Orient of his predecessors: Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales—an

Oriental tale in the Middle Ages. ‘The Squire’s Tale’ promotes the grandeur of the exotic land o f‘Old Tartarie’ ruled by King ‘Cambuscan" — ‘cambyuskan’ in the Tales, where the O r sru consumes exotic foods, wears lavish clothes, and receives magical gifts. Using

The Examiner as his platform, Hunt acknowledged Coleridge’s Orient while intensifying it further for the reader.

Coleridge’s Kubla had a lasting effect on his friends in his literary circle as well.

Charles Lamb,17 a poet, essayist, and close friend of Coleridge, expressed in a letter to

Wordsworth how the poem transcended him to a euphoric dimension: ‘with what he calls a vision of Kubla Khan - which said vision he repeats so enchantingly that it irradiates & brings Heaven & Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it’.18 In his essay

‘Witches, and Other Night-Fears’ (1823), Lamb expressed frustration that his imagination failed to create 01. ;ntal visions like Coleridge in Kubla Khan: ‘There is Coleridge, at his will can conjure up ice domes, and pleasure-houses for Kubla Khan, and Abyssinian maids, and song of Abora, and caverns’.19 Contrary to Coleridge’s claim in his Preface that the poem was received ‘in a Dream . Lamb professed that the poet ‘at his

17 Lamb and Coleridge met as schoolboys, and remained friends until Coleridge’s death in 1834. There are many correspondences between the two sharing life events and their works. 18 D. Ward, Coleridge and the Nature o f Imagination: Evolution, Engagement with the World, and Poetry. (New Yoric 2013) 133. 19 C. Lambs, ‘Witches, and Other Night Fears’ (London 1823) The British Library: Digital file. 22

V--J1 .. conjure[d] up’ the Oriental images in Kubla Khan—a quality Lamb envied and attempted to imitate.

Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd had the privilege of listening to Coleridge’s recitation of Kubla Khan after its publication, and the impression that it left on him was significant.

Talfourd stated:

But more peculiar in its beauty than this [Coleridge’s recitation of ‘Christabel’],

was his recitation of Kubla Khan [sic]. As he repeated the passage—

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora!

his voice seemed to mount, and melt into air, as the images grew more visionary,

and the suggested associations more remote.20

Coleridge’s powerful recitation of Kubla Khan captured the imagination of Talfourd to

such an extent that he became compelled to note his observations. Through its ‘imagery’

Kubla Khan transported Talfourd to a dimension that brought the Orient closer while making it more palatable. By making the ‘suggested associations more remote’,

20 Hogsette, ‘Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome’, 2. 23

Coleridge preserved the distance between the ‘East’ and ‘West’— ‘us’ and ‘it’—while further cementing the stereotypes in both Talfourd and the audience’s consciousness.

Tim Fulford makes a befitting observation that Coleridge’s Oriental poems had

‘talismanic power to enthrall his countrymen/women to ways of perceiving the world that were unconvenr onal and foreign’. His capacity to ‘defamiliarize the local, estrange the familiar, decentre the British from themselves’ is on display in the reviews of Kubla

Khan discussed in the preceding paragraphs (233). In their assessment of the poem,

Coleridge’s contemporaries solidified the inaccurate representations of the Orient in the poem using very public platforms that further dispersed misrepresentations. Fulford notes that the highly charged Oriental imagery of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan made an impression on the likes of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Moore who came to imitate kim.

Kubla Khan and its Muses

In the previous chapter, travel literature was exposed as a benefactor that promoted stereotypes of the East. In this section, I examine the influence of travel literature on Coleridge and his writing of Kubla K h a n while aiming to contextualize some of these texts the poet cited as sources. But first, I begin with exploring Oriental texts, especially The Arabian Nights, that shaped Coleridge’s views of the Orient. According to

Makdisi and Nussbaum ‘Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron—to name the most obvious examples—were all weaned on the Nights, and they all developed their 24

poetry in context of Britain’s burgeoning interest in Orientalism’ (5).21 In fact, similar to

travel literature, the oriental tales echoed the British Empire’s political agenda as it

articulated communal images of the Orient in an effort to reinforce the differences

between East and West. The tales came to dictate 18* century English writers’ thoughts

and fantasies in addition to laying the groundwork for their Oriental work.

L The ‘Orient’ in Oriental Tales

Jn a letter to Coleridge, Charles Lamb oosed a question regarding the nature of

influence of the Arabian Nights on the poet: ‘Think what you would have been now if

instead of being fed with Tales and old wives fables in childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History.’22 In a correspondent, Coleridge acknowledged that

h’s father ventured to introduce him to corresponding subjects mentioned by Lamb, but the poet’s heart yearned for the Nights:

I heard him with a profound delight & admiration: but without least mixtures of

wonder or incredulity. For from my early readings of Faery Tales & Genii, &c &c

21 Calling it only a ‘partial list9, Makdisi and Nussbaum name numerous other writers who were inspired by The Arabian Nights in their works. The editors state: ‘Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, Eliza Haywood, and Samuel Johnson round much to admire and imitate in the exotic tales, while James Beattie and Hemy Fielding, among others, criticized them as implausible. Similarly, the objections of Bishop Atterbury, Lord Kames, and Henry James Pye focused on the book’s wild extravagances, disproportion, and amorality as the very antithesis of neoclassical tenets. Other readers included Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Frances Sheridan, John Hawkesworth, Clara Reeve, Maria Edgeworth, William Beckford, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Walter Savage Landor, Richard Johnson, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Dacre, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Thomas Moore, Waite* Scott, Alexander Kinglake, Robert Louis Stevenson, Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Tennyson, Richard Burton, Oscar Wilde, and E. M. Forster.’ (12-13) 22 Tim Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental Tale’, The Arabian Nights in Historical Context Between East and West (Oxford 2008) 214. 25

- my mind had been habituated to the Vast -& I never regraded my senses in any

way as the criteria of my belief... Should children be permitted to read Romances,

& relations of Giants & Magicians, and Genii? --1 know all that has been said

against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative.23

In recalling his state of mind as a child, Coleridge reveals the Nights continuous influence in his life. He often found himself in a predicament when pressed by his father to choose the Sciences, but the poet embraced ‘readings of Faery Tales & Genii’ even though his father severely disapproved. Livid by the effect the tales produced, Coleridge’s father burned his son’s copy of the Arabian Nights, thus making Coleridge even more of ‘a dreamer’.

Coleridge’s reading of the Oriental texts affected his sensibilities deeply as child, blurring his distinction between imagination and reality. Fulford explains that the Nights

‘left the young Coleridge in a state o f‘fearful eagerness’, ‘haunted by specters’, prepared to believe things for which he had no sensible evidence’; it made ‘that world., real enough to change the boy’s perception of the daily surroundings in which he lived’ (214-

215). Coler tlge’s experience at a neighboring Baronet’s mansion marked this change, serving as some sorts of rites of passage where the poet’s imagination became projected on to his reality. Coleridge recalled ‘my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring baronet, awfully known to me by the name of the great house, its exterior having been

23 Ward, Coleridge and the Nature o f Imagination, 31. 26

long connected in my childish imagination with feelings and fancies stirred up in me by the perusal of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’ 24 For Coleridge, the Nights brought the dull baronial halls to life filled with Oriental qualities that incited sensations of the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising 25 The mansion transformed into an Oriental palace consisting of luxurious spaces, irregular architecture, and grand halls—eliciting a more intensifying experience with the Orient.

The Oriental tales provided a model of writing for Coleridge apparent in his poetical work. For instance, in examining The Rime o f the Ancient Mariner, there are parallels between Coleridge’s poem and The Merchant and the Genie tale as they both exude elements of the supernatural and the exotic. Fulford confirms this: ‘The dislocation of conventional causality, the sudden appearance of narraotorial moralizing, the enclosure of the voyages with a framing story, were all features o f‘The Merchant and the Genie’ that give the poem its nightmarish fascination’ (220). Those who loved the Nights appreciated the amalgamation of the real and illusionary in The Ancient Mariner, but others criticized the poem for its lack of moral value and unrestrained imagination. Anna

Laetitia Aikin Barbauld was one such critic, and in his Table Talk (May 31, 1830),

Coleridge recorded her criticism:

24 S. T Coleridge, The Complete Works o f Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed Professor Shedd. Vol. 2. (New York 1853) 137. 25 In Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), Sir William Chambers notes that Chinese gardens consisted of scenes respectively characterized as the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising. The Baronet s mansion, I believe, induced similar emotions in Coleridge that may be categorized as the pleasing, the terrible and the surprising. 27

Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired The Ancient Mariner very much,

but that there were two faults in it, — it was improbable, and had no moral. As for

the orobat;:.ty, I owned that that mignt admit some question; but as to the want of

a moral, I told her that in my own judgement the poem had too much; and that the

only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so

openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure

imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of

the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the

shells as le, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid

merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the

genie's son.26

Coleridge’s response to Mrs. Barbauld confirms three things: Coleridge read the Nights, his work was heavily influenced by the Oriental tales, and his work falls in the same conventions of morality as The Merchant and the Genie. But, Coleridge’s morality differed from that of Mrs. Barbauld. Where Mrs. Barbauld’s, a poet and abolitionist, morality was grounded in orthodox Christianity, Coleridge believed that morality should be delivered obliquely as in the case of the Merchant and the Mam- ;r. Yet, Coleri ige’s take on morality is questionable. Even though he placed The Merchant and the Genie on

26 qtd. in Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental Tale’, 217. 28

a morality pedestal, it still promoted an unreliable view of the Orient, but—unaffected—

Coleridge continued to propagate the Orient for his readership.

Coleridge’s Kubla Khan was deeply influenced by the Eastern narrative The Tales o f the Genii, a collection of pseudo-oriental fantasy tales modeled after the Arabian

Nights. Unlike the Nights that originated from the folkloric tradition prevalent in countries as India, Persia, Iraq, Syria and Egypt, The Tales o fthe Genii developed out of Sir Charles Morell’s obsession to imitate the Oriental tale’s exotic ethos of mystery and fantasy.17 The parallels between The Tales o f the Genii and Kubla Khan are best captured by Fulford, as he finds that Coleridge’s ‘deep romantic chasm' and a ‘woman wailing for her demon-love’ imitates scenes in the Hassan Assar; or The History o f The

Caliph o f Bagdat tale:

In The Tales o f the Genii a pair of lovers meet in a verdant valley: each

approaches the other ‘but, alas, ere the happy couple could meet, the envious earth

gave a hideous groan, and the ground parting under their feet, divided them from

each other by a dismal chasm...Wild notes of strange uncouth warlike music were

heard from the bottom of the pit’ (Genii i. 135).28

There is also an uncanny resemblance between Kubla’s ‘gardens’ and the groves of

Shadaski mentioned in The Talisman o f Oromanes; Or", The History o f the Merchant

Abduah.

27 He published under pseudonym James Ridley. 28 Fulford, ‘Coleridge and the Oriental Tale\ 227. Fulford is quoting from the tale Hassan Assar; or, The History o f The Caliph o f Bagdat, the third tale in The Tales o f the Genii collection. 29

They contain a pavilion which ‘stood upon a rising mount, in the midst of a most

beautiful green...The center of the pavilion opened to the lawn, which was beset

with elegant tufts of the most delightful verdure. ..At the bottom of the lawn ran a

clear and transparent stream, which gently washed the margin of the green’ (Genii

i. 67).29

The description of Shadaski’s ‘pavilion opened to the lawn, which was beset with elegant tufts of the most delightful verdure’ is echoed in Kubla’s ‘pleasure-dome’ surrounded by

‘So twice five miles of fertile ground/ With wall and towers were girdled around: / And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills’ (6-8). Further, Kubla’s ‘pleasure-dome’ and

‘gardens’ unfolding to "Alph, the sacred river’ imitates Shadaski’s arrangement of his groves where the ‘pavilion’ and lawn’ open to a ‘clear and transparent stream’

EL Travel Literature

In 1 s Preface, Coleridge admits to getting his idea for Kubla Khan from Samuel

Purchas’ collection of traveler’s tales Purchas his Pilgrimage,30 thus reaffirming Said’s claim that knowledge of the Orient ‘seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient’ (177). The exact passage in

Purchas that Coleridge used as his source is as follows:

29 Ibidem, 227 Fulford is quoting from the tale The Talisman ofOromanes; Or, The History o f the Merchant Abduah, the first tale in The Tales o f the Genii collection. 30 The full title of work is Purchas his Pilgrimage, Or Relations o f the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from creation to the Present. 30

In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteen miles of

plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs,

delightfuli Stream es, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest

thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure, which may be moved from place to

place31

Ironically, Purchas’ description of Xanadu was based on the description of the famous traveler Marco Polo, who travelled to the Emperor’s palace in the late 13th century 32

Purchas reworks Polo’s account (quoted in the footnote) to make his text more exotic and pleasing for the reader. For instance, Polo describes a structure that is capable of being moved as follows: ‘The whole is constructed with so much ingenuity of contrivance that all the parts may be taken asunder, removed, and again set up, at his majesty's pleasure’; in comparison, Purchas exaggerates the description by calling it ‘a sumptuous house of pleasure’, thus letting the reader insinuate that the structure is likely a harem. In his

Preface and poem, Coleridge too alters information so it fits the parameters of his poem.

Whereas both Polo and Purchas conclude that the land surrounding the palace is ‘sixteen

31 qtd. in footnotes o f ‘Kubla Khan’, The Norton Anthology o f English Literature (New Yoik) 446. 32 Excerpt from The Travels o f Marco Polo, the Venetian that Purchas copied, and changed in his text is as follows: ‘Departing from the city last mentioned, and proceeding three days1 journey in a north-easteriy caused direction, you arrive at a city named Shandu, built by the grand khan Kublai, now reigning. In this he caused palace to be erected, of marble and other handsome stone, admirable as well for the elegance of its design as for the skill displayed in its execution... the building runs another wall to such an extent as to enclose sixteen miles in circuit of the adjoining plain, to which there is no access but through the palace. Within the bounds of this royal park there are rich and beautiful meadows, watered by many rivulets, where a variety of animals of the deer and goat kind are pastured, to serve as food for the hawks and other birds employed in the chase, whose mews are also in the grounds. . The whole is constructed with so much ingenuity of contrivance that all the parts may be taken asunder, removed, and again set up, at his majesty's pleasure.’ 126 31

miles’ long, Coleridge changes it to ‘ten miles’ in the Preface, and ‘So twice five miles’ in the poem (1. 6). The various amendments made to Polo’s text by Purchas makes it an unreliable source for Coleridge, but the poet seems to show little concern for the inaccuracy. Rather, Coleridge makes modifications to Purchas’ text for the effectiveness of his poem, contributing to the erroneous knowledge about the Orient.

Another influence on Coleridge was Sir William Chambers Dissertation on

Oriental Gardening (1772), a travel text that introduced the Chinese gardens to Europe.

In a letter to his close friend Fredrick Chapman, Chambers confessed that his account of the Chinese gardens was fabricated to attract an audience: ‘it is a system of my own which as it was a bold attempt of which the Success was very uncertain, I fathered it upon the Ch'nese who I thought lived far enough off to be out of reach of Critical Abuse’.

Chambers believed that Chinese gardens satisfied all the senses, dividing the effects produced by the gardens into the pleasing, the terrible, and the surprising. He orchestrated oriental scenes in his text to evoke contrived sensations of the Dleasing, the terrible, and the surprising in his readers in an effort to shape their imagination.

Chambers Dissertation had a riveting effect on Coleridge’s imagination that crossed over to Kubla Khan. Essential images of the Orient found in K ubla Khan were imported by the poet from Chambers manufactured text. In addition to the oriental

Chinese gardens, Chambers mentions portable tents called the ‘Miau Ting, or Hall of the

33 Chambers’ letter to Fredrick Chapman in Stockholm, date 28 July 1772. Cited in Harris, Crook, and Harris, Sir William Chambers: Knight o f the Polar Star, 158. 32

Moon’, ‘composed each of one single vaulted room, made in the shape of a

hemisphere’ These ‘vaulted’ tents are reminiscent of Kubla Khan’s ‘stately pleasure-

dome’ (1- 2). The ‘pleasure’ aspect of the ‘pleasure-dome’ is borrowed from Chambers

description that the structures were where ‘the Chinese princes retire, with the - favorite

women, [where] they feast, and give a loose to every sort of voluptuous pleasure’ 35

Chambers further mentions that these gardens and buildings are surrounded by ‘clear

running water, which falls in rills from the sides of a rock in the center’, the purity and

clarity of the water is echoed by Coleridge in ‘ Alph, the sacred river’, while the ‘rills’ are

reproduced in the line And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills’ (3,8). The origin

of Coleridge’s lines ‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure / Floated midway on the waves’ (31-32) can be found in the following description by Chambers: ‘many little islands float upon its surface, and move around as the current directs, .with arbors, containing beds of repose, with sophas, seats, and other furniture for various use’ (31).

Coleridge was also fascinated with James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source o f the Nile (1790), a travel narrative that surveyed the history and culture of Abyssinia

(Ethiopia). Coleridge’s admiration for Bruce is on full display in ReligiousMusings, where he quotes a passage from the Travels as an explanatory footnote to the image of

‘Simoom’ in his poem. Coleridge also shared his appreciation for the text with his friends from his circle; in a letter to Lady Beaumont, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote Coleridge says

34 W. Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. (London 1772) 30. 35 Ibidem, 31. 33

that the last edition of Bruce’s Travels is a book that you ought by all means to have’

Leask finds that there is a striking resemblance between Bruce’s ‘Ozoro Esther1 and

Coleridge’s ‘Abyssinian maid’ ‘The powerful erotic interest of Bruce’s narrative and

especially his portrait of his royal patroness Ozoro Esther is surely discernible in

Coleridge’s almost feverish evocation of the ‘Abyssinian Maid’ and her 'symphony and

song’ (16). In The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes also observes that

Coleridge’s Xanadu, especially lines 12-16, imitates the area surrounding the fountains where the Nile begins37

Analyzing Representations in K ubla K han

Kublai Khan—The Great Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Mongolian conqueror who successfully ruled Mongolia, and became the first Mongol to rule the entirety of China. Unlike his predecessors, Kublai ruled through an administrative apparatus that embraced the local culture and traditions of the conquered population while also providing them with religious freedom. In addition to creating a government founded on humanity and magnanimity, he unified the people of Mongolia and China under the Yuan Dynasty. He improved infrastructure by building roads for effective transportation, expanded waterways for agriculture, and established and utilized paper currency as the primary means of trade. In 1256, he established the city of Shandu, also known as the ‘city of 108 temples’, which became the summer capital for Kublai Khan

36 qtd. in Perspectives: Romantic, Victorian, and Modem Literature,113. 37 Refer to The Road to Xanadu, pg. 344 for a full description by Bruce o f the area surrounding the fountains of Nile. 34

and his successors. He is revered as a kind and civil leader in Mongol and Chinese history.

Unfortunately, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan lacks the qualities mentioned above as he is reduced to an essentialized Orient by the poet. The poet demonizes and eroticizes the

Orient, wnether Kuoia or the setting, through the deliberate use of exouc language, fictionalized imagery, and intentional extravagance. He also sets up binaries between

East and West—Kubla Khan and the Abyssinian Maid, that further cements stereotypes of the Orient in the poem. By promoting a powerful sense of otherness, Coleridge distances the Orient from familiarity and reality of the true East. In my analysis of K ubla

K han, I showcase how exactly Coleridge fabricates the Orient, and in doing so, participates in Orientalism.

In his Preface, Coleridge makes the disclaimer that Kubla Khan; Or, A Vision in a

Dream: A Fragment was received in a dream after the poet had ‘retired to a lonely farm house’, and taking a ‘anodyne’, had fallen asleep. The Preface reads:

The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the

external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could

not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines.. On awakening he

appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his

pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here

preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on 35

business from Porlock and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his

room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still

retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet,

with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had

passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had

been cast38

The Preface, I believe, is an orchestrated cognitive mechanism by Coleridge to deter the

reader from questioning the accuracy of the content—the Orient. By strategically placing the Preface in the intro to the poem, Coleridge deflects blame from himself and places it on the ‘ Vision in a Dream’. Leask agrees, as he further adds: ‘Coleridge’s 1816 Preface to Kubla Khan, by focusing readerly attention on the agency of the drugged imagination as a syncretizing power, erases the geopolitical distinction between the poem's constituent topoi. Kubla Khan and the Abyssinian Maid, Xanadu and Mount Abora are condensed by a kind of drug-induced poetical dreamwork into an ‘essentialised’ Orient’

(3). But, what if we remove the Preface? The ‘essentialised’ Orient remains Oriental— making it more obvious that Coleridge’s attempt to mislead the reader via the Preface is deliberate, and misrepresenting the Orient in K ubla Khan intentional.

If, even for a moment, we believe Coleridge’s claim that the poem has its origin in a dream—manifested through a ‘vague and dim recollection of the general purport’,

38 ‘Kubla Khan’, The Norton Anthology o f English Literature (New York) 446-47. 36

the poem s highly developed structure proves otherwise. Coleridge concludes in his

Preface that ‘with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away’; yet, the audience is presented with a fifty-four-line masterpiece.

William Hazlitt, a literary critic and contemporary of Coleridge, echoed the sentiment as he affirmed that K ubla Khan ‘only shews that Mr. Coleridge can write better nonsense verses than any man in England. . .it is not so much a poem but a musical composition’. 39

The complex achievements of the poem are reaffirmed by J.R. de J. Jackson who writes that a 'regular iambic framework is used to set off variants, and the entire poem is marked by alliteration and elaborate assonance that reaches back in subtlety to Milton’.40

Thus, comparing K ubla Khan to a pragmatic ‘musical composition’ and/or profoundly complicated work of Milton eliminates doubt that the poem is not a dream composition, but a highly self-conscious creation.

For the necessity of creating an exotic locale in K ubla, Coleridge deploys imagery that reinforces the stereotypes of the Orient. He typifies the Orient and the Oriental in his poem by deliberately stressing qualities that exude "Sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy’ 41 For example, Coleridge begins by establishing the splendor and majesty of Kubla Khan right from the beginning: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla

Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’ (1-2). Coleridge reinforces the image of the

‘pleasure-dome’ multiple times—in line thirty-one: ‘The shadow of the dome of

39 qtd. in Lessk, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism’, 1. ^ Ibidem. 1. 41 Said, Orientalism, 118. 37

pleasure’, and thirty-six: ‘A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’. In doing so, he

quickly captures the imagination of his reader by making the ‘dome’ more luxurious and

memorable versus simply stating ‘A stately dome decree’. Coleridge further creates an

atmosphere of beauty and sacredness to add to the generic assumptions of the Orient. The

area surrounding the ‘pleasure-dome; is localized with rich and exotic images of

‘blossomed many an incense-bearing tree’, ‘forests, ancient as the hills’, and a ‘sacred river’ (3,9-10). He continues to describe the river as ‘sacred’ on multiple occasions throughout the poem, and Xanadu as ‘holy and enchanted’.

Coleridge also makes use of supernatural agencies to skillfully promote sinister qualities of the Orient. Caverns through which the ‘sacred river runs are described as

‘measureless to man / Down a sunless sea (4-5) and gardens are infused with ‘sinuous rills’, further eroticizing the landscape (8). The savage an a untamed nature of the Orient is highlighted in the second stanza as the location is now described as ‘A savage place! as holy and enchanted’ (14). Mystical elements are introduced to describe an Oriental woman longing for her lover: ‘As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’ (15-16), thus making a reprehensible loss bewitching.

Coleridge continues to challenge the restrictions of realism by injecting life into earth as the ‘earth in fast thick pants were breathing’ (18), while also connecting Kubla to Eastern generalizations of war through the evocation of the spiritual realm: ‘Kubla heard from far

/ Ancestral voices prophesying war’ (29-30). Hence, the Orient in Coleridge’s K ubla 38

Khan is reduced to the general categories mentioned by Said of ‘Oriental despotism,

Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality’, because in the eyes of an Orientalist, An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism’—just like Kubla (4,102).

I would like to take a moment here to reinforce Said’s claims that the Orient was a

‘European invention’; Coleridge takes part in that ‘invention’ by creating nonexistent places in his poem to give the audience a false sense of the Orient. For example,

Coleridge sets his poem in ‘Xanadu’—‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure- dome decree’, but such a place does not exist (1-2). In Marco Polo’s The Travels o f

Marco Polo, the Venetian, Kubla’s city is called ‘Shandu’ ‘Departing from the city last mentioned, and proceeding three days’ journey in a north-easterly caused direction, you arrive at a city named Shandu’ (126). In Purchas his Pilgrimage, Purchas calls the city

‘Xamdu’— ‘In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace’, Fulford confirms the fabrication as he states ‘Thus Coleridge’s Xanadu is never a real place discovered through books but a place the Western poet imagines after reading and then dreaming’

(231). Interestingly, ‘Xamdu’ does not fit the poem’s iambic tetrameter while ‘Xanadu’ does, confirming that the change i > premeditated.

Furthermore, Coleridge continues to exoticize the locale by inventing the name of the ‘sacred river’ ‘Alph’— ‘Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man’ (3-4). Considering Coleridge’s fascination with the A rabian N ights, 39

the ‘Alf in A lfLayla wa-Layla may have been the inspiration for the name ‘Alph’.

Similarly, ‘Mount Abora’ is contrived as well in the lines— ‘It was an Abyssinian Maid,

/And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora’ (39-41). Leask verifies that no such mountain exists: ‘Much ink has been spilt by critics cm the significance of

‘Mount Abora’, a name which doesn’t correspond to any known site in Abyssinia or elsewhere’ (15). In the Crewe manuscript, ‘Mount Abora’ is referred to as ‘Mount

Amara’, which is a real mountain in the Amhara Region of Ethiopia. The mountain is perhaps a variation of John Milton’s false paradise of Mount Amara in Paradise Lost—

‘Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard, / Mount Amara, though this by some suppos’d / True Paradise under the Ethiop Line’.42 It may be postulated that since Miltor already used ‘Mount Amara’ in his text to refer to the East, Coleridge wanted break away from the known and create an unknown mythical oriental landscape to enthrall his audience, hence ‘Mount Abora’. Coleridge’s creation should not be ignored as a necessity of imagination or poetical creation because these fabrications contributed to Europe’s

Oriental worldview of the East that served as the foundation for colonization.

Coleridge also imposes an artificial binary opposition between the first thirty-six lines of the poem and the eighteen line ‘coaa’, between Kubla Khan and the Abyssii an

Maid. As seen in the analysis above, Kubla and Xanadu are infused with exotic, erotic, and supernatural qualities, but there is sudden shift in the coda when the ‘Abyssinian

42 Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 280-282. 40

maid’ appears. The flow of the lines become light and airy as the tone turns nor“ive and the setting paradise like:

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora. (37-41)

Coleridge sets up the ‘Abyssinian maid’ in opposition with the Oriental woman who is

‘wailing for her demon-lover!’ First and foremost the ‘woman wailing’ is unidentifiable outside of her crying and collective Oriental identity, whereas the woman in the coda is inundated with admirable attributes as she is called a ‘damsel’ and a ‘Abyssinian ma*d’.

Uirke the wailing woman who conjures haunting sensations, the ‘Abyssinian maid’ sings and plays offering the narrator ‘deep delight’ (44). Ironically, the Abyssinian maid is also an Oriental woman, but why does Coleridge depict her antithetical to the ‘woman wailing’? In Hiob Ludolfs Historia Aethiopica (1681), Ludolf depicted the Abyssinian

Church as ‘a pure primitive Christianity uncontaminated by Roman Catholic doctrine’ and Bruce echoed the sentiments in his extensive study of Abyssinia— Travels to

Discover the Source o f the Nile 43 Considering Coleridge read Bruce’s Travels and was

43 qtd. in Leask, ‘Kubla Khan and Orientalism’ 14. 41

influenced by it, the reference of Abyssinia being a pure, primitive form of Christianity is reinforced in his characterization of the ‘Abyssinian maid’. 42

Chapter Three: Orientalizing the Orient in Shelley's O zym andias

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.’

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away. (10-14)

On December 27,1817, a day after Boxing Day, Shelley entertained at his house in Marlowe, London based poet-financier Horace Smith who he had met the previous year through Leigh Hunt. Hunt, editor of The Examiner, liked to organize sonnet competitions between his acquaintances on popular topics with fifteen-minute time allotments for completion.44 Discussing recent discoveries in the East in the wake of

Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and Diodorus Siculus’ epitaph to Ozymandias, Shelley and

Smith engaged in a similar light-hearted friendly competition to produce a sonnet on

‘Ozymandias, King of Kings’ While Shelley named his sonnet Ozymandias, Smith gave his sonnet an elaborate title On a Stupendous Leg o f Granite, Discovered Standing by

Itself in the Deserts ofEgypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.

The competition between the two writers was inspired by the colossal head of

Ramses n, ‘Ozy mandias’ in Greek, excavated in 1816 from the West Bank at Thebes by

Giovanni Belzoni. According to Jalal Uddin Khan, ‘on the recommendation of Swiss

44 Hunt set up a similar competition between Shelley, John Keats, and himself on the topic of ‘The Nile.’ 43

Orientalist, J. L. Burckhardt, the Orientalist Belzoni was sent by the British consul to

Egypt.. .Belzoni managed to remove with great skill the colossal bust of Ramses, commonly called ‘the Young Mem non, which took 17 days and 130 men to tow the more-than-7-ton bust to the river with the help of ropes, levers and rollers’ (74-75).

Similar to the hardships encountered during the excavation, Ozymandias’ journey to

England was just as daunting. The sculpture suffered many delays, first due to the failure to find an appropriate vessel to accommodate the seven-ton colossus, and then because of quarantine issues in Malta. The boat canying Ozymandias docked in England in March

1818, and the pharaoh was finally exhibited in late 1818.45 Keats, an avid British

Museum attendee, did not see the head unt. early 1819, claiming ‘I had not seen it before’.46

In his effort to capitalize on the public’s excitement for the upcoming Ramses II exhibition, Hunt published the two sonnets in The Examiner in short succession of each other Shelley’s poem, signed ‘GLIRASTES’, was publ hed on 1 i January 18118, roughly two weeks after it was written. Smith’s poem soon followed on 1 February 1818 in the same publication with a note stating ‘The subject which suggested the beautiful

Sonnet, in a late number, signed ‘Glirastes,’ produced also the enclosed from another

45 For a full description of the sculpture's journey to England, please read John Rodenbeck’s ‘Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias.’”, pp. 125-26. 46 qtd, in John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land: Shelley's Inspiration for ‘Ozymandias.”’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 24 (2004) 126. 44

pen, which, if you deem it worthy insertion, is at your service. -H.S.’.47 The poems are reprinted here as they appeared in The Examiner for comparison:

OZYMANDIAS.48

I met a Traveller from an antique land, Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.” Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

OZYMANDIAS49

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desart knows— “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone, “The King of Kings; this mighty City shows “The wonders of my hand.’’-The City’s gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon. We wonder,- and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

47 qtd. in K. Everest and G. Matthews, The Poems o f Shelley, Volume Two, 1817-1819. (London and New York 2014) 307. 48 Percy B. Shelley, The Examiner (January 11,1818) 24. 49 Horace Smith, The Examiner (February 1,1818) 73. Both poems, as showcased here, will be used as a point of reference throughout this chapter. 45

What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Ironically, both poems were titled ‘OZYMANDIAS’ in The Examiner until Smith changed his title to ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’ in his collection of poems called Amarynthus, Nympholept (1821). Shelley’s Ozym andias was republished under the title ‘Sonnet. Ozymandias’ in the collection of poems called Rosalind and Helen, A

Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems (1819) by Charles and lames Oilier. After her husband’s sudden death in a boating accident, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley struggled to sort through a multitude of the poet’s unfinished and fragmentary work to publish posthumously. With the assistance of Percy’s dear friend Hunt, Mary edited, and ultimately published in 1824 Posthumous Poems o f Percy Bysshe Shelley, which also included Ozymandias. In the Preface to the Posthumous Poems, Mary expressed grief that

‘The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame. Hereafter men will lament that his transcendant powers of intellect were extinguished before they had bestowed on them their choicest treasures’ 50 Shelley’s tragic death brought his work into the focus of the public’s attention, garnering him posthumous fame and appreciation.

50 Mary W. Shelley, ‘Preface.’ Posthumous Poem o f Percy Bysshe Shelley. (London 1824) Iv. 46

After being published in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1861, O zym andias became frequently anthologized.

Contrary to popular belief, it is of extreme importance to reiterate that Shelley never saw the sculpture of Ozymandias a person. By the time Ramses II had arrived in

England in Spring 1818, Shelley’s poem had already been published, and the poet, accompanied by Mary and her sister Claire, had permanently left for Italy to escape creditors. Further, Shelley never travelled to Egypt, or a matter of fact to any Eastern country, to see the statue. Rodenbeck confirms this:

At no time before he wrote the sonnet, could Shelley possibly have seen the

sculptured head comparable to the one his fictional traveler describes unless he

had actually gone to Egypt. In common with all the other English Romantic poets,

either major and minor, Shelley never set foot in the Land of the Pharaohs.. .Nor

is there any record, indeed, of his ever even contemplating such a visit. (122)

Therefore, Shelley was not inspired by any physical experience with ‘Ozymandias’ when writing his poem. His knowledge about the pharaoh was limited, like his contemporaries, to the rendition of the East in travel literature. This, obviously, makes the depiction of the great pharaoh in Ozym andias Active and erroneous, as the details were not grounded in any concrete experience or knowledge of Ramses H

Rodenbeck drives the point home as he stresses that Shelley had no idea what

Ozymandias looked like, and even if he did know, he ‘found the information irrelevant 47

when he wrote his poem’ (126). The critic’s affirmation validates my claim that the misrepresentation of the Orient in Shelley’s poem was premeditated as the poet intentionally promoted stereotypes of the East to meet the demands of the marketplace.

Unfortunately, during Shelley’s lifetime, his poem failed to intrigue both his contemporaries and the audience; only after his death did the relatively unknown poem, and poet, acquire fame. This chapter will be divided similar to the previous chapter, but sans the reception due to the lack of response to the poem when it was published, or even republished. The section that follows will examine texts, specifically travel literature, in the context of Shelley’s life to demonstrate how the unstable narratives influenced him in writing his poem. This will be followed by an analysis of O zym andias to identify and expose misrepresentations of the Orient. Where appropriate, I will bring in Smith’s poem to draw out the inconsistencies between the two poems written at the same time and informed by similar sources.

Ozymandias and its Muses

It s imperative to reinforce my earlier claim that travel literature from its conception secured ethnocentric perspectives of the Orient by perpetuating stereotypes that were inhumanely flawed. Rodenbeck agrees as he asserts that travel literature ‘alone has historically had far greater cultural impact than the experience of mere travel’ (121).

The consequences of the said fabrication were poems like Shelley’s O zym andias that embraced and fomented inaccuracies of the Orient. The inspiration for Shelley’s poem 48

can be found in the dubious literature of travel since the poet had no first-hand experience other than his readings. In this section, I examine the relevance of these sources in

Shelley's poem while contextualizing them to better understand their significance in the poet’s life.

In her copious journals that religiously tracked every aspect of her husband’s life,

Mary reveals Shelley’s reading during 1817 to be the following: ‘His readings this year were chiefly Greek. Besides the Hymns of Homer and the Iliad, he read the Dramas of

Aeschylus and Sophocles, the Symposium of Plato, and Arrian’s Historica Indica’, and

Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica. Diodorus, a likely contemporary of Julius

Caesar, was a Greek historian and traveler known for writing a massive forty-volume work attempting to cover universal history, which included the history of Egypt. In their respective poems, Shelley and Smith used the historian as a source when writing their sonnets. In his description of the Ramesseum, a memorial temple built to commemorate

Ram esses H, Diodorus remarks:

At the Entrance stand Three Statues, each of one intire Stone, the Workmanship

of M emnon of Sienitas. One of these made in a sitting posture, is the greatest in all

Egypt, the measure of his Foot exceeding Seven Cubits; the one standing on the

right, and the other on the left, being his Daughter and Mother. This Piece is not

only commendable for its greatness, but admirable for its Cut and Workmanship,

and the Excellency of the Stone; in so great a Work there’s not to be discern’d the 49

least Flaw, or any other Blemish. Upon it there is this Inscription—I am

O sim anduas King of Kings; if any would know how great I am, and where I lye,

let him excel me in any of my Works.51

In examining the above description, it may be concluded that Diodorus never visited the

Ramesseum, or the colossus himself. Neither the head given to the British Museum, or the fragments of the statue left behind in Egypt by Belzoni had the inscription mentioned above. Considering that hieroglyphics were not understood until 1822 when the Rosetta

Stone was deciphered, Diodorus, or whoever reporting the description of Ramses II to him, would have not been able to read the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Unfortunately, we are unable to verify Diodorus’ description since ‘No other ancient or classical histo: an—

Herodotus, Strabo, Pausanias, Thucydides, Xenophon, Arrian, Tacitus, or Pliny— mentions Ozymandias or his statue’.52 This makes what Parr calls the ‘ultimate source’ for the two poems unstable, untrustworthy, and replete with errors.

It is without question that both Shelley and Smith borrowed from Diodorus’ translated inscription when conceiving the following lines in their poems: Shelley—“‘My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’ / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! ’

(10-11), Smith— ‘“I am great OZYMANDIAS,’ saith the stone, / ‘The King of Kings; this mighty City shows / ‘The wonders of my hand.’” (4-6). But, being literary figures of their caliber, it is surprising that both Shelley and Smith participated in hearsay by

51 Diodorus Siculus, Bib. hist. 1.4.2 [Booth] 24-25. 52 Johnstone Parr, ‘Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias. ” Keats-Shelley Journal 6 (1957) 32. 50

quoting another quoted, or rather fabricated, text. The two poets likely knew that it was impossible to translate hieroglyphics, yet they evaded questioning Diodorus’ boisterous epitaph. Noteworthy, too, is the fact that both poets paraphrased the inscription Diodorus mentioned using quotations—thus deceiving the audience in to believing that the

nscription was the original.

As Diodorus manufactured the inscription for the effectiveness of his description—Shelley followed suit by recreating the historian’s setting to fit the framework of his poem. Diodorus produced his description of the pharaon in late first century BC, roughly a thousand years after the Ramesseum was built. The statue of

Ozymandias as described by the historian was sitting’ in one piece surrounded by two other statues as he concluded ‘At the Entrance stand Three Statues, each of one *ntire

Stone... One of these made in a sitting posture, is the greatest in all E g yp t... so great a

Work there’s not to be discern’d the least Flaw, or any other Blemish’. Shelley failed to maintain the integrity of Diodorus’ text as he created his own Oriental locale; the statue in his poem is annihilated and ‘standpng]’ alone as—‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desart. Near tbem, on the sand, f Half sunk, a shattered visage f'es’ and ‘No thing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck’ (2-4, 12-13).

Diodorus’ departure from historical facts and Shelley’s departure from Bibliotheca

H istorica proves the unreliable nature of both the authors and their work. The poem’s decampment does suggest that even though informed by a semi-historical/travel text like 51

Diodorus’ Bibliotheca, the poem was more so a product of the Doet’s imagination. D.W.

Thompson echoes my sentiments when describing Shelley’s Ozymandias: ‘The face in

the sonnet is not that of an Egyptian king, but that of Shelley’s tyrant, a Godwinian

monarch whose character has been ruined by court life’

A source Shelley certainly read and borrowed from was C. E. Volney’s .Les

Ruines, ou Meditation sur les Revolutions des Empires (1791), a massively popular work

that attributed to shaping Shelly’s perspectives of the Orient. In Orientalism, Said

exposes Volney as an Orientalist, referring to him as an 'orthodox Orientalist authority’

who apparently ‘saw himself as a scientist, whose job it was to always record the ‘etat’ of

something he saw’ (39). Volney’s writing about the Orient was very impersonal and

hostile, which transferred over to the work of the literary crowd that exploited it, such as

in Shelley’s O zym andias, Queen M ab, A lastor, and The R evolt o fIslam . According to

Thomas Medwin, cousin and biographer of Shelley, the poet was introduced to Volney’s

R uines after his expulsion from Oxford in 1811. The poet’s good friend Thomas Jefferson

Hogg witnessed first-hand Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, reading aloud to her husband L es

R uines, which he claims was one of her ‘text books’.54 The importance of Volney’s text

in the Shelley household was again emphasized by Mary’s use of the text in her work

Frankenstein, published the same year as Ozymandias. The Creature’s curriculum

included ‘Volney’s Ruins o fEmpires’ from which he gained highly flawed imperial

53 qtd. in H.M. Richmond, ‘Ozymandias and the Travelers.1 Keats-Shelley Journal 11 (1962) 67. 54 qtd. in Ralph A Nablow, ‘Shelley, ‘Ozymandias,’ and Volney’s Les Ruines. ’ Notes & Queries 36 (June 1989) 172. 52

knowledge of the Orient and the Occident as he notes ‘I heard of the slothful Asiatics; of

the stupendous set i us and mental activity of the Grecians’.55

During his exploration of Egypt and Syria, Volney took a detour to visit the ruins

of Palmyra. In the first two chapters of L es R uines, Volney tried to capture the splendor

of the ruins that once were the cultural centers of the ancient world. A passage that likely

inspired Shelley’s ruins in O zym andias is reprinted here:

I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins; a countless

multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. The

solitude of the place, the tranquility of the hour, the majesty of the scene,

impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city

d.serted, the record of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my

mind to high contemplations. (I, 3&5)56

Ralph A. Nablow, who first called attention to the similarities between the description of the ruins and Shelley’s O zym andias, notes that Volney’s ‘meditation, like that of Shelley,

centres on the vanity of world glory, the vicissitudes of empire, the ephemerality of the works of man’.57 Shelley embraced and structured his poem around the same principles— transience of power, pride, and ambi on made apparent in the c .integration of

Ozymandias’ colossus. Volney’s rumination about ‘ephemerality’ of Oriental empires

55 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frantcens^in: Or, The Modem Prometheus. Vol. 2. (London 1823) 9. 56 C.F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions o f Empires: and the Law o f Nature. Project Gutenberg (New York 1890). 57 Nablow, ‘Shelley, ‘Ozymandias,’ and Volney’s Les Ruines', 173. 53

should be treated with considerable skepticism since he did approach the subject as an

Orientalist. For instance, a few lines above the passage mentioned, Volney describes the same Omental locale consumed by ‘robbery and devastation, tyranny and wretchedness’, representations that were again promoted by Shelley’s Ozym andias,58

Edward Said points out that Volney’s text also served as inspiration for Napoleon in his conquest of Egypt. In his attempt to strip the Orient to its essentials, Napoleon enlisted the help of dozens of scientists and ‘savants’, among whom was Dominique

Vivant, Baron Denon—an artist, writer, diplomat, archaeologist, and Orientalist. In addition to being a contributor to the multi-volume Description de VEgypte, Denon also publ.^hed his own account in a three-volume work titled Voyages dans la basse et la haute Egypte, pendant les Campagnes de Bonaparte (1802), translated into English by

Arthur Aiken the following year by the ntle Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, During the Campaigns o f General Bonaparte in that Country (1803). Denon’s enormously successful work surpassed the popularity of Description de I'Egypte and became a ‘major cultural event’ with multiple editions published simultaneously in Paris and London.59

Due to the popularity of the Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt, Shelley read and used Denon as a source in Ozymandias. There is a striking resemblance between

58 C.F. Volney. The Ruins, or, M editatkv on the Revolutions o f Empires: and the Law o f Nature. (New York 1890). 59 John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land’, 134. 54

Shelley’s Ozymandias and the following description of Ozymandias in Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt:

Our attention was arrested in the plain by two large statues in a sitting posture,

between which... was the famous Osymandyas, the largest of all these colossal

figures. Osymandyas had prided himself so much on the execution of this bold

design, that he had caused an inscription to be engraven on the pedestal of the

statue, in which he defied the power of man to destroy this monument as well as

that of his tomb, the pompous description of which now appears only a fantastic

di eam. The two statues still left standing, are doubtless those of the mother and

this prince.. .that of the king himself has disappeared, the hand of time and the

teeth of envy appear to have united zealously in its destruction, and nothing of it

remains but a shapeless rock of granite.60

In comparing the above passage to Ozym andias, Shelley’s reads like an abridged version of Denon’s description. Both works move between the past and present as they outline

Ozymandias’ fleeting power, ambition, and architecture. Parr brings up an intriguing point that ‘Denon is the only traveler who actually states that the inscription was ‘on the pedestal’” which in return is echoed in the following lines of O zym andias ‘And on the pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’” (9-10).

Vivant Denon. Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt. Vol. 2. Translated by Arthur Akin, (Cambridge 2015) 92-93. 55

This serves as a solid confirmation that Shelley used Denon’s Orientalist text to derive stereotypes lingering in his poem.

Ironically, Shelley found his source in a deceptively misleading text since the ruins Denon described were unrelated to Ramses II or the Ramesseum. Ozymandias’ head was not removed by Belzoni until 1816, which means that the statue, as claimed by

Denon, had not ‘disappeared’ and was still stanuing when he visited the area. Also,

Ozymandias was surrounded by statues of his mother and daughter whereas the two statues Denon mentions is ‘of the mother and prince’. Because Denon was unable to i wCntify the ruins he stood in, he likely remembered Diodorus’ descncnon of the

Ramesseum and the placement of Ozymandias between two statues. He assumed the statue o f‘Osymandyas’ no longer existed, but the remaining statues of the ‘mother and prince’ proved that at one time the statue of the pharaoh was there. The assumption wa? false. Thus, Denon, and Shelley’s, lack of accuracy in their work solidifies my earlier claim that their misrepresentations of the Orient were intentional

Analyzing Representations in Ozymandias

Pamses II—Ramesses the Great, was the third ruler of the 19th Dynasty of Egypt, and the second longest reigning pharaoh in Egyptian history. In his successful reign that lasted a little over sixty-six years, Egypt flourished extensively as Ramses improved infrastructure, strengthened borders, and commissioned comprehensive building projects all over Egypt. His most notable work included the Ramesseum in Thebes, temples at 55

Abu Simbel, the great hypostyle hall at Kamak, the capital city Pi-Ramesses, and many more. Apart from his extensive building, he was a reputed solr er known for leading many expeditions to restore annexed territories by Nubians and Hittites. His prowess as a soldier, accomplishments as a builder, and dedication to secure resources for his people as a leader earned him absolute loyalty from his people. Due to his numerous contributions, Ramses was dubbed by Egyptians as ‘ Userma ’atre ’setepenre’ or ‘Keeper of Harmony and Balance’.

In contrast, Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem is void of all humanity as he is reduced to a tyrant facing the wrath of time. Said makes a crucial point that I have reinforced eariier, ‘men make their own nistory, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography—such locales, regions, geographical sectors as

Orient1 ana ‘Occident’ are man-made’ (5). In Ozym andias, Shelley imposes a similar man made history on Ramses II as he strips the pharaoh of his accomplishments, and in doing so, displaces him. like the efforts made by his contemporary Coleridge in K ubla

Khan, Shelley too uses forged language and imagery to create Oriental ‘locales, regions, geographical sectors’. My analysis of O zym andias aims to illustrate how Shelley misrepresents the Orient by first penetrating it, and then re-imagining it for the convenience of his work that initially informed Western consciousness. I also utilize

Smith’s poem in places to draw out discrepancies between O zym andias and On a

Stupendous L eg o f Granite. 57

Similar to Coleridge’s Preface to Kubla Khan, Shelley too attempts to avoid

accountability for the accuracy of the Orient in Ozymandias. He frames the sonnet as a

stoiy told to the poet-speaker by a ‘Traveller from an antique land’, which in turn is told

by the ‘sculptor’ who ‘well those passions read’ of Ozymandias when creating his

colossus (1,6). Rodenbeck echoes this as he states that ‘the poem has nothing to do with the poet/speaker’s personal physical experience is announced by the first line, which tells

us explicitly that the person who had the fictive experience that the poem uses as its

central metaphor was not the poet-speaker at all, but ‘a traveler”’ (121). This is apparent

in the sudden shift in the first line from ‘I’ to ‘Traveller’ in ‘1 met a Traveller from an

antique land’, thus showing a sense of urgency in Shelley to deflect responsibility and

blame (1). Using the interlocking stories as an apparatus, the poet is successfully able to

create a distance between the Orient and the Occident while rendering the powers of

Ozymandias useless with the passage of time.

During his trip to Egypt with the American Museum of Natural Histoiy, Eugene

Waith found himself standing in the ruins of the Ramesseum in front of the fragmented

statue of Ozymandias. Unable to contain delight, he asked the guide ‘You mean that this was the inspiration for Shelley’s poem - ‘I met a traveller from an antique land...’?’.

As the guide answered ‘Yes’ to Waith’s inquiiy and asked him to recite the poem, the

scholar found himself perplexed as he states ‘What I was looking at as I read bore little

resemblance to the scene Shelley evoked’ (154). According to Parr, ‘Since the statue lay 58

precisely thus in Shelley’s day, it becomes obvious that Shelley’s description is not in

conformity with the facts’ (33). But, why? Shelley misrepresents the Orient by making

sweeping generalizations about it because, as an Orientalist, he simply could.

Shelley’s deliberate attempt to part ways from ‘facts’ begins in his fabrication of a

desolate Oriental setting in the second line of the poem where the ‘Traveller’ describe?

‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desart’ (2-3). By beginning his

description of Ozymandias’ sculpture in a dilapidated state, Shelley aggressively

dehumanizes the pharaoh in his effort to re-create him. Ironically, his description deviates

from Smith's On a Stupendous Leg oj Granite even though the sonnets peruse similar

sources and share the theme of ephemerality of power. Smith’s poem is more ‘in

conformity with the facts’ as he describes only one leg standing in the ‘Desart’: ‘In

Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone, / Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws / The only

shadow that the Desart knows’ (1-3). While referring to a description of Ozymandias by

British authority on Egyptian antiquities Richard Henry Hamilton. Parr attests ‘rather

than ‘Two vast and trunkless legs’ there were no legs at all. What were once legs had become shapeless mass of stone with exception of a part of foot lying among the debris’

(33).61 Waith echoes P ? jt as he too confirms ‘there were no trunkless legs’ when he

visited the sculpture (154).

Richard Henry Hamilton was the President of the British African Association during Shelley’s time. According to Parr, Hamilton travelled to Thebes to study Ramesses II around 1809. 59

The poet continues to reconstruct, or rather deconstruct, OzymanCzas as an

unregenerate savage in the following lines:

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those pas: ons read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. (4-8).

Particular attention should be paid to Shelley’s use of negative diction and imagery to describe the pharaoh: 'trown’, ‘wrinkled lip’, ‘sneer of cold command’, ‘hand that mocked’, and ‘heart that fed’. Quite strategically, the poet alienates Ozymandias from his

own identity of 'Userma ’atre 'setepenre ’ by equipping him with tyrannical attributes to reinforce stereotypes of the governing ‘other’. In fact, there is no ‘frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’ on the face of the head excavated by Belzoni. Belzoni ddsci .bed the head as ‘smiling upon me, at thought of being taken away to England’.62

Similar to Waith. I too was fortunate enough to visit the Egyptian gallery at the British

Museum during my visit to London a few years back.631 was intrigued to find myself standing in front of the head of Ozymandias, but confounded when I discovered no

wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command’. Rather, there was a quaint smile on the pharaoh’s mouth that aroused a sense of peace and serenity in me as I stood there for

62 qtd. in John Rodenbeck, ‘Travelers from an Antique Land’, 116. 63 The head of Ozymandias, or ‘The Younger Memnon’, is available for view through the online collection on the British Museum’s website. 60

some time examining him. The difference exists due to Shelley’s lack of concern for the

accuracy of Ozymandias' sculpture which, I believe, is a calculated methodology by the

poet to distill what Said calls ‘essential ideas about the Orient—its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness— into a separate and un-challenged coherence’.64

It has already been determined in the previous section that Shelley and Smith borrowed from Diodorus’ translated inscription ‘I am O sim anduas King of Kings: if any would know how great I am, and where I lye, let him excel me in any of my Works.’ In juxtaposing Shelley’s inscription v th Smith’s, it is obvious that Shelley departs from the

historical context supplied by Diodorus by contriving a richly suggestive inscription that evokes habitual fascination and repugnance for the Orient. The two inscriptions are reprinted side-by-side for comparison:

S h ellev s Ozymandias.______Sm ith's On a Stupendous Les of Granite.

“My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.’ “I am great OZYMANDIAS,” saith the stone,

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! “The King o f Kings; this mighty City shows (10- 11) “The wonders o f my hand.” (4-6)

The inscription’s opening ‘I am Osim anduas King of Kings’ is echoed in both poems but, particular attention should be paid to the rest of the lines in both works. Changes are made by both poets, but Shelley’s inscription borders sheer manipulation. While Smith’s lines somewhat convey a similar message of human glory as in its original source (which

64 Said, Orientalism, 205. 61

both Shelley and Smith read together), Shelley’s lines make a complete shift. Shelley transforms the declaration of accomplishments made by a successful ruler into a tyrannical boast of power by a despot who calls for ‘despair! ’ for those who ‘Look on

[his] works’ (11). The proclamation made by Shelley’s Ozymandias is contradictory to the historicity of Ramses II who built monuments on a grand scale to ensure his legacy would be remembered. Thus, the amendments made by Shelley are framed to elicit a strong response from his audience by maintaining an essential aspect of the Orient of

Oriental despotism.

In the last few lines of the sonnet, Shelley derives home the outcome of tyranny hrough the evocation of a barren and bleak landscape: ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of the Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away’ (12-14). Rodenbeck makes a valid point that ‘This setting is vital to the poem, since its theme or meaning requires that it evoke for us a place in which, apart from the portra.t statue of the tyrant, all other physical evidence of an empire shall have disappeared without a trace’ (129). The imagery of a 'Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare’, and ‘lone and level sands stretch far away’ does arouse an ‘affect’ of desolation the reader is supposed to feel, but it is also manufactured. Waith notes that ‘what is perhaps most striking, the ‘colossal wreck’ is not alone in the desert, surrounded by ‘lone and level sands,’ but in the midst of the substantial remains of a large temple’ (22). Shelley 62

disregards these facts. In depopulating the landscape, Shelley appropriates the Orient to sustain stereotypes of the distant degenerate ‘other’ in h s poem. 63

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