Critical Survey

Thirty years after its publication in 1978, a reconsideration of Edward Said’s Orientalism invites a shift from contextual and colonial discourse analysis towards a renewed attention to ambiguities of form and structure. The central point of interest of this special issue, ‘Re-Imagining the Victorian Orient’, hinges upon close readings of canonical and noncanonical texts, side by side, in order to highlight the complexities of Victorian literary culture that earlier readings often threatened to deny. The analyses comprise discussions of travel writing as well as of fiction from the 1830s up to the 1920s, covering what is commonly considered the height of imperialism. What brings the essays in this special issue together is the project of opening up the question of the Victorian Orient as a concept and a literary topos, based upon, but also beyond the critical tenets of Orientalism. While this project is rooted in literary history and the history of representation, its main emphasis firmly rests on a ‘texting’ of the Victorian East: an emphasis on genre, aesthetics, and structural metaphors. This collection is held together by the places it foregrounds as much as by this critical redirection towards textual analysis. Divided into two parts, it reads women’s travelogues covering the Middle East, South, and South East Asia, comparing and contrasting them with the ‘notorious’ colonial novels of Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, and Forster.

This essay considers epistemological vocabularies in aristocratic women’s travel writing of the Victorian period, examining the ways in which travelogues use ideas of ‘interest’ to stage the processing and dissemination of knowledge about, and personal experience of, ‘the Orient’ over the course of the nineteenth century. Each of the three travellers who are the main focus of my essay develops her own distinctive model of engagement with the regions in which she journeys: models which nevertheless all turn upon particular invocations of concepts of ‘interest’. I will first discuss what aspects of knowledge these writers are interested in and how they represent their own interest in the East, then analyse the ways through which the publication of their writings appeals to the interests of their British readership, before asking how the travellers’ best interests are furthered or hindered by the modes of epistemological authority they formulate. Ultimately, I argue that these inflections of interest reflect both the British upper class’s increasing emphasis on elite societal and cultural responsibility and, more generally, changing Victorian models of epistemological engagement with the Orient.

There is a striking tonal similarity amongst those who reviewed Emily Eden’s account of her journey with her brother George Auckland – the recently appointed Govenor-General of British India – across the northern provinces of the country between 1837 and 1840. On its publication in 1866, the Athenaeum decided that like Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Eden’s book had no information of interest to the Statistical Society. The Fortnightly Review agreed: ‘it is true that very little of what is commonly called “useful knowledge” will be found in these volumes’. Yet, it is precisely Eden’s failure to provide ‘useful knowledge’ that was seen as the strength of her work. Freshness, humour, feminine vivacity, grace, and charm were the typical adjectives employed to describe Eden’s prose. Moreover, the reviewers seem to have decided that Up the Country was best evoked in visual terms. The Athenaeum praised Eden for capturing the ‘picturesque appearance of Indian life’ and representing her ‘picturesque misery and magnificence’; the Fortnightly Review applauded the book as ‘a series of pictures true to life. In her letters we do not read about India; we see it’.

The starting point for this essay is Doris Yedamski’s pioneering research paper on ‘Women Travellers in the Malay Archipelago’. Yedamski begins by noting that, at the time of her paper, there had been no systematic study of women’s travel in the region (2). Yet, as she observes: ‘Travelling women in nineteenth-century Europe were far from being rare phenomena. As long as they visited relatives overseas, or sometimes went abroad for educational purposes, women were allowed to travel’ (31). There were, of course, other women travellers who did not fit into either of these categories. Shirley Foster, for example, notes how ‘health’ was also an acceptable motive for women’s travels, and draws attention to the paradoxical linkage (for women travellers) between ‘physical weakness and geographical mobility’. Nevertheless, Yedamski’s paper produces a useful typology of women travellers in the archipelago: ‘accompanying women’, solo travellers, or ‘unprotected females’ (to use the language of the time), and tourists. I will be using this typology (and many of Yedamski’s examples) later in the essay.

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is carefully wrought, formally balanced, stylistically elegant, and maddeningly, deliberately opaque where one wishes most for clarity. The novel recounts what seem to be two only marginally related narratives – the story of Fielding and Aziz and the story of Adela and Ronny. The question, ‘whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman’, the subject of the novel’s first conversation, and which presages the story of Fielding and Aziz, continues long after the story of Adela and Ronny – until, in fact, the book’s closing lines.1 Yet in spite of the novel’s carefully self-conscious structure, it is not at all clear why the answer to this framing thematic question, whether or not Indian and English men can be friends, should be explored in the context of the most conventional of all the conventions of the Anglo-Indian domestic novel: a young girl’s coming to India in order to marry.2 Nor is it clear why friendship between Indian and English men should turn on Aziz’s excursion with Mrs Moore and Adela to the Marabar Caves, although what happens there, and the aftermath, determines the course of friendship between Fielding and Aziz. Why, we might ask, do women emerge at the centre of a question about men? Why is the barrier separating Indian and English men posed in terms of English women’s response to India?

It is a testament to Said’s critical legacy that today it is almost inconceivable to approach the Victorian novel without considering the representation (or lack thereof) of race and imperialism. Said’s conceptualisation of Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between authors and their broader political context has made a new generation of readers acutely aware of the markers of Britain’s imperial progress that had hitherto been rendered invisible.

When James Brooke (1803–68), a former soldier of the East Indian Company, sailed for Borneo in 1838 as an adventurer and merchant, he was inspired by contemporary works of ethnology and geography, especially Thomas Stamford Raffles’s History of Java. Upon his arrival, he eagerly inquired after the languages and customs of native inhabitants. His interviews often took the form of inquiries into their religious beliefs, especially as to whether they had a concept of a supreme God, and if so, by which name he was known. Brooke religiously recorded in his journals the details of such interviews, and even the unease of his native informants, who occasionally had difficulty understanding what Brooke wanted when he insistently asked who and what their god was. Brooke’s inquiry was along the lines of comparative philology, which was at that time regarded as a vital methodology for the new human sciences.

Borrowing heavily from the opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Edward Said’s Orientalism suggests that imperialist acquisitiveness was excused through an anthropological rhetoric of geography: ‘The important thing was to dignify simple conquest with an idea, to turn the appetite for more geographical space into a theory about the special relationship between geography on the one hand and civilized or uncivilized peoples on the other.’1 Intriguingly anticipating this critique, in Lord Jim, Conrad explores the fallout of such idealisation both for the colonies and, more particularly, for the colonisers. The idealising rhetoric of justification that Said identifies has already been fully internalised by Jim so that he fails to recognise its fictional basis. It is exactly this problem of blurred boundaries between fictional ideal and the lived experience of reality that Conrad seeks to explore in the novel. This exploration takes place not only in the realm of colonialism, however, but also in that of narrative itself, so that the novel exhibits a certain sceptical self-reflexivity of the kind usually denied by Said to those orientalising authors he seeks to critique. This narratalogical self-consciousness is more pertinently discussed by Said in his 1974 essay, ‘Conrad: The Presentation of a Narrative’, yet here his focus refrains from acknowledging the ethical import of Conrad’s narrative play.2 What follows then is an exploration of Lord Jim that, without being an overtly Saidian reading of the novel, unpacks the ethical concerns that arise from the elision of fiction and reality in the ideal of romance.

At the Hospital MATT SIMPSON

Thorn Gruin's New Year Malediction THORN GRUIN

Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas by Martin Espada (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2008), 72pp. ISBN 0-9554028-1-6, New ISBN 978-0-9554028-1-4, £7.95

Seeds of Fire edited by Jon Andersen (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2008), 174pp. ISBN 0-9554028-2-4, New ISBN 978-0-9554028-2-1, £9.95

When the Metro is Free edited by Alan Dent (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2007), 98pp. ISBN 0-9551061-9-2, ISBN 978-0-955-10619-4, £7.95

Permanent Winter edited by Yana Glembotskaya and Oleg Burkov (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2007), 85pp. ISBN 0-9548691-2, ISBN 978-0-9548691-99, £7.95

Contains Mild Peril by Adrian Buckner (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008), 72pp. ISBN 978-1-905512-43-0, £7.00

Notes on contributors