Romantic Orientalism

A more specific topic is the political interest of Romantic Orientalism can be described in terms of national identity, cultural difference, the morality of imperialist dominion, and consequent anxiety and guilt concerning such issues. One way Romantic Orientalist texts are thought to justify British imperialistic domination of non-Western countries is by describing these countries as "backward" or tyrannical in their political and social organization.

In the “romantic” period, “Orientalism” was a large concept, by no means to be defined with strict regard to the dictionary; and it is no more precise today. However, scientists mostly interpret “Oriental” in the narrow sense of “Eastern”; and naïvely, “Islamic Eastern”. We are aware that there were other areas of Orientalism – Armenian, for example – in which Byron was interested, but the Islamic East informs the largest portion of the poetry he wrote deriving from the subject – as well, of course, as being the one most relevant to our concerns today.

Opponents of such an approach, aware of the advantages of cultural variety, write of the Orient as a place in which one can redefine one’s self in new ways, not so much by penetrating and possessing it, as by “encountering” it, and in doing so, newly discovering oneself. The Orient can also be a place of violence, of oppression, or contrariwise of romance, of lost innocence recovered, or of paradisal strangeness, but it can also be a place of romantic disillusion, of innocence lost all over again, or of paradisal strangeness evaporated: a subject not for romance but for satire, where the disparity between ideal and real is, again, a source of laughter. In the Orient, everything is revealed as having the capacity to transmute into its complementary opposite – as happens in the Forest of Arden, or Bohemia, or Cyprus.

All these definitions and approaches are useful when discussing the life and works of Lord Byron. Byron’s Orientalism is often praised, and used as a contrast with that of other “romantic” writers, because it was based on experience. In medieval European epics and romances, written with the Crusades as background, and then in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the Turkish threat to Christian Europe hovering near, Islam was the enemy. In poetry, the dialogue between Islam and Christianity was, to put it mildly, simplistic.

However, by 1812, when Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the first of Byron’s Oriental poems, was published, the western perspective on the east had altered, at least in so far as academic studies were concerned. The threat to Europe from the Ottomans had long receded. Southey, Byron and Shelley all wrote in the pseudo-orientalist tradition, which Beckford had developed from an earlier eighteenth-century one. Shelley, who loathed Christianity, could not be expected to admire Islam; Byron, who respected Christianity as long as it was divorced from English cant, was much more friendly to its fellow-monotheism.

The Giaour, alone among Byron’s tales, is told in part from an Islamic viewpoint: and Byron enters into the spirit of, and seems master of a Moslem’s perspective. He knows enough to see that in killing Hassan, the Giaour has destroyed a fount of Islamic virtue, of which he, Byron, has had personal experience: Byron enjoyed using intriguingly similar oriental vocabulary, whose meaning only he could elucidate, via prose notes, thus emphasising his role as bold traveller, and expert in unknown areas that fascinated and thrilled. “Palampores” and “caïques”, “tophaikes” and “djereeds”, “ataghans” and “chaius’s” litter The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (though not The Corsair or The Siege of Corinth).

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1119