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Are You Suprised ? ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS OF PERSIA IN THE WORKS OF SPENSER, MARLOWE, MILTON, MOORE AND MORIER By HOSSEIN PEERNAJMODIN Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Birmingham June 2002 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. To the memory of my brother Ali Abstract This study aims at investigating the representations of Persia in a number of canonical and non-canonical texts in English literature. The theoretical framework comes from Edward Said’s analysis of orientalism. It is argued that the case of Persia instances the heterogeneous and striated character of orientalism (‘representations’ rather than ‘representation’ in the title). It is shown that while a number of relatively similar set of motifs and topoi, mainly derived from classical tradition and contemporary travel writing, circulate in the works of the three Renaissance authors included (Spenser, Marlowe, Milton), they are differently inflected and serve different thematic and ideological purposes. It is also suggested that the somewhat nascent orientalism of these authors develops into a more fully-fledged one in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh where a basically Romantic notion of Persia as an exotic land is overridden by its construction as a realm fallen to foreign domination and cultural dispossession so as to displace the poet’s radical political views. Finally, it is shown how the motifs and topoi teased out in the analysis of the matter of Persia in the works of the authors preceding James Morier find their characteristic form and their most effective articulation in his fiction, especially the Hajji Baba novels which arrogate the representation of the ‘real’ Persia. Central to the analysis is the point that though Said’s theorisation of orientalism is immensely useful, and essential, to any consideration of the orientalist canon, issues such as masquerading and displacing as well as the specificities of each text, of its context, and of the object of representation, compound the notion of orientalism as merely a mode of Western domination and hegemony. (Approximately 72, 000 words.) ACKNOWLEGEMENTS Professor Ian Small’s many insightful comments and ideas inform this study. I would like to thank him for being an ideal supervisor in every respect. I am also thankful to Professor Mark Storey who supervised part of this thesis. My thanks also go to M. Mokhtari Ardakani and Dr Behzad Ghaderi, of Kerman University, Iran, who have always been sources of inspiration and encouragement to me. I would like to thank Professor James T. Boulton for his useful comments as well. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Maryam, for her unfailing support and patience. ORIENTALIST REPRESENTATIONS OF PERSIA IN THE WORKS OF SPENSER, MARLOWE, MILTON, MOORE AND MORIER CHAPTER I: Introduction 1 CHAPTER II: Pompous Monarchs: The Faerie Queene 8 CHAPTER III: The Imperial Map: Tamburlaine the Great 36 CHAPTER IV: Evil Kings: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained 56 CHAPTER V: Exotic Persia: Lalla Rookh 91 CHAPTER VI: The ‘Real’ Persia: The Hajji Baba Novels 144 CHAPTER VII: Conclusion 224 Bibliography 229 CHAPTER I Introduction The idea of this study occurred to me when I first read James Morier’s Hajji Baba. Before reading I had a dim notion of what I could expect in a novel written some two centuries ago by a British imperial functionary about a Muslim Eastern country. What I did not expect was for the novel to be so overwhelming in its style, so ‘well-written’ as a piece of orientalism. The experience, which no doubt owed much of its poignancy to my being an Iranian, led me to investigate other representations of Persia and the Persian in English literature. Tracing these figurations was a task in itself. Eventually, I selected works by three canonical and two non-canonical authors and a number of lesser texts, as regards the object of this analysis, as an exhaustive survey is beyond the scope of a single study. The theoretical framework comes from Edward Said’s groundbreaking analysis of orientalism.1 Borrowing Foucault’s concept of discursive formations and articulation of knowledge with power Said has emphasised the complicity of orientalism as a form of ‘knowledge’ about the Orient with European imperialism and colonialism. Said’s pivotal thesis in Orientalism is that texts of orientalism ‘can create not only knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe.’2 As such, orientalism is defined as ‘a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient.’3 Elsewhere, Said puts this as: ‘Orientalism is the Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’, an ‘archival system’ which helped the West achieve its hegemony by rendering invisible the ‘actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship, on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force on the other.’4 ‘The relationship between Occident and Orient’, Said maintains, ‘is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.’5 Following Said, the field of colonial discourse theory concerned with the analysis of the body of texts about the others of the West, oriental and non-oriental, has proved an 1 animated and fruitful one. As Robert J. C. Young puts it, the importance of Said’s work in this regard lies in that it has shifted ‘the study of colonialism among cultural critics towards the discursive operations, showing the intimate connection between the forms of language and the forms of knowledge deployed for the study of cultures and the history of colonialism and imperialism.’6 Said’s model of orientalism has been subject to a number of charges. For example, it has been pointed out that Said poses the category of ‘the human’, in its basically Western conception of it, instead of that of the Orient, which he refuses to recognise; that his ethical and theoretical values are altogether too ‘deeply involved in the history of the culture he criticizes’; that ‘culture’ for him ‘always remains exclusively European high culture’; that he tries to ‘combine Foucauldian and Derridean methods and Gramscian dedication to social change’; that if true representation is taken as an impossibility, ‘on what ground is he criticizing the Orientalists?’7 The chief criticism levelled at Said’s account of orientalism (and the most relevant one to this study), however, is probably one which holds that it is monolithic, that it flattens many heterogeneities and nuances. As Dennis Porter puts it: Unlike Foucault, who posits not a continuous discourse over time but epistemological breaks between different periods, Said asserts the unified character of Western discourse on the Orient over some two millenia, a unity derived from a common and continuous experience of fascination with and threat from the East, of its irreducible otherness.8 It is against this backdrop that Homi K. Bhabha has argued for ambivalence and ‘the splitting of colonial discourse’, which produces the possibility of resistance to its hegemonic process.9 Bhabha ‘has shown’, in Young’s words, ‘how colonial discourse of any kind operated not only as an instrumental construction of knowledge but also according to the ambivalent protocols of fantasy and desire.’10 Said’s ‘inadequate attention’, in the words of Ali Behdad, ‘to the complexities of power relations between the orientalist and the oriental makes him reaffirm in a sense an essentialist epistemology that derives its authority from the dichotomies it puts forth.’11 2 A number of studies of orientalist and colonial texts have tried to take into account the heterogeneities in the history of orientalism and colonialism. For instance, contending that ‘Said’s world picture is itself bounded by its own ideology, dividing its territory into West and East, self and other, and leaving out the complicated presence of the “third world” of Africa … and of a fourth, the “New World”, neither of which can be accommodated within a self / other binarism’, Emily Bartels has tried to address the ‘third’ terms which compound the binarism of orientalism in her study of Marlowe.12 Or, in her investigation of women’s travel writing Sara Mills has taken on board the problem, neglected in Said, of gender, ‘the way that women writers had to negotiate different textual constraints.’13 One more example of the concern with these heterogeneities can be found in Peter Hulme’s classic Colonial Encounters where he shows, for instance, that in Columbus’s diaries there are side by side a discourse of (African, Caribbean) savagery and a discourse of Oriental civilisation.14 Despite all the criticisms rightly or wrongly levelled at Said’s theorisation of orientalisam, his analysis remains immensely useful in providing a vocabulary with which to deal with the representations of the East. In the final analysis, though it is crucial to note that while his rather unified vision of orientalism does not allow for the fissures and rifts in orientalist or colonial texts, these disharmonising effects should not be overestimated. For, as Mills reminds us, ‘without the notion of a dominant reading’ one can hardly explain ‘the power that these texts have had.’ Hence, ‘it is necessary to be aware of the reception of these texts and the fact that they did serve a role in the process of affirming and reaffirming’ colonial or imperial domination.15 My probing of the representations of Persia in the texts I have selected, especially in my chapter dealing with James Morier’s Hajji Baba novels, will, I hope, bear out the point at issue.
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