The notion that poetry’s goal is to amuse and instruct the reader is a venerable one in Western aesthetics. In his Poetics, Aristotle links “the art of poetry” to both “pleasure” and “learning.”1 Horace explains that:
The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. [...] He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend the fame of the author.2
From the outset, canonical English critics adopt Horace’s stance as their own, though with varying degrees of emphasis and usually without such blunt acknowledgment of poets’ financial motives. Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595), for instance, describes poetry’s “end” as “to teach and delight,” and goes on to “affirm, that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach and move thereto so much as Poetry.”3 A century and a half later, Samuel Johnson concurs succinctly: “The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.”4
As the turn of the nineteenth century approaches, this formulation remains basic, but its articulation becomes more complex. In 1786 Joshua Reynolds proposes that “the true test of all the arts is [whether] the production [...] answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.”5 Horace’s dictum is clearly in view here, but Reynolds departs from it in decisively emphasizing pleasure rather than instruction. William Hazlitt follows Reynolds’s lead, proclaiming that “Poetry [...] relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.” Although Hazlitt does not discount poetry’s ability to improve the human mind, his terms are much less pedagogical than Sidney’s or Johnson’s: “Poetry,” he says, “is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being.”6 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s analysis of poetry’s function in A Defence of Poetry (1821) avoids the pedagogical as well. Shelley declares first that “Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure.” Poetry’s ability “to produce the moral improvement of man,” on the other hand, depends not upon “schemes,” “examples,” or “doctrines,” but rather upon poetry’s capacity to “awaken and enlarge the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”7 These general directives apply equally to orientalist poetry in the early nineteenth century; for example, Walter Scott’s review of Southey’s The Curse of Kehama evaluates that poem according to the same customary criteria of “pleasure” and “edification.”8
As we turn now to Shelley’s long poem The Revolt of Islam (1817), and later to Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), we should carry away two points from the preceding discussion. First, as the comments of both Hazlitt and Shelley reveal, there is at this time a certain prejudice against explicitly didactic poetry; if a poem instructs, it should do so by simply representing beauty so as to enlarge the mind.9 Second, no critic or poet during the early nineteenth century can raise the issue of poetry’s function without making reference to the traditional perception of poetry as a vehicle for the delight and instruction of the reader. Given that this idea is a fundamental tenet of early nineteenth-century poetics, any comprehensive view of orientalist poetics during this time must take into account orientalist poetry’s engagement with it. This chapter will show how The Revolt of Islam and Thalaba the Destroyer polarize the classical terms, exaggerating both instruction and amusement in such a way as to undermine the classical doctrine while appearing to support it. Moreover, whereas entertainment and edification are both conventionally linked with the central notion of mimesis, these poems also begin to question the primacy of mimesis. In each case, the poem’s orientalism is essential to its experimental aesthetic stance.
Despite its oriental setting, Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam is meant, according to Shelley’s preface to it, to communicate the lessons of the French Revolution. The poem proved to be unpopular, although its pedagogical impulses were probably less to blame than the poem’s (and the poet’s) unconventional morality; reviewers tended to criticize the poem on the basis of the sexual improprieties of Shelley’s life.10 Nonetheless, the preface reveals, with characteristic defensiveness, a certain anxiety about the poem’s substantial didactic component. Shelley insists that the poem is “narrative, not didactic,” even while admitting that it is composed “in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality.”11 It cannot be didactic, he says, because
I have made no attempt to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument. I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those inquiries which have led to my moral and political creed, and that of some of the sublimest intellects in the world.12
Even if a poem’s aim is the moral improvement of its readers, Shelley claims, the poem is not didactic unless it contains a “methodical and systematic argument.” Given the absence of such an argument in The Revolt of Islam, the poem’s chief structural feature — its narrativeness — becomes supposedly the defining one, with narrative and argumentative/didactic presumed to be mutually exclusive.13
Although Shelley goes on to discuss in greater detail the lessons of the French Revolution that he plans to convey, he does not explain why he has selected an oriental setting for this purpose. On the contrary, he specifies that he has “chosen a story of human passion in its most universal character [...] appealing [...] to the common sympathies of every human breast.”14 In the context of such universal moral aims, the poem’s Middle Eastern characters and its siting in Turkey appear without consequence, as Shelley states explicitly in a letter written at the time. He asserts first that he has “attempted [...] to speak to the common elementary emotions of the human heart,” and then firmly denies any significance to his setting’s oriental identity:
The scene is supposed to be laid in Constantinople and modern Greece, but without much attempt at minute delineation of Mahometan manners. It is in fact a tale illustrative of such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in a European nation [...] It is a revolution of this kind that is the beau ideal, as it were, of the French Revolution.15
Indeed, it is almost as if the choice of an oriental setting serves paradoxically to guarantee the universality of the story by freeing the idealized revolution from the specificity of France, the site of its failure.
The emphasis on the story’s universality is consistent throughout The Revolt of Islam. Briefly, the poem traces the following course: after a largely allegorical first canto, the speaker encounters the three main characters. These are the poet Laon, Cythna (also known as Laone), who is Laon’s wife and fellow social reformer, and the tyrant Othman. Other figures include the Hermit, who provides spiritual guidance to Laon, and Cythna’s daughter, who is the result of Othman’s rape of Cythna, but who is identified as Laon’s child in spirit. Troubled by many setbacks, Laon and Cythna attempt the reform and liberation of the Golden City (Constantinople).16 Their peaceful revolution, based on the principle of love, succeeds in deposing Othman. However, Othman quickly and violently regains his throne, and Laon and Cythna are put to death, achieving joy only in the afterlife. The outcome of this revolution is not much happier than that of the French original. The main difference is the attitude taken by Laon and Cythna, who reject the idea of revenge for past or present wrongs and who are committed to achieving their aims without bloodshed. It is chiefly in this respect, and in the exalted role given to Laon as a poet, that The Revolt of Islam becomes the “beau ideal” of the French Revolution.17
Shelley’s emphasis both on the universality of the story and on its derivation from the French Revolution raises once again the obvious question: why is this poem set in the Orient? There are several answers. First, although the French Revolution is Shelley’s point of reference, it is ultimately only the most immediate example of what he sees as a phenomenon of human history; as Marilyn Butler says, he is interested in “the generic structure of revolutions.”18 His thought experiment in political philosophy here need not then be compromised by being limited to the particulars of a single nation’s experience. Moreover, given that he wishes his poem to help dissipate the “infectious gloom” that followed the failure of the French Revolution,19 he would scarcely choose to reproduce the same flawed course of events. He needs a different revolutionary path; obviously, this would be easier to construct if he did not locate his revolution in France. Finally, by selecting an entirely different setting and a revolt with no apparent correlate to any actual event in history, Shelley is liberated from any need for historical correctness, which might have both required burdensome additional research and inhibited his development of the story.20
These rationales for choosing a setting other than France would be equally valid for any setting, oriental or not. An oriental setting offers several advantages, however. First, the situation of the Ottoman Turkish empire at this time offered a partial parallel to that of late-eighteenth-century France. Butler, for instance, situates The Revolt of Islam as one in
a whole series of poems by well-connected liberal poets welcoming the prospect of revolution in the Middle East. [These poems] describe revolutions, or failed revolutions, directed against an Asiatic old regime that has the same characteristics as European old regimes. In this period of Napoleon’s decline and fall, when European old regimes were being reinstated, it was widely expected that the Ottoman empire would soon break up: it appealed to radicals, then, as the likeliest site for a hoped-for replay of the French Revolution.21
But if the Middle East’s historical particularity makes it useful as a revolutionary location, its lack thereof does so as well. As Edward Said and other scholars have pointed out, the Orient is stereotypically an unchanging place, neither subject to the passage of historical time nor extant in any historical present.22 Azade Seyhan elaborates:
In the final analysis, one can argue that Romanticism’s exotic Orient remained just that, a faraway time and place whose traditions and symbolic wealth the Romantics excavated, carried off, and converted to their own currency without attempting to understand its historical present. Furthermore, escape into another time before time assured the subject a kind of theoretical innocence by sublating the ideological bonds of one’s own history.23
The Orient, then, offers a venue for the poet’s disentanglement from the complications of history. As Seyhan remarks, “the exotic, perceived as distance in time and space, provides access to the absent”24 — or in this case, to that never-was, the universalized “beau ideal.” In the words of Nigel Leask, Shelley appropriates the East “as an uncluttered site for the fulfillment of frustrated dreams of liberty.”25 The Orient’s otherness is important in this context not because it supplies any specific features but precisely for its lack of historical specificity, which allows Shelley to inscribe onto it a universalizing revision of European history.26 However, it is not really that he “translate[s] British imperialism into a displaced form of revolutionary politics which, in the name of universal enlightenment, alchemize[s] the Other into the Same,” as Leask argues.27 Rather, from the material of recent European history and a conventional, ahistorical Orient, Shelley creates a universalized entity both other and same, both oriental and European.
The Revolt of Islam retains its otherness most distinctly in its reliance on the Islamic Middle East’s conventional association with tyranny and slavery.28 Shelley’s professed hatred of tyranny and slavery is of course not limited to their oriental manifestations, but his poems consistently associate these horrors with the Middle East. His famous sonnet “Ozymandias” (1817) profiles a pharaonic, rather than an Islamic, tyrant, but the setting is unmistakably Middle Eastern. Indeed, when read with Shelley’s contemporaneous poems featuring Islamic tyrants, “Ozymandias” gives the impression of a genealogy of Middle Eastern tyranny reaching back to Ozymandias (Ramses II) in the thirteenth century BCE.29 Hellas (1822), Shelley’s only other predominantly orientalist longer poem, is, like The Revolt of Islam, set in Constantinople and concerned with a political conflict; Hellas treats the struggle between Turkey and Greece. Shelley’s sympathies lie clearly with the Greeks, and his portrayal of Islam in this poem is more hostile than in The Revolt of Islam. However, his linkage of Islam with tyranny and violence is equally firm in the two poems.30
Although the association of the Orient with tyranny and slavery would have been commonly assumed by Shelley’s readers, the poet is still careful to confirm it in his preface to The Revolt of Islam. As he somewhat arrogantly justifies his disregard for his critics’ opinions, Shelley describes the unconcerned attitude that he supposes Lucretius to have had towards his own critics “when he meditated that poem whose doctrines are yet the basis of our metaphysical knowledge, and whose eloquence has been the wonder of mankind.”31 Although Shelley identifies Lucretius’s critics as “the hired sophists of the impure and superstitious noblemen of Rome,”32 the origin of these “sophists” is not Rome but farther east:
It was at the period when Greece was held captive, and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigotted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, in favour of that contempt for virtue which is the portion of slaves, and that faith in portents, the most fatal substitute for benevolence in the imaginations of men, which, arising from the enslaved communities of the East, then first began to overwhelm the western nations in its stream.33
What Shelley holds against these pre-Islamic Syrians is not their easternness per se but rather their overdetermined affiliation with tyranny and slavery. On the other hand, their easternness is defined largely in terms of that affiliation. In this brief passage, for instance, words relating directly to slavery occur six times, all but once in connection with “the East.”34 Tyranny is implicit in the references to “the vices and vanities of the great,” and to the threat of eastern moral decadence beginning “to overwhelm the western nations in its stream.” Indeed, Shelley draws the reader’s particular attention to this threat by ending his expostulation with it. By implication, then, the worst thing about tyranny (with its accompanying evils) in “the East” is that it might “overwhelm the western nations.” As the East is identified by its tyranny, the victory of tyranny in the West would constitute a victory of the East itself over the West.35
Having thus informed the reader in the preface that tyranny and the East are closely (and alarmingly) linked, Shelley seldom introduces this question in the poem itself, focusing instead on tyranny per se. Where he does return to the Orient’s connection with tyranny, though, he reaffirms it emphatically. The figure of the tyrant Othman is central here, for his orientalness (both of person and of surroundings) is stressed as no one else’s. He is the only figure given an Arabic name; Laon and Cythna/Laone both have more or less Greek names, and the other characters are generally given a type (“the Hermit,” etc.) rather than a name.36 While the use of Greek names suggests an association, however vague, with supposedly universal humanist values, the Arabic name has a much more particular, as well as more negative, connotation. It cannot be a coincidence that Shelley chooses the same well-known name, “Othman,” to symbolize Turkish military power in Hellas, or that the term “Ottoman” and the name “Othman” are etymologically related. Moreover, by naming only these three characters in The Revolt of Islam, divided as they are into two opposing camps along a binary cultural axis, Shelley reaffirms and specifies the element of threat introduced in his preface. In the preface, classical Rome and “the western nations” were opposed by a morally and politically corrupt “East;” now in the poem itself, the Greek world, with its classical and humanist associations, stands against the Islamic Middle East, represented by a tyrant who deceives, kidnaps, imprisons, rapes, and kills.
It is to be expected, then, that when Othman is at his cruelest he is also at his most explicitly oriental. The scene that describes his plan to imprison Cythna provides an example:
The King felt pale upon his noonday throne:
At night two slaves he to her chamber sent,
One was a green and wrinkled eunuch, grown
From human shape into an instrument
Of all things ill — distorted, bowed and bent.
The other was a wretch from infancy
Made dumb by poison; who nought knew or meant
But to obey: from the fire-isles came he,
A diver lean and strong, of Oman’s coral sea. (7.64–72)37
The power of the King — his tyranny — is carefully emphasized in the first line by the prominent (and otherwise irrelevant) mention of the throne. He exercises this power by dispatching the two slaves; tyranny and slavery are, as usual, conjoined. Only when the characteristics of these slaves are specified in the third line, though, does the orientalization begin. The first slave is a “green and wrinkled eunuch.” The fact of his castration makes an immediate reference to (unnatural) oriental practice; so too do his color and texture. Not only does his greenness allude to the pallor of the tyrant, mentioned in the first line, thereby once again conflating slavery and tyranny, but the bizarre appearance of this person refers directly, if implicitly, to the unnaturalness that typifies the Orient. Moreover, the human status of this oriental eunuch is characteristically unclear.38 Not only is the eunuch a slave, and therefore in the legal category of property rather than person, but he is also outside both of the two basic categories of human being, male and female. And were this not enough, he is also morally inhuman: “grown / From human shape into an instrument / Of all things ill.”39
The second slave’s position is similar; he is deprived of his voice rather than his testes, but since both are instruments of power, the result is much the same. This second slave, like the first, lacks both human agency and moral independence, relying instead upon the tyrant’s initiative (he “nought knew or meant / But to obey”). While his artificial muteness, like the first slave’s castration, makes implicit reference to the Orient, his Middle Eastern identity is even more clearly specified: “from the fire-isles came he, / A diver lean and strong, of Oman’s coral sea.” Although this description’s immediate purpose is to identify the slave’s origin, it also confirms the oriental quality of the entire scene. The virtually unlimited play the scene gives both tyranny and slavery on the one hand and the scene’s heightened orientalism on the other hand enable and reinforce each other to such a degree that the oriental and the tyrannical become fundamentally indivisible. The Islamic Middle East, then, is defined in this poem as a place desperately in need of revolution; as such, it is an especially productive site for the revolution of liberty and love that Shelley proposes for the inspiration of his readers.
The lessons of The Revolt of Islam extend from the political to the moral, however, and there again, the Turkish setting proves valuable. As Shelley criticizes both religion and sexism, he calls upon the Islamic Orient’s association with this pair of moral ills. Religion and sexism function both as allies of tyranny and as forms of tyranny in their own right. Religion’s alliance with tyranny is exposed most plainly towards the end of the poem (especially the tenth canto), where “kings and priests” (10.60) are joined in defense of the status quo and against the revolt on behalf of liberty. In the end, it is a priest who instigates the execution of revolutionary leaders Laon and Cythna (10.344). “Faith” and “tyranny” are presented as twin evils, to be “trampled down” together (10.294). The notion of religion as a form of tyranny is also established firmly in this stanza of the poem. The priests praise God in virtually the same terms that are used elsewhere to censure the tyrant (10.244–6), in effect positioning God as the ultimate tyrant, whose priests — themselves petty spiritual tyrants — are as disinterested in freedom as their political allies are.
Although the poem’s censure of religion in general is unmistakable, its view of the individual creeds, and especially of Islam, is harder at first to discern.40 On the one hand, all religious denominations, including Islam, are grouped together. When the speaker relates the priests’ various appeals in time of plague, for instance, he describes how
Oromaze, and Christ, and Mahomet,
Moses, and Buddh, Zerdusht, and Brahm, and Foh,
A tumult of strange names, which never met
Before, as watchwords of a single woe,
Arose (10.271–5)41
The point of these lines is clearly the unity of faiths, but this unity evaporates in the remainder of the stanza:
each raging votary ‘gan to throw
Aloft his armed hands, and each did howl
“Our God alone is God!” and slaughter now
Would have gone forth (10.275–8)
Although all denominations appear to be equally condemned, the phrase “Our God alone is God!” refers to part of the Muslim declaration of faith. The choice of these words to symbolize the evil of denominational religion thus lays blame more forcefully upon Muslims than upon the Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus who are equally involved.42
The task of defining this poem’s treatment of Islam is complicated by the revisions that Shelley’s publisher, Charles Oilier, fearing prosecution and loss of business, demanded at the urging of both his printer and his customers.43 These changes fall into two categories. First, in Shelley’s original version, entitled Laon and Cythna, the hero and heroine are brother and sister rather than the childhood friends they appear in The Revolt of Islam. As in The Revolt of Islam, though, they become lovers; Oilier evidently felt that this incest would be too risky to include.44 Second, the antireligious, and specifically the anti-Christian, views so dominant in the original are muted somewhat.45
The moderation of atheistic sentiments can easily be traced in the characterization of the priest who suggests Laon and Cythna’s execution. In Laon and Cythna, he is introduced as “a Christian Priest” (10.280) and his Christianity is emphasized as the story proceeds. This accentuated Christian identification disappears in the revised The Revolt of Islam. The priest is now “an Iberian Priest.” His belief in “His cradled Idol, and the sacrifice, / Of God to God’s own wrath” is rephrased to convert the attack on Jesus Christ into a mere theological statement: “The expiation and the sacrifice” (10.302–3).46
However, the revision’s softer approach to Christianity entails a harsher treatment of Islam. For instance, whereas in Laon and Cythna the Christian priest’s mission is “[t]o quell the rebel Atheists” (10.283), it is in The Revolt of Islam “[t]o quell the unbelievers.” By replacing “rebel Atheists” with “unbelievers,” the stanza shifts the threat away from the Christian domain and into the Muslim one. (“Unbeliever,” a word not prevalent in Christian discourse, is the usual English translation of the Arabic “kâfir.”) The move to protect Christianity at the expense of Islam is manifested too in the change in the poem’s title. Originally Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century, the revised poem was published as The Revolt of Islam; A Poem in Twelve Cantos. Although Shelley in a letter glosses “the golden city” as Constantinople,47 the original title gives no clue to the poem’s oriental or Islamic identity. When the title is revised, “Islam” replaces “the golden city” as a location, safely removing Europe and Christianity from the immediate danger of revolution. Moreover, by making “Islam” a region as well as religion, Shelley implicitly posits Islam and the Orient/Middle East as interchangeable terms. In turn, this interchangeability implies and assumes the dominance of religion, specifically Islam, over the Orient. Given that the Orient is affiliated with tyranny, and that religion itself is a manifestation of tyranny, the Orient’s identification with Islam is logically consistent, even inevitable. Shelley’s revised title simply encapsulates a set of associations already elaborated within the poem but particularly accentuated in the revision.
Like religion, men’s oppression of women appears in The Revolt of Islam as a form of tyranny with peculiarly intimate connections to the Islamic East. Cythna is his usual mouthpiece on this subject, and she consistently uses terms familiar from the discussion of political tyranny to describe the relationship between men and women.48 Indeed, what might be considered the best synopsis of Shelley’s hopes for political liberty is articulated by Cythna in the context of sexist oppression:
ye might arise, and will
That gold should lose its power, and thrones their glory;
That love, which none may bind, be free to fill
The world, like light; and evil faith, grown hoary
With crime, be quenched and die. (8.136–40)
This canto ends with the freeing of women who had been enslaved for the tyrant Othman’s pleasure; the effect is to make political tyranny indistinguishable from sexual domination. The relationship between men and women is functionally equivalent to that between tyrants and slaves, the poem implies. While such a formulation was not commonly applied by Britons to their own culture at this time, it had the status of conventional wisdom when applied to the Islamic East. Much European condemnation of oriental tyranny arose (as it still does) from moral indignation at the presumed oriental subordination of women. As Lisa Lowe explains, the enslavement of Middle Eastern women becomes as a “constructed topos,” “a sign for oriental barbarism” in orientalist discourse of the period.49 Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist and the mother of Shelley’s second wife, uses references to “the seraglio” as counterpoints to her remarks on British male-female relations. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), for example, posed the Islamic Orient as a kind of worst-case scenario where women, “in the true Mohametan strain,” are “deprive[d ...] of souls” and, “in blind obedience [to] tyrants and sensualists,” “supinely dream life away in the lap of pleasure.”50 By situating his tale in the Islamic Middle East, Shelley lends the ring of truth to his version of relations between the sexes and therefore, by analogy, to the rest of his ideological package, including opposition to political tyranny and to the tyranny of religion.51
The Revolt of Islam appears as a long parable: narrative indeed, but with a didactic purpose always in view. Shelley’s espousal of didacticism — albeit hidden behind the “narrative” label and form — would be less significant had he not written this poem in an age when didacticism had largely fallen from favor. Aware that poetry’s limits as an instructional medium were narrower than they had been for many of his predecessors, Shelley seems intent on testing those limits, just as he tests the limits of conventional political and social morality.
Orientalism plays an indispensable role in this endeavor. As I have shown, the Orient’s stereotypical characteristics (especially its ahistoricity and its multiple tyrannies) serve Shelley’s message well. Equally important, however, is the role orientalism plays in counteracting the poem’s didacticism, through two independent mechanisms. First, whereas any return to didacticism is aesthetically retrograde, any treatment of the Orient is, if not cutting-edge, at least up-to-date. Orientalism, then, provides a screen behind which the poem’s didactic dimensions can be expanded, since a didactic orientalist poem may appear less offensively didactic than an ordinary didactic poem. Second, oriental(ist) literature’s association with entertainment serves to counteract The Revolt of Islam’s strong moralizing tendencies. Nineteenth-century readers typically expected plentiful entertainment from any “oriental tale” inspired by the 1001 Nights and characterized by an ahistorical, nonrealist depiction of the Middle East.52 Although The Revolt of Islam does not directly name the 1001 Nights as its source or model, certain of its structural aspects, such as the presence of multiple narrative frames, readily recall the 1001 Nights.53 The general orientalness of the tale is reinforced throughout by means such as the otherwise gratuitous use of desert images (e.g. “multitudinous as the desert sand / Borne on the storm” [2.403–4]), and the repeated references to dream, which is for various reasons conventionally associated with the Orient. In short, The Revolt of Islam takes advantage of the presumption that the Orient is a place where the excitingly implausible — even the impossible — can appear unproblematically verisimilar.
These tactics of orientalization are at least somewhat effective. In his edition of Shelley’s works, William Michael Rossetti (brother and editor of Victorian poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti) says of The Revolt of Islam: “It affects the mind something like an enchanted palace of the Arabian Nights. One is wonderstruck both at the total creation, and at every shifting aspect of it.”54 Would Rossetti have been “wonderstruck” by this poem in the absence of these oriental elements? Perhaps, but not likely, for he goes on to acknowledge that “one does not expect to find in it any detail of the absolute artistic perfection of a Greek gem, nor any inmate of consummate interest to the heart.” His admiration, then, depends mainly upon the orientalism of the poem, since despite its “originality” he finds it lacking both artistically and emotionally.55 Given the poem’s lack of consistent artistic and emotional appeal (aptly diagnosed by William Rossetti), only the poem’s value as amusement is likely to draw the reader through twelve long cantos. The Orient (in its entertaining rather than its timeless and tyrannical guise) is essential to this effort. The strongly narrative form of the 1001 Nights and, to a lesser degree, of the Europeanized oriental tale lends credibility (at least by association) to Shelley’s claim that the poem is “narrative, not didactic.” In effect, it is The Revolt of Islam’s orientalism that allows Shelley to assert with any legitimacy at all that, for all its moral instruction, the poem is not didactic.
The Revolt of Islam is unconventional chiefly in two respects: first, in its didacticism during a period where didacticism was disfavored; and second, in its morality — liberal, but also atheist and feminist. In both cases, the poem’s oriental setting plays an enabling role. As Alan Richardson points out, oriental(ist) literature (especially that related to the 1001 Nights) was a common basis for morally didactic works in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.56 However, the unconventional morality of The Revolt of Islam clearly distinguishes it from such texts as Maria Edgeworth’s orientalist story “Murad the Unlucky” (1804), which preaches a conservative, almost puritanical message.57 The poem’s engagement with aesthetic experimentation also sets it apart from earlier efforts at orientalist moralizing. As a whole, The Revolt of Islam polarizes the terms of the long-standing debate over poetry’s purpose. Whereas his predecessors, from Horace to Johnson, assumed that the relationship between amusement and instruction was complementary, Shelley places the two terms in an essentially conflicting relationship in which amusement serves to counteract instruction. At the same time, whereas his contemporaries tended to privilege amusement over instruction, Shelley does the opposite, despite his rhetoric to the contrary. Even while maintaining the tension between instruction and entertainment, he uses entertainment to facilitate the poem’s instructional purpose. Through his orientalism, Shelley accentuates the didactic as well as the delightful, developing an approach aesthetically distinct from both his predecessors’ moderation and mutuality and his contemporaries’ emphasis on pleasure.
Despite the Islamic Middle East’s great importance to the poetics of The Revolt of Islam, it remains chiefly a medium. Shelley’s choice of the Orient as a setting is subordinate to his aesthetic, moral, social, and political agendas. The opposite is true of Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer. This poem is as didactic as The Revolt of Islam, but whereas Shelley offers chiefly moral lessons, Southey instructs his reader in the Orient itself. Compared to the elaborate political morality of Shelley’s poem, Thalaba’s moral values are simplistic; good, in the person of Thalaba, battles evil, represented by denizens of “the Domdaniel [...] a seminary for evil magicians, under the roots of the sea.”58 The scheme remains uncomplicated since there is never any serious doubt about good’s ultimate victory. Unlike Shelley, whose aspirations to universality lead him to suppress the Orient, Southey brings the Orient into relief. Thalaba shares with The Revolt of Islam a relation to the orientalist literature of morality discussed by Richardson, but Thalaba’s morality is clearly less important than its orientalism. Motivated by what Richard Hoffpauir has called “[a]n intense desire to explain,”59 Southey emphasizes all the Orient’s particularities with a sort of earnest delight that reminds one of the obsessively detailed orientalist paintings of the nineteenth century.
As a result, the Orient has of course a more prominent status in Southey’s poem, but the Orient’s tyranny and moral degradation are not emphasized. While Southey would almost certainly have agreed with Shelley’s vision of oriental morality, he pointedly avoids pursuing it. He defends what at least one of his critics saw as a “flattering misrepresentation” by explaining that
Thalaba the Destroyer was professedly an Arabian Tale. The design required that I should bring into view the best features of that system of belief and worship which had been developed under the Covenant with Ishmael, placing in the most favorable light the morality of the Koran, and what the least corrupted of the Mahommedans retain of the patriarchal faith. It would have been altogether incongruous to have touched upon the abominations engrafted upon it.60
Tyranny, or in Southey’s words, “the spirit of Oriental despotism,” is chief among those abominations to be disregarded.61 In this atmosphere of (implicitly colonialist) relativism, Thalaba’s presentation of the Islamic Orient lacks a strong moral component. Instead, it stresses manners, customs, and geography in its portrayal of the region. There is no question that Southey was attracted to his subject mainly by its oriental identity rather than, as in Shelley’s case, by its potential as a medium for a culturally generalized message. Southey takes pains in a later preface to Thalaba to assure his reader that “this poem was neither crudely conceived nor hastily undertaken. I had fixed upon the ground, four years before, for a Mahommedan tale,” the first in a series of narrative poems with “mythological” subjects.62
Although Southey identifies Thalaba as “a narrative poem” in this preface, there is no corresponding reference, as in Shelley, to didacticism, nor is there any of Shelley’s defensiveness. There are at least three possible explanations for Southey’s evident self-confidence. First of all, unlike Shelley, Southey is communicating information rather than morals; he can simply offer the information, letting the readers take of it what they will without worrying about their resistance to his preaching. Second, while Shelley, who had done little research on the Orient before portraying it in his poem, made a point of not attempting “minute delineation of Mahometan manners,”63 Southey was proud of his extensive reading on the subject. In the four years between settling upon the idea of “a Mahommedan tale,” and beginning its composition, Southey not only “formed” the “plan” of the poem, but also “collected” the “materials,”64 many of which appear in the poem’s very extensive notes. This process is mentioned several times in his letters, always with enthusiasm despite occasional complaints. On August 22, 1800, for instance, he writes: “I have been polishing and polishing, adding and adding, and my unlearned readers ought to thank me very heartily for the toil, unpleasant and unproductive, of translating so many notes.”65 In short, Southey’s research reflects the value he ascribes to the instruction of his poem’s “unlearned readers,” even while his primary identification of Thalaba is as a narrative poem. Unlike Shelley, he seems entirely unconcerned about the possibility of any conflict between his narrative and his didactic intentions. In addition, as Peter Morgan has pointed out, Southey’s attitude towards poetry as instruction is relatively favorable;66 certainly he is less ambivalent on this score than Shelley.
In particular, Southey seems to accept oriental(ist) literature as naturally and desirably informative. This conception of oriental(ist) literature’s instructive value underlies Thalaba, as we see when Southey explains that he began his planned series of narrative poems with one on
the Mahommedan religion, as being that with which I was then best acquainted myself, and of which every one who had read the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments possessed all the knowledge necessary for readily understanding and entering into the intent and spirit of the poem.67
While the 1001 Nights are “Entertainments,” they also leave the reader with “knowledge.” This knowledge is “all” that a reader needs to “enter into the intent and spirit of the poem”; in other words, the 1001 Nights has primed the reader, enabling him or her to take up the much broader stream of information the poem provides. Since “Thalaba the Destroyer [is] professedly an Arabian Tale”68 and follows from the 1001 Nights, it complies with the demands of its genre. Southey need make no further explanation or defense of his approach.
Finally, any compunction that Southey might have felt about his didactic ambitions would have been outweighed by his firm belief that the literature of the Orient, whether authentic or orientalist, was a potent source of delight. While Shelley uses the Orient’s associations with amusement to take the edge off his poem’s moral message, Southey delights in oriental amusement for its own sake. Indeed, he seems to find oriental(ist) literature more pleasurable than any other kind. During an extended stay in Portugal, for example, he laments: “More books are published annually at Bristol than in Portugal. There are no books to induce a love of reading — no Arabian Tales or Seven Champions.”69 Oriental subject matter appeals to him as a poet too. In a letter written before he began work on Thalaba, he tells a friend:
There are some fine Arabic traditions that would make noble poems. I was about to write one upon the Garden of Irem; the city and garden still exist in the deserts invisibly, and one man only has seen them. This is the tradition, and I had made it the groundwork of what I thought a very fine story; but it seemed too great for a poem of 300 or 400 lines.70
Another source of inspiration for Southey is Walter Savage Landor’s orientalist poem Gebir (1798), which Southey often mentions around the time of composing Thalaba.71 In retrospect, he all but acknowledges Gebir as a model for Thalaba, remarking, “I am sensible of having derived great improvement from the frequent perusal of Gebir at [the] time” of Thalaba’s composition.72
Southey’s didacticism, then, is a function of two phenomena. First, his attraction to the Orient, both in general and particularly as a poetic subject, motivates him to undertake an impressive program of research on the culture, geography, and literature of the East. This research and the poem Thalaba become mutually supportive structures. The poem justifies the research by providing not only an excuse for its extent but also a medium for its expression, while the research lends the poem a desirable sense of authenticity. Second and more important, Southey’s positioning of Thalaba as oriental(ist) literature leads him to accept certain genre requirements, including that of extensive instruction accompanied by intense entertainment — in effect, an exaggerated, immoderate version of the classical Horatian model. By announcing in the preface to Thalaba that his poem is “an Arabian Tale” following upon “the continuation of the Arabian Tales,” Southey requests that his poem be judged according to these oriental(ist) criteria.73
Southey’s adoption of these alternative criteria is, at bottom, what allows him to avoid such anxiety as Shelley’s. As both his Defence of Poetry and his preface to The Revolt of Islam suggest, Shelley’s unease about didactic poetry is grounded in a specific evolution of the old ideal of poetry as a form that “amuses and instructs.” According to this evolved position, the ideal permits only a particular mediated type of instruction, one that relies much more upon the sensitive reader’s aesthetic and moral receptivity than would Southey’s unrestrained flood of information. Southey’s disinterest in these refinements depends upon his choice of another, peculiarly oriental(ist), standard, one characterized not only by lack of restraint but also by a marked polarization of terms.
This is much the same polarization evident in The Revolt of Islam, but it is underlaid by a different set of concerns. Shelley is interested in the relationship between the terms, whereas Southey prefers to explore the boundaries of each term individually. Southey seems oblivious to the possibility of conflict between terms; Shelley assumes from the outset that entertainment can counteract as well as enable instruction. He also assumes that one term must eventually dominate, claiming victory for amusement (“narrative”) even though instruction triumphs in practice. Southey pursues the limits of both terms, favoring neither. If the most pleasurable literature is, as Southey believes, the 1001 Nights, then his orientalist poem will take that as a model, aiming for the greatest possible delight. But the 1001 Nights also instructs successfully; Southey works to replicate its effects by incorporating as much as possible (perhaps more than one would have thought possible) of his accumulated research. Throughout, the model of the 1001 Nights and its descendants guides his efforts to entertain and inform.74
Thalaba’s didacticism emphasizes information rather than morality, but it is nonetheless ideological. Certainly Southey seems unwilling to judge the researched material he presents, except in that selection implies a kind of evaluation. He rarely includes his own comments in the notes, whether independently or as responses to the scholars he cites. On the other hand, foreignness or exoticism — otherness — functions consistently in Thalaba as much more than a simple descriptive category; rather, it defines the value of information, whether for instruction or for entertainment. A detailed examination of book 3 will demonstrate the ways in which Southey’s articulations of foreignness, specifically the foreignness of the Arabian desert, enable both instruction and entertainment.
By the beginning of book 3, the poem’s major conflict — between Thalaba and the Domdaniel’s “evil magicians” — has already been established. These sorcerers have killed Thalaba’s father. His mother has died after wandering in the desert. Thalaba, just a child and alone, is taken in by a bedouin named Moath, to be cared for until he has grown and is able to avenge his family and destroy the magicians. Book 2 ends with the visit of a sorcerer who has been sent to kill Thalaba, only to be dispatched first by a freak sandstorm.
The opening stanza of book 3 begins with a conversation among Thalaba, Moath, and Thalaba’s foster sister and future wife, Oneiza. Thalaba is trying (successfully) to convince the others that he should wear the ring he has found on the body of the dead sorcerer. The basic question is whether an item used by evil can also be used by good; this is universal enough, but Southey is careful to remind his readers of the Middle Eastern setting. When Thalaba notices a cryptic inscription on the ring, for example, he exclaims, “It is not written as the Koran is: / Some other tongue perchance” (3.1). Southey might have indicated the strangeness of the unknown language in another way, but the mention of the Qur’an serves the additional purpose of specifying once again the Arabian (and Muslim) setting. Towards the same ends, the stanza makes two references to sand, one of them specifically to “desert sands,” along with an allusion to the group’s “tent.” We find this aggressive use of local color again in stanza 3, for instance, where the quietness of the night is described in peculiarly Arabian terms: “the night air had been so calm and still, / It had not from the grove / Shaken a ripe date down” (3.3). In fact, such conventionalized references appear in virtually every stanza, with tents, sand, and palms as the favored (though clichéd) markers of the oriental.75
On a pragmatic level, oriental references of this sort allow Southey to integrate information about the Middle East into his text without necessitating recourse to the notes. The group’s departure from their campsite, for instance, gives Southey the opportunity to describe the bedouin procedure for breaking camp:
Thalaba drew up
The fastening of the cords;
And Moath furl’d the tent;
And from the grove of palms Oneiza led
The Camels, ready to receive their load. (3.5)
The poem’s instructional aim can thus be met while requiring minimal effort from the reader — no flipping pages to the notes, no struggling with small print, no deciphering scholarly prose.
More significantly, the markers of the oriental enforce a distance between the reader and the Orient. It may seem that by informing the reader about the East, Thalaba is enabling a closeness between them. However, the creation of such a complete picture for readers inevitably casts them as observers and interpreters clearly separate from the scene. By emphasizing the peculiarities of the Orient, the poem stresses this material’s exclusion from the reader’s experience. The sixth stanza of book 3 is a case in point. A series of nautical references describes the bedouins’ passage from one campsite to the next:
from the Isle of Palms they went their way,
And when the Sun had reach’d his southern height,
As back they turn’d their eyes,
The distant Palms arose
Like to the top-sails of some fleet far-off
Distinctly seen, where else
The Ocean bounds had blended with the sky! (3.6)
In a sense, this dressing of the desert caravan in a sailing fleet’s costume and of the desert in the sea’s makes both caravan and desert more recognizable to the reader. But the (clichéd) disguise cannot cover the differences between the North Atlantic and the Arabian desert, and the very need for disguise accentuates the latter’s strangeness. This is a disguise meant to be penetrated. Since the presumed reader is affiliated with the world of the sea, not that of the desert, this “failed” disguise serves more to strengthen that affiliation than to allow a genuine rapprochement between the reader and the scene described.
The most important function of such markers, however, is to specify the scene’s orientalness, or rather to orientalize it further. When, for example, Thalaba is visited by the spirit of the ring, he asks Moath if he hears this spirit. Moath responds, “I hear the wind, that flaps / The curtain of the tent” (3.9). The second phrase is superfluous, since Thalaba wants to know only whether Moath can hear the spirit; “I hear the wind” would be sufficient to answer his question. But the allusion to the wind flapping the curtain of the tent reminds the reader once again that the characters are in a bedouin camp. Like so many others, this scene demonstrates a resistance to universality; it comes to have interpretable meaning only in its orientalness. It is in this sense that foreignness (orientalness, otherness) becomes a hermeneutic category.
Seyhan comments that “[m]aking strange, distancing, and exoticizing, are, paradoxically, poetic operations of making an other familiar.”76 She is right, but familiarity is not the same as sameness. Even where Southey’s examples are such well known stereotypes that they would be familiar rather than strange to the reader, they are familiar as signs of otherness, not of sameness. Sameness would be antithetical to the purpose of Thalaba, for it is difference that gives the poem’s subject its appeal, as material for both pleasure and instruction.
The use of oriental markers is not the only didactic strategy that depends upon foreignness as a category of interpretation. Another crucial one, especially prominent in book 3, is that of the character as archetype. Marilyn Butler argues that Thalaba “allegorizes not an individual life, but Everyman travelling through time and through stages of culture that are the same worldwide.”77 I propose instead that Thalaba’s characters are representative in a much more culturally specific way. While each has his or her own life course, that life course, along with the characters’ individual features, would be of relatively little instructional value unless the characters were presented as typical of Arabs, and their lives as representative of life in the Arabian desert.78 Thalaba’s notes reinforce Southey’s formulation of characters as archetypes, but the poetic text itself engages fully in this project as well.
We may take as an example the depiction of Thalaba’s youth in book 3, stanzas 18–25. After a description of his physical appearance (stanza 14) and of his relationship with Moath and Oneiza (stanzas 15–17), stanza 18 begins with the desert rains and the happy domestic scene inside the sodden tent:
Or comes the Father of the Rains
From his caves in the uttermost West?
Comes he in darkness and storms?
When the blast is loud;
When the waters fill
The traveller’s tread in the sands;
When the pouring shower
Streams adown the roof;
When the door-curtain hangs in heavier folds:
When the out-strain’d tent flags loosely:
Within there is the embers’ cheerful glow,
The sound of the familiar voice,
The song that lightens toil, —
Domestic Peace and Comfort are within.
Under the common shelter, on dry sand,
The quiet Camels ruminate their food;
The lengthening cord from Moath falls,
As patiently the Old Man
Entwines the strong palm-fibres; by the hearth
The Damsel shakes the coffee-grains,
That with warm fragrance fill the tent;
And while, with dexterous fingers, Thalaba
Shapes the green basket, haply at his feet.
Her favorite kidling gnaws the twig,
Forgiven plunderer, for Oneiza’s sake. (3.18)
The juxtaposition of bedouin characters to desert climate in these lines posits the characters as predictable manifestations of their culture and environment rather than as human beings acting with free will. The picture Southey paints of each is clearly a composite; his use of present tense is only the most obvious clue. We are to understand that “the Father of the Rains” comes each year in the same way (“From his caves in the uttermost West”), with the same effect (“darkness and storms”). If there is a traveler’s footprint in the sand, it will be filled with water in the same way with every storm. Even if Moath does not make rope every evening, his rope making is typical of bedouin rainy-evening activities. That he makes rope, or that Oneiza roasts coffee, or that Thalaba weaves a basket, does not further the narrative in any way. If, however, we assume that Moath, Oneiza, and Thalaba are not simply individual human figures but representative bedouins, we see the importance of their behavior to Thalaba’s didactic program. Here, as above, Southey’s manipulation of his material becomes legible only through the application of foreignness as a hermeneutic category.
It is clear from the notes accompanying these lines that the characters’ specific traits are derived from generalizations about Arabs. The notes’ role, though, is to reverse the process, guiding the reader from an understanding of the particular (Moath and his family) to an appreciation of the general (Arabs or bedouins). A brief quotation from Volney explains, for instance, that “The Arabs call the West and South-West winds, which prevail from November to February, the fathers of the rains.”79 While Southey’s British readers might at first have supposed (based on abundant personal experience) that rainstorms were a universal experience, his citation strips away this universality by stressing the Arabianness of these rains. Moreover, in the next note, Southey quotes Pococke referring to bedouins only as “they,” and in the following one Chénier referring only to “these people.”80 In neither case is the group of people at issue explicitly identified. The generality of the references leaves no doubt that readers are to extrapolate from the specific information about these bedouins (provided in the poem) to the habits of bedouins in general (provided in the notes). The effect of such interaction between notes and text is of course to cast Moath and his family principally as individual manifestations of a larger phenomenon of cultural otherness.
The next two stanzas are similar in structure as well as in effect to the one just discussed. They describe the results of the rains: first a “winter torrent,” then a “vernal brook.” In both cases, these lessons in climate are followed, as above, by a presentation of associated customs. Thalaba, for instance, “wanders” barefoot in the “wet sand” created by the winter torrent, with “The rushing flow, the flowing roar, / Filling his yielded faculties, / A vague, a dizzy, a tumultuous joy” (3.19). Later he “recline[s]” “Beneath the lofty bank,” while “With idle eye he views” the vernal brook’s “little waves, / Quietly listening to the quiet flow” (3.20). Whereas in stanza 18 the emphasis is on domestic activity, which produced an emotion (contentment), here the emotion itself is accentuated. In neither case, however, can we safely assume that the emotion is individual. The notes to this stanza indicate that the stream described is representative of those “so common in Arabia.”81 Correspondingly, we may suppose that any bedouins who find themselves in a cozy tent during a rainstorm, or next to a flooded channel, or by a quiet stream, might feel as Thalaba and his foster family do. As a result, despite the apparent specificity of the emotion they feel, these characters are not individuals so much as illustrations, the better to contribute to the poem’s didactic purpose. Moreover, their status as examples makes them less likely to attract the reader’s empathy; as already discussed, such distance between the reader and the poem’s subject contributes to the reader’s instruction.
With Thalaba’s position as a bedouin representative now secure, Moath and Oneiza replace him as the archetypes of choice. The next stanza begins by depicting Moath’s circumstances:
Nor rich, nor poor, was Moath; God hath given
Enough, and blest him with a mind content.
No hoarded gold disquieted his dreams;
But ever round his station he beheld
Camels that knew his voice,
And home-birds, grouping at Oneiza’s call,
And goats that, morn and eve,
Came with full udders to the Damsel’s hand. (3.21)
These lines constitute a list of the items that a bedouin male needs in order to feel himself content: camels, poultry, goats, and a capable, hardworking daughter. As above, the image is a composite. Even more than in the preceding stanzas, though, the consistency of the scene is emphasized; his camels are always (“ever”) there, and his goats come “morn and eve” for milking. The description is of course specific to Moath and his circumstances, but Southey goes out of his way to identify Moath as average, “Nor rich, nor poor.” As usual, the notes complete this movement towards generality, making Moath’s situation and attitude emblematic of bedouins as a group:
All the wealth of a family consists of movables, of which the following is a pretty exact inventory: — A few male and female camels, some goats and poultry, a mare and her bridle and saddle, a tent, a lance sixteen feet long, a crooked sabre, a rusty musket, with a flint or matchlock; a pipe, a portable mill, a pot for cooking, a leathern bucket, a small coffee-roaster; a mat, some clothes, a mantle of black woollen, and a few glass or silver rings, which the women wear upon their legs and arms; if none of these are wanting, their furniture is complete.82
The note prepares the way for Southey’s next topic: bedouin women. Oneiza is his example:
Dear child! the tent beneath whose shade they dwelt,
It was her work; and she had twined
His girdle’s many hues;
And he had seen his robe
Grow in Oneiza’s loom.
How often, with a memory-mingled joy
Which made her Mother live before his sight,
He watch’d her nimble fingers thread the woof!
Or at the hand-mill, when she knelt and toil’d,
Toss’d the thin cake on spreading palm,
Or fix’d it on the glowing oven’s side,
With bare, wet arm, and safe dexterity. (3.21)
The fact that Oneiza is representative of bedouin women generally is supported by the mention of her mother. These lines characterize both women by their involvement in work, especially weaving. Such a characterization is confirmed in the notes, all three of which refer primarily and explicitly to women’s labor — weaving, grinding, and baking.
Having identified the daytime activities of these supposedly typical bedouins, the poem shifts to evening, when “The Tamarind from the dew / Sheathes its young fruit, yet green” (3.22). This reference to the tamarind (elaborated upon in the notes) serves the same purpose as the introductory references to climate in earlier stanzas; it sets the scene, but in such a way as to emphasize its difference from an assumed European standard. This accomplished, the entire remainder of the stanza is devoted to the characters’ habits of prayer. Again, they are offered as representative, even though their worship might seem primitive compared with other Muslims’, whose more elaborate arrangements might be more familiar to readers. But, the speaker asks rhetorically,
What if beneath no lamp-illumined dome,
Its marble walls bedeck’d with flourish’d truth,
Azure and gold adornment? Sinks the word
With deeper influence from the Imam’s voice,
Where, in the day of congregation, crowds
Perform the duty-task? (3.22)
Now that these pious Muslims have prayed as required, they are at leisure.83 Oneiza is of course still working, “knitting light palm-leaves for her brother’s brow,” but Moath is “tranquilly” smoking his pipe (3.23). Thalaba has let “The slacken’d bow, the quiver, the long lance / Rest on the pillar of the Tent,” while he plays a reed flute or recites love poetry to his companions (3.23–4).84
Beneath all this peace there is passion, however. We soon suspect that Oneiza is in love with Thalaba, which creates an opportunity for the delineation of oriental feminine adornments:
was it sister-love
For which the silver rings
Round her smooth ankles and her tawny arms
Shone daily brighten’d? for a brother’s eye
Were her long fingers tinged,
As when she trimm’d the lamp,
And through the veins and delicate skin
The light shone rosy? that the darken’d lids
Gave yet a softer lustre to her eye?
That with such pride she trick’d
Her glossy tresses, and on holyday
Wreathed the red flower-crown round
Their waves of glossy jet? (3.25)
It is difficult to imagine how Oneiza would find time for all of these cosmetic refinements, given that she must also weave the family’s shelter and clothing, prepare their food, care for their livestock, and so forth. This is clearly of no concern to Southey; the important thing is that the reader know about these ornaments, not that Oneiza (or any other single individual) make use of them. The notes emphasize the Arabness of the adornments, observing for instance that the “tinge” on Oneiza’s fingers is from henna and that her eyelids are darkened by kohl. (The henna is especially problematic because it requires some time to set; Oneiza would probably have had to miss a milking.) However, it is important also to observe that, as elsewhere, these notes draw upon non-Arab as well as Arab materials. India, Persia, West Africa, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and Greece all are mentioned, after which Southey remarks that “The females of the rest of Europe have never added [kohl and henna] to their list of ornaments.”85 Clearly, then, the crucial interpretive category in play here is not that of Arabness, orientalness, or even exoticism, but rather once again of foreignness in general, even while the Arab and the oriental remain the essential points of reference for Southey’s implied definition of the other.
This stanza concludes Southey’s summary of Thalaba’s youth. The remainder of book 3 describes how Thalaba finds upon the forehead of a locust instructions to depart “when the sun shall be darkened at noon” (3.34). The eclipse arrives that very day, and Thalaba leaves immediately, despite the distress of Moath and Oneiza. This turn of events gives Southey an excuse for lengthy notes on locust plagues, predators on locusts, the physical characteristics of locusts (including their forehead markings), and the appearance of a solar eclipse. The remaining nine books of Thalaba describe the protagonist’s wanderings through the Middle East and his repeated encounters with villainous magicians. After many travails, and with his piety reaffirmed, Thalaba finally uses his father’s sword to kill all the magicians but one, who repents and is spared. Urged on by his mother’s spirit, he then kills “the Idol,” who represents the Devil, Eblis. At last, in an ending recalled in The Revolt of Islam, Thalaba himself is killed as the “Ocean-vault” of the Domdaniel collapses.
In the same moment, at the gate
Of Paradise, Oneiza’s Houri form
Welcomed her Husband to eternal bliss. (12.36)86
Although book 3 has especially extensive notes (and especially little action), the other books of Thalaba are also heavily annotated. One cannot argue that the Islamic Orient per se called Southey to this approach; his other long poems on exotic subjects are also annotated, though not quite so heavily.87 However, conventional perceptions of the Orient clearly encourage annotation. If orientalist literature is already assumed to be edifying, its instructive capacity can be practically increased by the use of notes. Indeed, notes, along with explanatory prefaces and other paratextual framing devices, are so common in orientalist works as to be characteristic of the genre. Southey’s use of them is simply more extensive than usual.88
Further, while keeping in mind how the oriental (specifically the Arab) is subsumed within the hermeneutic category of foreignness, it is essential to remember that the oriental is the standard for other types of foreignness, exoticism, and indeed weirdness of every kind. In Thalaba we see this not only in the indistinct relationship between the Arabian setting and the information about Persia, Poland, Portugal, etc., brought to bear upon it, but also especially in the unconcern with which the poem mingles the natural and supernatural, the explicable and the magical; in the Orient, it seems, there is no need to differentiate one from the other. In short, Thalaba implies that the strange is necessarily relevant. For instance, during one of Thalaba’s encounters with the evil sorcerers, the mummified hand of a hanged man is burned so that its fumes will subdue the vicious guardian of a cave (5.27–9). This scene reveals the union of natural and supernatural; Southey’s note associates the burning with the supernatural by labeling it “superstition,” yet the same note also includes detailed instructions on how to prepare such a hand, almost as if Southey expects his (presumably nonsupernatural) readers to try the recipe themselves. Similarly, the text specifies that “No eye of mortal man, / If unenabled by enchanted spell, / Had pierced those fearful depths” (5.23), but those evidently supernatural “fearful depths,” are found at the edge of a “bitumen-lake” (5.22), which is described in both text and notes as a natural phenomenon.89 The blurring of these various boundaries recalls once again the importance of the Orient as a locus for both amusement and instruction. Indeed, it is here that we see most clearly the extent to which instruction and entertainment overlap. When we are acquiring information about what is weird we enjoy ourselves; the origin of the weirdness matters very little. But precisely because Southey’s Orient is so inclusive of weirdness, virtually any odd bit of information becomes pertinent; one result is the massing of information we see in Thalaba’s notes and poetic text.90
Finally, the Orient (with the partial exception of the desert) is conventionally perceived as jumbled, detail-ridden, and otherwise excessive.91 The desert, for instance, is a dry, vacant wasteland, as Southey establishes early on by having Thalaba nearly die in it. The great force of the winter rains then contrasts sharply with the dryness of the desert in other seasons; similarly, the familial comfort of Moath’s tent contrasts with the empty solitude of its surroundings (book 3). The heat of the desert finds its opposite extreme in the snows of Lebanon, where Thalaba almost dies of hypothermia (book 10). Less physical extremes also predominate. Thalaba, for instance, goes repeatedly from a state of abandonment and mortal danger to one of being cherished and honored. Moath and Oneiza are absolutely good and loyal, while the sorcerers of the Domdaniel are (with one exception) utterly deceitful villains. In short, the Islamic Orient in this poem is stereotypically constituted as a place of extremes.
Indeed, one could argue that Thalaba’s overflowing notes exemplify a sort of corresponding structural excess. These notes are occasionally inconsistent with the text, as when Southey praises the domestic scene in Moath’s tent but then in the notes cites Chénier’s negative comment: “being black, [these tents] produce a disagreeable effect at a distant view.”92 More often, though, the notes are simply disproportionate or irrelevant. In book 8, for instance, a false version of Oneiza’s spirit appears, lasting less than two stanzas of verse before her real spirit emerges (8.9–10). The false spirit is called a “vampire corpse,” which gives rise to two full pages of notes on vampires in the Middle East and elsewhere.93 Clearly such extensive annotation cannot be justified on the basis of the incident’s importance, especially since, unlike the lengthy descriptions of tent construction, for example, it does little to help the reader visualize the scene at hand.
In this case, as in numerous others, we may justifiably suspect that the incident occurs for the sake of the notes. Indeed, Southey’s letters suggest that he considered the notes ahead of the text.94 While still in the midst of writing the sixth book of Thalaba, for instance, he comments, “my notes are ready for the whole, at least there is only the trouble of arranging and seasoning them.”95 Later, as he describes the process of revision, he again gives priority to the notes: “The work before me is almost of terrifying labour; folio after folio to be gutted, for the immense mass of collateral knowledge which is indispensable.”96
Diego Saglia argues that the notes to Southey’s 1814 Roderick, the Last of the Goths constitute “an additional discourse” that operates as a Derridean supplement, “work[ing] against textual unity.” He sees the relationship between the poetic text and the notes as “both collaborative and antagonistic, completing and supplanting.”97 Such a reading would be largely valid for Thalaba as well, with one important qualification. Saglia’s argument assumes that, in the absence of the notes, the signification of the poetic text would be relatively unproblematic; it is “the notes [that] expose the impossibility of origins and seminal histories within a textuality that is always a reproduction and a transcription of other texts.”98 In Thalaba, however, it is clear that even without what Saglia calls the “series of discourses” “staged” by the notes,99 the poetic text itself resists unitary meaning. This resistance is particularly evident in the impulse towards excessive information that affects the text as well as the notes. The crowding in the description of Moath’s tent (3.18, cited above) is unexceptional; Thalaba seems driven by an urge for completeness that often results in a list rather than a full picture. When, for example, Southey describes Oneiza’s efforts to make herself attractive to Thalaba, the minute detail tends to atomize the image. It takes great effort on the reader’s part to gather Southey’s description of her ankles, arms, fingers, veins, skin, eyelids, eyes, and hair into a composite picture of a beautiful young woman (3.25).100
The polarization of amusement and instruction in Thalaba, then, is supported not only by Southey’s choice of discursive models (the 1001 Nights and scholarly orientalism), as I suggest above, but also by those excesses characteristic of the conventionalized Orient. The structural excesses (notes disproportionate to the text, extraordinarily complete but atomized descriptions) extend the instructional aspects of Thalaba, while the excesses integral to the depiction of the Orient itself (extremes of heat, opulence, and danger) enhance the poem’s amusement value.
It is difficult to know how effectively Southey’s contemporary readers were either instructed or entertained. Thalaba did not sell particularly well.101 The Monthly Review, the Critical Review and the Edinburgh Review each offered mixed evaluations in their articles on Thalaba. The Monthly reviewer criticizes Southey on several counts. “The more minute description,” he complains, “is rather tedious, and is very particular without being distinct.”102 Although he praises certain descriptive passages, he concludes that
Throughout the poem [...] the author has interspersed too much description; and the notes, though sometimes curious and amusing, are too bulky, and contain rather an ostentasious [sic] display of the author’s assiduity in collecting materials for his undertaking.103
Portions of the poem are “not very intelligible,” “fatiguing,” “tedious,” and “dull.”104 Southey’s “mongrel metre” shows “a degree of presumption which we are not much inclined to pardon.”105 Despite
poetical beauties of the first order, [...] the poem is deficient not only in probability, but in connection and consistency of fiction. The death of every new sorcerer is the end of an entire fable and course of action; and there is no more connection nor dependency of parts in the different enterprizes [sic] of the Destroyer, than in the seven voyages of Sinbad the sailor. We find no discrimination of character, nor any extended delineation of human actions.106
The Critical reviewer, Southey’s friend William Taylor, too notes that “there is a want of concatenation, of mutual dependence, of natural arrangement [...]: the fable somewhat wants cohesion: nor is it wholly consistent.”107 Although he is intrigued by the characters in Thalaba, he finds that they
have something supernatural in their turn of mind, which surely intercepts very much our fellow-feeling. [... L]ike the figures of landscape-painters, [they] are often almost lost in the scene: they appear as the episodical or accessory objects. [...] It is theatric representation reversed: the places seem the realities; the actors the fictitious existences.108
Writing for the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey praises certain passages but devotes himself mainly to complaints. The style is “feeble, low, and disjointed.” The “exaggerat[ed ...] characters must be in agonies and ecstasies, from their entrance to their exit,” to the point that “[t]here is little of human character in the poem.” The versification is “a jumble,” and “the conduct of the fable is as disorderly as the versification.” Finally, “the story [...] consists altogether of the most wild and extravagant fictions, and openly sets nature and probability at defiance.”109
These reviewers’ criticisms, then, focus on two problems: the inaccessibility of the characters, and the disjointedness and artificiality of the plot. Southey’s manipulations of entertainment and instruction appear quite beside the point; the reviewers seem to be saying that they would prefer a psychologically satisfying experience, which is made impossible by the nature of the characters and the plot. The reviewers’ critique is largely explicable if we consider Thalaba’s relationship with the oriental tale as genre. The classic “Arabian tale,” such as that recounting “the seven voyages of Sinbad the sailor” mentioned by the Monthly reviewer, is episodic and/or composed of stories enframed by other stories. As a rule, the characters are not developed sufficiently to arouse empathy even when their misfortunes inspire sympathy. In fact, the entertainment derived from such a tale depends upon its not making demands upon the psyche of the reader. In Rae Beth Gordon’s terms, these are “Arabian tales where complicated imaginary events are intertwined, and where the readers’ pleasure lies in losing themselves along with the narrator, then in untying the plot.”110 This is a principally intellectual pleasure that does not entail the reader’s emotional involvement with psychologically complex characters. So too, it is the intellect, not the psyche, that engages with the instructional component of such tales. Thus the reviewers’ dissatisfaction with Thalaba is in an odd sense a mark of the poem’s success; it has alienated them for all the right reasons. This leaves the poem in an ambiguous position, since the fulfillment of its aesthetic aims causes its rejection.
The problem is essentially one of conflicting expectations. The reviewer looks for a poem with coherent narrative flow and emotionally developed figures, whereas the poet is working within a genre (the “Arabian tale”) with opposite expectations. That two of the reviewers recognize this problem of genre on some level is clear from their uneasy attempts to categorize Thalaba. Taylor begins his review with the question of whether to call Thalaba a “metrical romance” or a “lyrical one;” he also calls it a “story,” and compares it to the ode and the “epopoeia.”111 The Monthly’s review starts with the sentence “It is not easy either to class or to appreciate this singular performance,” and then, as if to explain, announces that “[t]he story and action of the poem are altogether oriental.”112 In neither case does the reviewer’s recognition of genre as an issue in the interpretation of Thalaba lead to substantially greater enthusiasm for the poem.113 Nor does the Monthly reviewer’s attribution of orientalness to story and action inspire him to articulate expectations consistent with the genre of the oriental tale. Like the other reviewers, his standards rely on the moderated opposition between pleasure (the favored term) and instruction typical of mainstream early-nineteenth-century aesthetics.
Presumably, Southey’s reviewers’ would have preferred a poem with emotionally developed, verisimilar characters; a credible plot; and description that was “distinct” as well as “particular.” Such characters, plot, and description would all be based upon a classical assumption of realistic representation; mimesis would be such a poem’s dominant mode. In contrast, as Jeffrey says rather truculently, Thalaba,
[i]n its action, [...] is not an imitation of any thing. [...] The pleasure afforded by performances of this sort is very much akin to that which may be derived from the exhibition of a harlequin farce; where, instead of just imitations of nature and human character, we are entertained with the transformation of cauliflowers and beer-barrels, the apparition of ghosts and devils, and all the other magic of the wooden sword.114
From a (neo)classical perspective, moreover, it would be reasonable to expect representation in a poem whose goals are to amuse and instruct. The link between these goals and representation is forged in Greek aesthetic theory and persists throughout the development of English criticism. Sidney associates them when he declares that “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth [...]; with this end, to teach and delight.”115 Joseph Addison resumes the more explicitly causal connection suggested by Aristotle, explaining that representation is itself a source of delight:
this [...] Pleasure of the Imagination proceeds from that Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas arising from the Original Objects, with the Ideas we receive from the Statue, Picture, Description, or Sound that represents them. It is impossible for us to give the necessary Reason, why this Operation of the Mind is attended with so much Pleasure, as I have before observed on the same Occasion; but we find a great variety of Entertainments derived from this single Principle.116
Johnson specifies this connection between pleasure and representation. Representations of “particular manners” will be unsuccessful, he predicts, whereas “[n]othing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” He also tries to articulate the “necessary Reason” for this pleasure that Addison found it “impossible for us to give”: “Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”117 Unfortunately, since Johnson is unable then to explain why “bringing realities to mind” should produce pleasure, his attempt is hardly more satisfying than Addison’s evasion. Hazlitt tries again, emphasizing new impressions rather than familiar realities:
One chief reason, it should seem then, why imitation pleases, is, because, by exciting curiosity, and inviting a comparison between the object and the representation, it opens a new field of inquiry, and leads the attention to a variety of details and distinctions not perceived before.118
Shelley’s version stresses formal conventions instead: “there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from other.”119
This progression of views suggests that while English critics remain convinced that instruction and pleasure have something to do with representation, they have trouble fixing upon the connection. Though the question of pleasure concerns them more urgently than that of instruction, their underlying assumption is evidently that representation enables both instruction and pleasure.120 These critics seem not to have considered seriously the possibility of a poetry which may seek earnestly to amuse and instruct but in which representation is neither based in a verifiable, experiential reality nor accorded the ultimate aesthetic value.121 Yet at least in certain respects, Thalaba the Destroyer explores just such a possibility. The poem’s consistent unwillingness to separate natural from supernatural, or fact from fantasy, distorts the supposed reality in which this representation is grounded. Because the “reality” that it imitates is unreliable, the resulting imitation appears unreliable as well, however solidly referential it might still be. In addition, because this representation is, like so much of nineteenth-century orientalism, heavily dependent on texts instead of on empirical reality, and because it incorporates so much non-Middle Eastern (textual) material, it evokes the Islamic Middle East as an unstable referent only insecurely grounded in reality: in Said’s terms, a simulacrum.122 Thalaba’s use of foreignness as a hermeneutic category becomes especially significant in this context since it implies an aesthetic standard other than the (neo)classical fidelity to nature.
Equally important, though, is Southey’s attempt to use the arabesque as a challenge to representation itself. This ambivalent and understated effort is based an a surprisingly simplistic vision of the arabesque, compared for instance to the complex consideration of this subject presented by Friedrich Schlegel in the same year that Southey wrote Thalaba.123 Be that as it may, Southey uses the notion of the arabesque primarily as a justification for his chosen meter. In his original preface to Thalaba, he announces:
Let me not be supposed to prefer the rhythm in which [Thalaba] is written, abstractedly considered, to the regular blank verse — the noblest measure, in my judgment, of which our admirable language is capable. For the following Poem I have preferred it, because it suits the varied subject: it is the Arabesque ornament of an Arabian tale.124
In his much later preface to The Curse of Kehama, he states again that the “reason why the irregular, rhymeless lyrics [...] were preferred for Thalaba was, that the freedom and variety of such verse were suited to the story.” While Kehama demanded “moral sublimity” and “the utmost richness of versification,” Thalaba, as an “Arabian Tale,” called for “the simplest and easiest form of verse.”125
Southey’s comments in both prefaces present this aspect of the poem’s form as dictated by its content (its “story”) and specifically by the “Arabian” identity of that story. Whereas ornament is usually, by definition, understood to be supplemental and nonessential, he indicates that this “Arabesque ornament” is actually necessary to the effect he seeks. The relationship between the “Arabian tale” and its “Arabesque ornament” thus becomes oddly reciprocal. On the one hand, the tale’s Arabian affiliation calls for the arabesque ornament, while on the other hand, the ornament completes that affiliation, confirming the tale’s fundamental Arabianness. The arabesque is thereby put in the position of representing the oriental nature of the poem, even though the essence of the arabesque is of course that it is purely ornament, that it does not represent — or, in Sandra Naddaff s words, that it is “[n]onfigural and thus necessarily antimimetic, [...] at once the means of signification and the thing signified.”126
Southey’s prefaces do not comment, of course, either upon the representational role of the “Arabesque ornament” or upon Thalaba’s other formal allusions to the arabesque, including repeated lines and episodic narrative structures. Such features are strongly associated with oriental literary models. Moreover, like the arabesque of meter, these arabesque characteristics are not in themselves representational or referential. Southey’s unwillingness to acknowledge the arabesque in any less “ornamental” aspect of the poem than its meter indicates an ambivalence about the arabesque. His equivocal, even suspicious attitude can also be discerned in one of the very few directly judgmental comments he makes in the notes to Thalaba.
A waste of ornament and labor characterizes all the works of the Orientalists [that is, the Orientals]. I have seen illuminated Persian manuscripts that must each have been the toil of many years, every page painted, not with representations of life and manners, but usually like the curves and lines of a Turkey carpet, conveying no idea whatever, as absurd to the eye as nonsense-verses to the ear. The little of their literature that has reached us is equally worthless.127
This note takes a fundamentally neoclassical position in favor of the “representations of life and manners” and against arabesque ornamentation “like the curves and lines of a Turkey carpet.”
However, in yet another instance of the sort of discursive diffusion Saglia observes, Thalaba’s orientalism itself forces this prejudice to be compromised. Certainly, too much arabesque would interfere with the representation upon which both the entertainment and the instruction of the poem depend, as Jeffrey implies when he charges Southey with “disproportioned and injudicious ornaments.”128 On the other hand, as an “Arabian tale,” the poem must have something arabesque about it. Southey’s solution to this dilemma is to include arabesque, restrictively labeled as such, in an area — meter, rhyme — which is already chiefly ornamental and nonrepresentational. Indeed, the ornamental aspect of the arabesque remains the only important one for him, to the point that his interpretation of the arabesque as “irregular” and “free” disregards the customary view (based mainly on Islamic art) of the arabesque as orderly, repetitive, geometric, and symmetrical.129
Thalaba remains relentlessly and obsessively referential even though, as I have shown, mimetic representation is undermined throughout, especially by the Islamic Middle East’s instability as a referent and by the (partial) substitution of foreignness for fidelity to nature as an aesthetic criterion. It is only through the arabesque that Thalaba begins to bring referentiality itself into question.130 Gordon argues that “one of the primary functions of ornament is to carry meaning and intent that have been suppressed or excluded from the central field.” Among ornaments, the arabesque in particular “is pure form, nonreferential ornament.”131 Given that, as Seyhan explains, “such figures as the arabesque [...] challenge the notion of total representation,”132 Thalaba’s “Arabesque ornament” enables a query about the privileged status of referentiality, a query that is firmly suppressed within Thalaba’s emphatically referential “central field.”
Thalaba’s staged meeting of form and content through the “Arabesque ornament” is important as an experiment with nonrepresentation, despite the experiment’s superficiality and tentativeness and despite Southey’s reliance on a dubious interpretation of the arabesque. Shelley’s approach is closer to Southey’s than might first appear, and not only because of Southey’s well-known and formidable influence on his younger contemporary.133 The Revolt of Islam’s allegorical displacement of European events onto an Eastern setting indicates a parallel endeavor to reach beyond the conventional bounds of representation. To borrow the terms of Seyhan’s argument, allegory “confirm[s] the impossibility of the mimetic project [and] signifies] the absence of an ultimate referent.”134 In The Revolt of Islam, the Orient as a discrete and empirically verifiable referent disappears, subsumed into the allegory that is its raison d’être. Thalaba’s Orient derives from descriptions in texts and remains merely a (very exhaustive) description in Southey’s text; “reality” is deferred through referential instability and discursive diffusion. Both The Revolt of Islam and Thalaba the Destroyer produce representations of the Islamic Middle East that are in an essential respect not representational. The “Arabesque ornament” becomes the Arabian tale.
Given the English literary critical tradition’s linkage of mimesis with the mandate that poetry amuse and instruct its readers, it is no surprise that the challenge to mimetic representation in these poems is accompanied by a disrupted implementation of the twin purposes claimed for poetry. Through the mediation of the Orient as a setting, pleasure and edification are both accentuated and polarized. Although Shelley suppresses the exoticism of the Orient, seeing instruction as a matter of universal humanistic morality, whereas Southey affirms it vigorously, with conveying information as his instructional goal, instruction supercedes pleasure in each case. The emphasis on instruction runs counter to the inclinations of the time, which privilege amusement at the expense of edification. So too, both poems undermine the notion that the two purposes of poetry exist in a moderate, balanced, and mutually reinforcing relationship. These important divergences from contemporary norms in poetics depend upon the poets’ conventionalizing manipulation of the Islamic Middle East.
1 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Leon Golden (Tallahassee: UP of Florida, 1981) 7.
2 Horace, Art of Poetry, trans. W.J. Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) 56.
3 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 86, 97.
4 Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (1765), Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 210.
5 Reynolds, Discourse XIII, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 263. John Boyd includes Reynolds in his useful analysis of pleasure and instruction; see The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968) esp. 267.
6 Hazlitt, On Poetry in General (1818), Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 303, 304.
7 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 431, 432.
8 [Scott], Review of The Curse of Kehama, Quarterly Review 9 [Feb. 1811]: 55,41.
9 Although dominant, the emphasis on pleasure was not, of course, universal. An 1814 review of a collection entitled The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, for instance, praises critic John Dennis (1657–1734) because “he knew what poetry ought to be, and did not define it, like some others, to be the Art of Pleasing. ‘It is an art,’ he says, ‘[that] has two ends, a subordinate and a final one; the subordinate one is pleasure, and the final one is instruction’“ (Quarterly Review 23 [Oct. 1814]: 89). However, this reviewer clearly feels himself in the minority on what he recognizes to be a fundamental aesthetic question of his age.
10 For analysis of critical response to The Revolt of Islam and of Shelley’s reactions to his reviewers, see Michael Laplace-Sinatra, “‘I Will Live Beyond This Life’: Shelley, Prefaces and Reviewers,” Keats-Shelley Review 13 (1999) 90–4.
11 Shelley, The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Neville Rogers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975) 99–100.
12 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 100.
13 Both Shelley’s choice of terminology (“narrative,” “didactic,” “argument”) and the concepts that underlie it are rather too broad to be of general use. Harold Orel and Stuart Sperry are among the critics to question Shelley’s formulation; see Orel, “Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam: The Last Great Poem of the English Enlightenment?” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 89 (1972): 1190; and Sperry, “The Sexual Theme in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 82.1 (1983): 32.
For further discussion of this portion of the preface, see Stephen C. Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989) 23; and Hermann Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative: The History of a Genre, 1964, trans. Sue Bollans (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 188–9.
14 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 100.
15 Shelley, “To a Publisher,” Oct. 13, 1817, letter 266 of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen, vol. 2 (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1909) 559. There is no indication that the addressee is Charles Oilier, who eventually published the poem. For additional information, see Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences 23, 26; Donald H. Reiman, ed., Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973) 154; and Charles E. Robinson, “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Oilier, and William Blackwood: The Contexts of Early Nineteenth-Century Publishing,” Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference, ed. Kelvin Everest (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1983) 191.
“Beau idéal” normally means “ideal beauty.” However, Shelley evidently uses the phrase to mean “beautiful ideal,” ungrammatically reversing the positions of noun and adjective.
16 On the idea of the Golden City, see Douglas Thorpe, “Shelley’s Golden Verbal City,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 86.2 (1987): 215–27.
17 As I will explain shortly, The Revolt of Islam was first printed, although not distributed, as Laon and Cythna. The poem’s plot was not substantially affected by the revisions implemented before distribution; preface was unchanged but for the suppression of its final paragraph. For a more complete discussion of the structure, characters, and political significance of The Revolt of Islam, see James Lynn Ruff, Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (Salzburg: Institut für Englishe Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1972). Other general studies of the poem include Deborah A. Gutschera, “The Drama of Reenactment in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal 35 (1986): 111–25; Richard H. Haswell, “Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam: ‘The Connexion of Its Parts,’“ Keats-Shelley Journal 25 (1976): 81–102; Gerald McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969) ch. 10; Orel, “Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam”; and Sperry, Shelley’s Major Verse: The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) ch. 3.
18 Marilyn Butler, “Byron and the Empire in the East,” Byron: Augustan and Romantic,” ed. Andrew Rutherford (London: Macmillan, 1990) 68.
19 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 102.
20 It is no doubt in keeping with his professed disinclination towards “minute delineation of Mahometan manners” that Shelley tends to rely on vaguely defined precedents from orientalist literary convention rather than researching oriental(ist) sources, as many other nineteenth-century writers of orientalist poems do. During a brief period in 1820, he did express a desire to learn Arabic and to go to India, but this is long after the composition of The Revolt of Islam; see Michael Rossington, “Shelley and the Orient,” The Keats-Shelley Review 6 (1991): 26–7. For The Revolt of Islam itself, Shelley seems to have had relatively few historical sources. For further discussion, see Kenneth N. Cameron, “A Major Source of The Revolt of Islam,” PMLA 56 (1941): 175–206; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 114–20; McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea esp. chs. 2, 10; Rossington, “Shelley and the Orient” 18–36; and Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance 195.
21 Butler, “Byron and the Empire in the East” 68.
22 Said, Orientalism esp. 96, 167, 240. See also Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 108–9 and MacKenzie, Orientalism 58–9. The stereotype of timelessness will be discussed further in chapter 2.
23 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992) 79.
24 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents 66.
25 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 10. Sharafuddin’s argument resembles Leask’s; see Islam and Romantic Orientalism 200.
26 Compare Makdisïs argument that Shelley’s Alastor (1816) “produces a version of the Orient in which otherness has been all but obliterated [...] and in which a search can take place for images and reflections of Europe; this new Orient is thus no longer a refuge offering and containing the other, it is a cleaned-out slate ready for European colonization and inscription” (Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 152).
27 Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 6.
28 Many critics have noted this association. See especially Talal Asad, “Two European Images of Non-European Rule,” Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London: Ithaca P, 1973) 103–18; and Claudine Grossir, L’Islam des Romantiques ch. 2. See also Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance 106; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism xxi-xxiii. Sharafuddin rightly observes the Islamic Orient’s connection with tyranny in Walter Savage Landor’s influential poem Gebir (Islam and Romantic Orientalism 19) but muddies his argument by claiming that “the Romantic movement’s] resistance to massive despotism” contributes to the development of “a genuine interest in other countries and cultures,” including the Islamic Middle East (xvii), and that Islam “offered an alternative to the compromised or corrupted political and social systems of Europe” (xxi). This view seems unrealistic; there is undoubtedly a genuine interest in the Orient at this time, but when poets use the Orient as an opportunity to rail against tyranny, the Orient’s affiliation with tyranny overshadows the other features of the region in which a genuine interest might otherwise evolve. As The Revolt of Islam shows, European poets evince attraction to Islamic Middle Eastern political or social alternatives only in very limited respects.
29 Further evidence of this can be found in Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” (1820), which links Islamic and pharaonic symbols (“palace and pyramid”) in an orientalized depiction of tyranny and its “sister-pest,” slavery. Shelley’s other orientalist poems include “Zeinab and Kathema” (1811), “To the Nile” (1818), “The Indian Serenade” (1819), and “From the Arabic: An Imitation” (1821). Michael Rossington reads “Ozymandias” with “To the Nile,” emphasizing the relationship between art and political tyranny, and also offers a useful analysis of the orientalism of “Alastor” (1815) and “The Witch of Atlas” (1820); see “Shelley and the Orient” 25–6, 29–36.
30 The stereotypical association between tyranny and the Islamic Middle East has continued throughout the twentieth century. In a 1992 Time profile of Edward Said, for instance, tyranny is mentioned as an identifying characteristic of the Middle East five times. Democracy now substitutes for Shelley’s “liberty,” and terrorism (mentioned four times) for slavery as tyranny’s sidekick, but the basic construct appears unchanged (Robert Hughes, “Envoy to Two Cultures,” Time [21 June 1992]: 60–2). The interrelationships among Islam, tyranny (especially in opposition to intellectual freedom), and terrorism are similarly fundamental to the argument of Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent anti-Muslim exposé of Pakistan’s Haqqania madrasa, which he terms “a jihad factory” and whose students he calls “perfect jihad machines” (Goldberg, “The Education of a Holy Warrior,” New York Times Magazine [25 June 2000] 34, 71).
31 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 105. Lucretius (c. 99 BCE-c. 55 BCE) wrote his On the Nature of Things in hexameter.
32 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 105.
33 Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 105. Another editor of The Revolt of Islam gives as an alternative: “Asia was first made tributary, Greece was enslaved to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, and a multitude of Syrian captives bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found a precarious subsistence by administering,” etc. (H. Buxton Forman, cited in The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927) 424. The elements relevant to my argument are unaltered, however.
34 For analysis of Shelley’s use of the term “slave,” see Kyle Grimes, “Censorship, Violence, and Political Rhetoric: The Revolt of Islam in Its Time,” Keats-Shelley Journal 43 (1994): 104–5. Lowe’s comments on slavery and orientalism are also relevant; see Critical Terrains 60–2.
35 Four years later, Shelley expresses similar concerns in the preface to Hellas as he defends Greece against Turkish domination. His argument is based on the view that “We are all Greeks,” that western European civilization is defined by its Greek heritage (The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson 447). The idea of an alliance between Britain and Turkey is therefore abhorrent to him, as the poem itself also makes clear. Underlying Shelley’s attitude is very probably the fear of Ottoman Turkish expansion towards western Europe, although the Ottoman threat had been weakening for decades; see Hourani, Islam in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 10. For further discussion, see Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 72–3; and Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 148–50.
36 On the names of Laon and Cythna, see Ruff, Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam 60–2. It is remotely possible that Shelley had in mind Othman II (1603–1622), the unpopular sixteenth sultan of the Ottoman Empire, as a prototype for his Othman. Of the major Othmans of history, he is the only one to have been involved in a rebellion, but unlike Shelley’s Othman, he was put to death after being overthrown (see The Encyclopedia of Islam, 1st ed., vol. 6 [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1913–36; rpt. 1987] 1007).
37 My source for The Revolt of Islam is Shelley’s Complete Poetical Works, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck.
38 The issues of human status and of the Orient’s relationship with nature will be discussed in detail in chapter 3.
39 See for comparison Lowe’s discussion of eunuch slaves and orientalism in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (Critical Terrains 60–9).
40 For discussion of nineteenth-century attitudes towards Islam in general, see esp. Grossir, L‘Islam des Romantiques ch. 4; and Hourani, Islam in European Thought ch. 1.
41 This citation is from the Laon and Cythna version of the poem. Neville Rogers notes that “Oromaze’ is Ormuzd, the Principle of Good among the Zoroastrians. ‘Zerdusht’, in the next line, is Zoroaster” (Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 393). “Foh” is probably Fu Hsi (also spelled Fo-Hi), a Chinese “god emperor,” c. 3000 BCE, to whom “is attributed the development of the philosophical framework of Chinese medicine” (The Encyclopedia of Religion [New York: Macmillan, 1987] 313). Shelley’s list here can be compared to a shorter one in the Prologue to Hellas: “Satan, Christ, and Mahomet” (76).
This passage of The Revolt of Islam is cited as part of John Taylor Coleridge’s condemnation of the poem for “blasphemy”; see his review, “Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City,” Quarterly Review 42 (April 1819): 464 (rpt. in Albert Mordell, ed., Notorious Literary Attacks [New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926] 63–82). Robinson discusses the circumstances of this review; see “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Oilier, and William Blackwood” 196.
42 Shelley uses another version of the declaration of faith in Hellas: “One God is God — Mahomet is His prophet” (274). A more exact translation of the Arabic original would be: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”
43 For more information on the circumstances of this revision, see the notes to Laon and Cythna in the Ingpen and Peck edition of Shelley’s Complete Works; and H. Buxton Forman’s comments on the poem in his The Shelley Library: An Essay in Bibliography (London: Reeves and Turner, 1886) 74–5, 80–1. See also Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences 27–8; Reiman, Shelley and His Circle 157–65; and Robinson, “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Oilier, and William Blackwood” 190–3. Shelley’s letters at the time are of interest as well; see Shelley, “To Charles Oilier,” Dec. 11, 1817, letter 276; “To Charles Oilier,” Dec. 13, 1817, letter 278; and “To Thomas Moore,” Dec. 16, 1817, letter 279 of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2: 569–72, 575–7.
44 Oilier may have been right to worry, if John Coleridge’s italicized horror is any indication (“Laon and Cythna,” Quarterly Review 464). For further discussion of this incest and its censorship, see Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979) ch. 10; Ruff, Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam 58–60; and Sperry, “The Sexual Theme in The Revolt of Islam” 37.
45 Reiman reports that “four times as many lines were changed to avoid the charge of blasphemous libel as were altered to remove the subject of incest” (Shelley and His Circle 165).
46 A comparable shift occurs in the passage cited above, where Shelley lists the religious figures to whom the various clergymen appeal. The original list includes Christ; in revision, Christ is replaced by Joshua. However, as Rogers notes, this “substitution [...] was obstinate and artful, the name being a synonym of ‘Jesus’“ (Shelley, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Rogers 2: 393).
47 Shelley, “To a Publisher,” Oct. 13, 1817, letter 266 of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2: 559.
48 See esp. 2.42–3 and 8.13–16. For further analysis of Cythna’s role and Shelley’s “feminism,” see Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley 181–7; Gutschera, “The Drama of Reenactment in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam” 124–5; E. Douka Kabitoglou, “Shelley’s (Feminist) Discourse on the Female: The Revolt of Islam” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 15.2 (1990): 139–50; William Keach, “Cythna’s Subtler Language,” Studies in Romanticism 37.1 (1998): 7–16; Leask, British Romantic Writers and the East 130–5; McNiece, Shelley and the Revolutionary Idea 198–200; and E.B. Murray, “‘Elective Affinity’ in The Revolt of Islam,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 67 (1968): 580–1.
49 Lowe, Critical Terrains 51, 43–4, emphasis hers. Daniel argues that in the nineteenth century “[t]here is no subject connected with Islam which Europeans have thought more important than the condition of Muslim women.” In the Ottoman context, for instance, he proposes that “the position of Muslim women” was one of the three most important elements “in the European experience of Islam,” along with “fear of Turkish power” and “the absence of a gentry.” Daniel goes on to explain: “To the mind of aristocratic Europe, tyranny was common to all three, to the external threat, to a polity internally servile and to an enslavement of women” (Daniel, Islam, Europe and Empire 36, 11).
50 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: Norton, 1975) 19, 24, 29. For additional comments on Wollstonecraft in this context, see Keach, “Cythna’s Subtler Language” 8.
51 As usual, Shelley’s efforts in this regard were not fully successful. John Coleridge argues in his review that the circumstances Shelley depicts are so extreme as to make his solutions appear irrelevant to ordinary political and social situations. As he says, “We are Englishmen, Christians, free, and independent; we ask Mr. Shelley how his case applies to us?” (“Laon and Cythna” Quarterly Review 466; emphasis his).
52 See my analysis of Southey below for a fuller discussion of this prevalent view.
53 Fischer makes a similar observation; see Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative 191.
54 Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. W.M. Rossetti, vol. 1 (London: E. Moxon, Son, & Co., 1870) cii.
55 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. W. M. Rossetti 1: cii. The opposition that Rossetti implies between a Greek standard and the orientalist work at hand may seem innocent, but it depends upon the same political and cultural privileging of the Greek over the Middle Eastern that Shelley affirms in his preface to The Revolt of Islam and in Hellas. Accordingly, the Greek stands for absolute value; the Middle Eastern for a derivative value bounded by exoticism. The oriental may be admirable, but it can never be Greek.
56 Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 116–7.
57 Maria Edgeworth, “Murad the Unlucky,” Oriental Tales, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) 213–77. Originally published in Edgeworth’s collection Popular Tales, the story advocates an ethic of hard work and self-sufficiency; the title character’s misfortune is ascribed to laziness and poor judgement rather than to ill luck.
58 Southey, preface, Thalaba the Destroyer, The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey (New York: D. Appleton; and Philadelphia: George S. Appleton, 1846) 225. This preface is dated October 1800 but is erroneously ascribed to the fourth edition of Thalaba; it undoubtedly belongs to the first edition, which appeared in 1801.
This 1846 edition of the Complete Poetical Works is my source for Southey’s poetry.
59 Hoffpauir, “The Thematic Structure of Southey’s Epic Poetry,” Wordsworth Circle 6.4 (1975): 240. As Said shows, Southey’s brand of informational didacticism is not uncommon; see Said, Orientalism 125–9.
60 Southey, preface (1838), The Curse ofKehama (1810) 565.
61 Southey, preface (1838), The Curse of Kehama 565. Recent critics have disputed this omission; for further analysis of Thalaba’s political dimensions, see Butler, “Plotting the Revolution: The Political Narratives of Romantic Poetry and Criticism,” Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) 135, 142–52; Butler, “Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History,” Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Bulter, Jerome McGann, Paul Hamilton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) 82–3; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 54–74, 105–7. See for comparison Balachandra Rajan, “Monstrous Mythologies: Southey and The Curse of Kehama,” European Romantic Review 9.2 (1998): 102–16.
62 Southey, preface (1837), Thalaba 224.
63 Shelley, “To a Publisher,” Oct. 13, 1817, letter 266 of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2: 559.
64 Southey, preface (1837), Thalaba 224.
65 Southey, “To John Rickman, Esq.,” Aug. 22, 1800, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. Charles Cuthbert Southey, vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850) 104. See also for example Southey, “To Joseph Cottle, Esq.,” Sept. 22, 1799, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 25.
66 Peter Morgan, “Southey on Poetry,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 26 (1971): 80–1.
67 Southey, preface (1838), The Curse of Kehama 565. See Butler, “Repossessing the Past” 76–7 for additional comments on Southey’s use of the 1001 Nights.
68 Southey, preface (1838), The Curse of Kehama 565.
69 Southey, “To Henry Southey,” Aug. 25, 1800, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 110. “Seven Champions” refers to The Seven Champions of Christendom, a set of tales produced by Richard Johnson (1573–1659) but heavily dependent upon folk legends and traditions of chivalry. Several of the tales include Middle Eastern elements. Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, recommended both the 1001 Nights and The Seven Champions as books for children.
Southey seems to have more difficulty admiring oriental poetry than prose. Although he occasionally refers to Arabic poetry, especially the famous pre-Islamic Mu’allaqât, the founding poems of the Arabic literary tradition, he is generally critical of oriental poetry. He classes Ferdusi, one of the greatest Persian poets, as “worthless,” though admitting that perhaps the translation was bad. “The Arabian Tales,” on the other hand, “certainly abound with genius; they have lost their metaphorical rubbish in passing through the filter of a French translation” (notes, Thalaba 232).
70 Southey, “To C.W.W. Wynn, Esq.,” Aug. 15, 1798, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 1: 346. The legend of the Garden of Irem is incorporated into the first book of Thalaba.
71 In his first reference to Gebir, Southey says that the poem contains “some of the most exquisite poetry in the language” (Southey, “To Joseph Cottle, Esq.,” Sept. 22, 1799, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 24). In this same letter, Southey mentions that he has written a review of the poem; this review acknowledges that the “story of this poem is certainly ill chosen and not sufficiently whole; and the language is frequently deficient in perspicuity.” In all other respects, though, Southey’s appraisal is extremely high, for the poem “abound[s] with such beauties as it is rarely our good fortune to discover;” “we have read [it] with more than common attention, and with far more than common delight” (“Gebir; a Poem,” Critical Review 21 [Sept. 1799]: 29, 38, 39). From this point on, Southey’s pleasure in Gebir merely increases. He mentions it again on Dec. 21, 1799, referring to its “miraculous beauties” (“To Grosvenor C. Bedford, Esq., Dec. 21, 1799, The Life and Correspondence 2: 33). He recommends it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge on April 1, 1800 (“To S.T. Coleridge, Esq.,” April 1, 1800, The Life and Correspondence 2: 56.), and again a month later (“To S.T. Coleridge, Esq.,” May 1, 1800, The Life and Correspondence 2: 64).
Landor (1775–1864) was a poet and prose writer, influential despite his notoriously difficult temperament. For further discussion of his personal and intellectual connections with Southey, see Charles L. Proudfit, “Southey and Landor: A Literary Friendship,” Wordsworth Circle 5.2 (1974): 105–12. For general analysis of Gebir, see Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative 57–61; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism ch. 1. One of Landor’s shorter orientalist poems will be analyzed in chapter 4.
72 Southey, preface (1837), Thalaba 224.
73 Southey, preface (1800), Thalaba 225. According to Byron Smith, Southey is referring to “The Arabian Tales, or, a Continuation of the Arabian Nights (1792) translated by Robert Heron from La Suite des milles et une nuits, contes arabes (1788) by Dom Chavis and Jacques Cazotte. The story entitled ‘The History of Maugraby the Magician’ gave Southey the suggestion for his poem” (Smith, Islam in English Literature 180). Martha Conant discusses this tale in some detail; see Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century 41–4. Moreover, the term “romance” itself has orientalist connotations in the nineteenth century; see for example John Beer, “Fragmentations and Ironies,” Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 262; Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative 191; Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England 241–3, 248–50; and Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance 108.
74 However sincerely Southey desires to inform his audience, it is difficult to agree with Sharafuddin that Thalaba “became a vehicle for the communication of the nature of the Islamic faith in the West, and in England in particular; it treated Islam with scholarly seriousness” (Islam and Romantic Orientalism 87). Part of the entertainment value of texts like the 1001 Nights, and even Thalaba, lies precisely in the exoticism of the information they impart; “scholarly seriousness” must always compete with curiosity, and very often loses to it.
75 This trio of features has been remarkably enduring. A recent travel article on Tunisia includes all three (and little else) in a pull-out quote that precedes the article: “Tunisia offers visitors a glimpse of the great wide sands of the Sahara, with camels and oases formed of springs giving life to date palms, and the brown tents of nomads” (Larry Lindner, “Tunisia: Where the Sands of Time are Still Vibrant,” The Boston Globe [23 Oct. 1994, Special Section: “Adventures in Travel”] 10.)
It may seem odd that Southey would fasten on such stereotypical Middle Eastern characteristics as tents, sand, and palms when his extensive research would have shown him so much more. Yet while this research enriched his knowledge of the region, it tended, because of its textual derivation, to confirm rather than counter the received ideas and images of the Orient.
76 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents 14. MacKenzie makes a similar observation of orientalist painting; see his Orientalism 55.
77 Butler, “Repossessing the Past” 77.
78 Again I must disagree with Sharafuddin, who proposes that Southey’s “imaginary Arabs are not merely primitive superstitious people, but cultured beings capable of spiritual experience,” characterized by “complexity and aspiration” (Islam and Romantic Orientalism 105). Said’s analysis of the “life-cycle” of Edward Lane’s “modern Egyptian” (Orientalism 161) comes closer to the mark.
79 Southey, notes, Thalaba 249; emphasis his. Constantin-François Chasseboeuf Volney (1757–1820) was a French orientalist and author of several books on the Middle East, including the 1787 Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie [Travels in Egypt and Syria], which chronicles his own travels.
80 Edward Pococke (1604–1691) was a prolific orientalist at Oxford who had traveled to Syria. Louis de Chénier (1722–1796) spent fifteen years as French consul in Morocco; he published a book on Morocco (1787) and one on the Ottoman Empire (1789).
81 Southey, notes, Thalaba 250.
82 Southey, notes, Thalaba 250; the quotation is from Volney.
83 Southey takes this opportunity to include more than half a page of notes on oriental singing, mosque architecture, and the direction in which Muslims are required to face while praying.
84 This reference to the “pillar of the Tent” is explained in a long footnote that discusses not only tent materials and construction but also the particulars of tent use. Bedouins, it is pointed out, have no “bed, mattrass [sic], or pillow,” but sleep “lying, as they find room, upon a mat or carpet, in the middle or corner of the tent.” We will be relieved to learn, however, that “[t]hose who are married, have each of them a corner of the tent, cantoned off with a curtain” (Southey, notes, Thalaba 251; he is citing Thomas Shaw [1694–1751], who published several books based on his travels in North Africa and the Levant).
85 Southey, notes, Thalaba 253.
86 More extended summaries and general analyses of Thalaba may be found in Beyer, The Enchanted Forest (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) 237–44; Butler, “Plotting the Revolution” 143–52 and “Repossessing the Past” 73–80; Hoffpauir, “The Thematic Structure of Southey’s Epic Poetry” 246–8; Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 50–133; and Smith, Islam in English Literature 181–6.
87 Diego Saglia’s analysis of the notes to Southey’s long poem on Moorish Spain, Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), confirms the significance of such marginalia; see Saglia, “Nationalist Texts and Counter-Texts: Southey’s Roderick and the Dissensions of the Annotated Romance,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 53:4 (1999): 421–51.
88 Sharafuddin’s comments on this phenomenon are useful; see Islam and Romantic Orientalism xxix-xxx, 117.
89 Southey’s tactics here may be modeled in part upon what Haddawy describes as the 1001 Nights’ “interweaving the unusual, the extraordinary, the marvelous, and the supernatural into the fabric of everyday life. [...] Thus the phantasmagoric is based on the concrete, the supernatural grounded in the natural” (The Arabian Nights x-xi).
90 Said makes a related argument about Gustave Flaubert’s orientalism: “The Orient is watched [...]; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what [Le Mascrier’s 1735] Description de l’Égypte called ‘bizarre jouissance.’ The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness” (Orientalism 103; emphasis his).
91 This perception applies to any number of spheres of life, from government to architecture and urban planning to interior decoration to interpersonal relations. See for instance Asad, “Two European Images of Non-European Rule” 110–1. Timothy Mitchell explores this view’s obvious implications for colonialism: “The Orient was backward, irrational, and disordered, and therefore in need of European order and authority” (Colonising Egypt 166). The problem of disorder will be addressed more fully in chapter 2.
92 Southey, notes, Thalaba 251.
93 Southey, notes, Thalaba 292–4.
94 Butler concludes that “Southey’s notes must have existed before he went off to Portugal in the summer of 1800 to write the text of his poem, since he sent Thalaba directly to the publisher from Portugal the following year” (“Plotting the Revolution” 148). Francis Jeffrey, whose notorious review of Thalaba appeared in 1802, would have shared her suspicions; he says with dismay that “It is impossible to peruse this poem, with the notes, without feeling that it is the fruit of much reading undertaken for the express purpose of fabricating some such performance” (“Thalaba the Destroyer,” Edinburgh Review 1 [Oct. 1802] 77). For discussion of this review, see Alison Hickey, “Coleridge, Southey, ‘and Co.’: Collaboration and Authority,” Studies in Romanticism 37.3 (1998): 305, 307.
95 Southey, “To S.T. Coleridge, Esq.,” Dec. 27, 1799, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 36.
96 Southey, “To S.T. Coleridge, Esq.,” May 1, 1800, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 64.
97 Saglia, “Nationalist Texts” 427–9.
98 Saglia, “Nationalist Texts” 428.
99 Saglia, “Nationalist Texts” 429.
100 As Lowe observes, the descriptive dismemberment of the love object has strong roots in Western literary traditions, independent of orientalism; she cites Petrarch’s praise of Laura as an example (Critical Terrains 48). However, the tendency towards atomization pervades orientalists’ descriptions of Orientals in circumstances that have nothing to do with love; Southey’s portrayal of Oneiza here is clearly part of that tradition as well as of Petrarch’s.
101 Rajan speculates on the reasons for the poem’s poor performance; see “Monstrous Mythologies” 202.
102 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 39 (Sept. 1802): 241.
103 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 251.
104 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 243, 244, 245, 247.
105 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 251.
106 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 250.
107 [Taylor], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Critical Review 39 (Sept. 1803): 370.
108 [Taylor], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 371, 369.1 will return in chapter 3 to this question of the relative position of people and places.
109 [Jeffrey], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 69, 69, 80, 72, 74, 75. The context of this review is discussed in Butler, “Plotting the Revolution” 141; and Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative 80–1.
110 Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 13. See also Smith, Islam in English Literature 84.
111 [Taylor], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 369. “Epopoeia” is an alternative to “epopee,” an epic poem or a “composition comparable to an epic poem” (OED).
112 “Thalaba the Destroyer,” Monthly Review 240.
113 The genre of Southey’s long poems (and other nineteenth-century poets’ work of the same scope) is a complex problem that has been debated at some length; see for instance Fischer, Romantic Verse Narrative 72–85. Fischer points out that Jeffrey simply adopts Southey’s term, “metrical romance,” but then judges the poem according to epic criteria (81). Fischer also observes correctly that Southey himself obscures Thalaba’s genre by using at least three different terms (“romance,” “poem,” and “Arabian Tale”) to identify the poem. However, it is important to note, as Fischer does not, that two of these three terms refer to the work’s orientalism, strongly suggesting that Southey privileged that aspect of Thalaba above any other. The remaining term, “poem,” is so general as to appear virtually meaningless until we notice that the reviewers’ reactions to Thalaba’s plot and characters seem better suited to a discussion of prose fiction than of poetry; perhaps Southey really did need to remind his readers that this was a poem.
114 [Jeffrey], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 75–6.
115 Sidney, An Apology for Poetry 86.
116 Addison, “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712), Criticism: The Major Texts, ed. W.J. Bate 186. Aristotle’s version, briefly, is as follows: “there are some things that distress us when we see them in reality, but the most accurate representations of these same things we view with pleasure [... M]en find pleasure in viewing representations because it turns out that they learn and infer what each thing is” (Aristotle, Poetics 7).
117 Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare” 208, 215.
118 Hazlitt, “On Imitation” 298.
119 Shelley, A Defence of Poetry 430.
120 For more recent reflection upon this problem, see Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Kant in The Truth in Painting, 1978, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) esp. 45.
121 Boyd argues persuasively that mimesis had begun to fade by the end of the eighteenth century. However, it remains for poets of the early nineteenth century a “given” (Boyd’s term) against which they must judge their own critical and poetic positions (see Boyd, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline 304–5). Comprehensive book-length studies of this hugely important issue include Boyd, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline; Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995); Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents; and Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also Frederick Burwick, “The Romantic Concept of Mimesis: Idem et Alter,” Questioning Romanticism, ed. John Beer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 179–208; Derrida, The Truth in Painting ch. 1; and Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) 382–418.
122 Said, Orientalism 166. Others have extended Said’s analysis; see Lowe, Critical Terrains x; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt esp. chs. 1, 5; and Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism 228.
123 See F. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry (1799–1800), Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968) 86, 96, 103–4. For discussion of Schlegel’s arabesque, see Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 31–6. General analysis of the arabesque, with reference to its origin in the visual arts, may be found in Ernst Kühnel, The Arabesque: Meaning and Transformation of an Ornament, 1949, trans. Richard Ettinghausen (Graz, Austria: Verlag für Sammler, 1976). For discussion of the arabesque as it relates to narrative and to Islamic aesthetics, see Sandra Naddaff, Arabesque: Narrative Structure and the Aesthetics of Repetition in 1001 Nights (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991) 111–9.
124 Southey, preface (1800), Thalaba 225; emphasis his.
125 Southey, preface (1838), The Curse of Kehama 566.
126 Naddaff, Arabesque 115. Derrida identifies a similar phenomenon: “[t]he parergon can [...] contribute to the proper and intrinsically aesthetic representation if it intervenes by its form and only by its form” (The Truth in Painting 64, emphasis his). One can glimpse too in Southey’s arabesque the prototype of what Lowe calls Roland Barthes’s “‘poetics of escape,’ a desire to transcend semiology and the ideology of signifier and signified, to invent a place that exceeds binary structure itself (Critical Terrains 154).
127 Southey, notes, Thalaba 232. Smith comments briefly on this passage; see Islam in English Literature 184–5. In accordance with current critical conventions, I use “oriental” to refer to things of the Orient, and “orientalist” to refer to things produced through European signification upon the Orient. Nineteenth-century distinctions between the terms are typically imprecise — hence Southey’s reference to Persian artists as “Orientalists.”
128 [Jeffrey], “Thalaba the Destroyer,” 78.
129 See Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 201; and Naddaff, Arabesque 112, 115.
130 Saglia remarks that “irony in [Southey’s] Roderick cannot be explained in terms of authorial intention” (“Nationalist Texts” 443). The same is true of Thalaba’s counter-referential experimentation. It is instead, as Saglia says, “a feature that escapes authorial control; it is rather an aspect of the work’s internal organization” (p. 443).
131 Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 4, 34. For a summary of Southey’s views on ornament in literary style, see Morgan, “Southey on Poetry” 81–3. Butler argues that Southey’s “experimental metres [...] suspend [...] the automatic superior prestige of forms and metres from the corpus of polished written literature,” but she does not address the extent to which the mimetic assumptions of that corpus are also opened to question (“Repossessing the Past” 75–6).
132 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents 28.
133 Butler’s comments on Shelley’s mixed reactions to Southey are useful; see “Byron and the Empire in the East” 70; and “Repossessing the Past” 79–81. For additional discussion, see Keach, “Cythna’s Subtler Language” 9–11.
134 Seyhan, Representation and Its Discontents 67.