Romanticism and Orientalism: Orientalizing the Orient in Romantic Poetry

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

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