Orientalism

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ORIENTALISM

Orientalism is a concept whose meaning has evolved from its first uses in British and French cultures in the age of European imperialism, when it referred specifically to political governance and visual art. Now, in its contemporary postcolonial valence, Orientalism is understood as the powerful discourse embodying Western attitudes toward Asia. Orientalism first defined a particular attitude to British imperial policy in India in the late eighteenth century, which valued the languages, laws, and culture of the subjugated colony. This response fostered academic disciplines founded on intellectual inquiry into all aspects of Islamic and Hindu India and, later, other Near and Far Eastern colonies occupied by the British. In France, early in the nineteenth century, Orientalism, in a more limited way, described a particular genre of painting and the popular vogue for Middle Eastern and North African subject matter in art.

In these contexts, Orientalism had positive, or neutral, meanings. But since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, along with the work of Said's contemporaries Anouar Abdel-Malek, A. L. Tibawi, and Bryan Turner, the limits of the term have expanded, with more negative connotations, to encompass cultural production in all forms. Most important, Orientalism has been refigured in terms of the discourses that have produced a controlling Western master narrative to comprehend the East—which is seen as mysterious, inscrutable, threatening, despotic, childlike, erotic, savage, mystical, perverse, and uncivilized. Said's epochal work has itself spawned much debate about the degree to which Asia has been imagined, represented, and governed in purely Orientalist terms, with many scholars revising Said's theory of Orientalism to allow for a more complex and nuanced rendition of the West's relations to the East. While Said initially posited Orientalism as the expression of a monolithic European domination over the colonized Other, further explorations of the concept have revealed that the full scope of the West's cultural engagement with Asia has been marked by both mutual influence and resistance, respect and opprobrium, fascination and fear, attraction and repulsion. Indeed, revisionist scholarship has uncovered the degree to which the East was able to undermine and challenge cultural appropriation by the West as well as irrevocably alter the cultural landscape of the West.

AMERICAN ORIENTALISM

The influence of Orientalism has been much less apparent in the United States than in Europe because America has, despite the actuality of history, denied being an imperial power. America has habitually clung to a myth of itself as unsullied by the desire for overseas empire, and yet it is easy to trace a fascination with the East in American culture, given the nation's occasional forays into Asia in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and the very presence of immigrants from Asia on American soil. If nothing else, Orientalist impulses in America manifested themselves as surface decoration in a vast range of cultural production, both elite and popular. Orientalizing urges to ornament ran the gamut, in 1903 alone, from Henry James's (1843–1916) fanciful description of The Golden Bowl's (1904) Fanny Assingham as "a daughter . . . of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans" (p. 34) to the illuminated minarets of Coney Island's Luna Park. And a full engagement with Asia by such eminent figures as the artists Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler, the poets Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the travel writer Lafcadio Hearn, the playwright David Belasco, the novelistStephen Crane, the satirist Mark Twain, and the film directors D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille comprises a significant body of work that reflects America's awareness of the Orient as an inspirational, alluring, and terrifying space upon which to project American national desires and anxieties—as well as America's sense of itself as a uniquely forward- and outward-looking culture of assimilation (however uneasy) and modernity (however socially retrograde).

There was no single originating moment in American Orientalism, because Asian motifs and themes in the visual and applied arts were omnipresent in the European culture imported to America well before the mid-nineteenth century (such as Spode's Willow Ware). But a signal event in American fascination with the Orient came in 1854, when an American naval officer, Matthew C. Perry, forced Japan to open trade with the West. Gradually Japan, after the Meiji restoration (1868), was willing to engage with the West, and by 1882 the Japanese had replaced the Chinese as the largest Asian group to immigrate to America. So by the end of the nineteenth century the American mainland had become a contact zone between Asians and other Americans, however much Asians were despised and disenfranchised (as they were in the 1879 California state constitution, which denied suffrage to all "natives of China, idiots, and insane persons").

ORIENTALISM AND RACISM

Indeed, the very worst tendencies of American nativism and racism frequently emerged in American cultural production that attempted to engage with the Orient. Bret Harte's (1836–1902) hugely popular 1870 poem "The Heathen Chinee" articulated the full range of attitudes to which Asians were subjected: bemused condescension for their charming childlike ways, hatred for their manipulative duplicity, and a mixture of fascination and terror at their exotic Otherness. Even the lofty patrician Henry Adams (1838–1918), in his account of an 1886 visit to Japan, considered it a "child's country . . . a nursery" (p. 17). Later, in a letter to John Hay, Adams found Japan to be "primitive," and he described the people in overtly simian terms. More well-meaning works still infantilized the Asian. A prime example would be David Belasco and John Luther Long's cross-racial stage romance Madame Butterfly (1900), which emphasized the long-suffering, masochistic passivity and childlike nature of the female protagonist, however much it cast her American lover Pinkerton in an unsympathetic light.

Racist fears of a "Yellow Peril" were reinforced during the American occupation of the Philippines after 1898 and American involvement in suppressing the Chinese Boxer uprising (1900). Stephen Crane's potboiler Active Service (1898), set in the Greco-Turkish War, posits the Turks as a dark, amorphous horde threatening the protagonists Rufus and Nora, sparring war correspondents seeking adventure and fame. The couple's love-hate relationship becomes the novel's focus, and Nora is defined in Orientalist terms as an alluring figure of Otherness because she represents the destabilizing threat of the American New Woman. Orientalizing characters became a stock method writers used to make their characters seem "different," dangerously seductive, decadent. Kate Chopin, for example, did this in The Awakening (1899), in the scene at Edna's party when Mrs. Highcamp's garland of roses transforms Victor into "a vision of Oriental beauty" (p. 110). So, too, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905), in which the arriviste Jew Simon Rosedale's physical appearance is associated with conventionally represented Asian characteristics, especially his "small sidelong eyes" (p. 249). Mrs. Hatch, one of Lily Bart's way stations along her sordid road down and down the social hierarchy, is criticized for her "Oriental indolence and disorder" (p. 267). These negative connotations of the East were inextricably linked to America's occasional interventions in Asia during the nineteenth century. But such one-dimensional manifestations of Orientalism, however ethnocentric and demeaning to the Other, were merely one aspect of a more complex cultural dynamic of attraction and repulsion that ultimately served to further familiarize Americans with the presence of Asia in the economic, political, and—most importantly for cultural production—imaginary realms. The Orient, in the American mind, was less the product of mimetic or realistic representation than a diametrically opposed Other against which a sense of essential American identity, however illusory, could take form.

THE ORIENT IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

As a sort of manifesto for Orientalism, Walt Whitman's (1819–1892) poem "Passage to India" (1870) celebrated the closeness of the West and East made increasingly real by advances in technology. Just as the American continent was connected by the joining of the Union and Central Pacific railroads, so was Asia becoming easier to reach and traverse thanks to the completion of the Suez Canal. Whitman's poem conceives geographical connectedness between the two hemispheres; more than that, it is a self-reflexive meditation on the power of the Orient to incite a kind of ecstatic artistic inspiration, for the poet catalogs the epic histories of the entire Eastern Hemisphere as a means of lauding the idea of visionary mastery in all forms. The poet is especially inspired by Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor, and other adventurers and explorers, linking himself to their quests: "Doubts to be solv'd, the map incognita, blanks to be fill'd" (p. 536). American Orientalism could be said to act on that same questing desire to fulfill curiosity and exert agency in the world: "The foot of man unstay'd, the hands never at rest. Thyself, O soul, that will not brook a challenge" (p. 536), he apostrophizes.

Whitman's Orientalism enunciated itself in typically huge, expansive gestures. By contrast, Herman Melville's (1819–1891) Clarel (1876) takes its title character on a contemporary journey to the Holy Land, and at the end of it Clarel finds the experience a meaningless and solitary one. Amid a collective of "strangers and exiles" (p. 497), he finds his encounter with the Orient dispiriting; unlike Whitman, with his effusive delight in global unification through technology, Clarel notes the irony of humankind's ability to "wire the world" via cables "far under the sea" while unable to hear any "message from beneath the stone" of biblical history (pp. 497–498).

ORIENTALISM AND TASTE

So, as Melville's long narrative poem articulates, the reality of cultural producers' appropriation of Asia was, of course, frequently less magnificent in execution and borne of far less-idealistic grandiosity than Whitman's. Indeed, much American Orientalism had the intended and unintended effect of embracing and embodying kitsch. The intentional appropriation and parody of Orientalist stereotypes and aesthetic conventions was merely one way of acknowledging the complexities inherent in viewing the East. Kate Chopin's (1851–1904) short story, "The Egyptian Cigarette" seems at first to represent the Orient in a degrading manner, as a space for the West's exotic fantasies to run amok. Chopin's narrator expresses a hallucinatory vision of the Arab world that is, on the surface, stereotypically hyperbolic in its exoticism and Technicolor eroticism. Yet in the story's very excess, Chopin makes gentle fun of popular urges to represent the East in purely fantastic terms, most apparently in cigarette advertising.

Some of that same parodic or satiric spirit is omnipresent in Mark Twain's (1835–1910) writings about Asia. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897), for example, mocks the very processes of Orientalizing Asia. The chapter "In Ceylon" complains that Cairo was insufficiently Oriental, that it was "a tempered Orient—an Orient with an indefinite something wanting" (p. 339). Ceylon, according to the narrative voice, "was Oriental in the last measure of completeness—utterly Oriental" (p. 339). Ceylon perfectly meets the traveler's preconceptions of what the Orient should be, a riot of lush tropical foliage and colorful, exotic dress. Twain piles on the descriptive narrative to an excessive degree. Further in the chapter, however, "this dream of fairyland and paradise" is rudely interrupted by "grating dissonance" (p. 343) as a small group of young girls dressed in missionary school uniform enters the scene. Twain's complex satiric voice layers a yearning for cultural purity with an implicit recognition that such a longing exoticizes the Other to its disadvantage.

Kate Chopin's short story "An Egyptian Cigarette" was written in April 1897 and published in Vogue in April 1900. In the story, "Madam," the otherwise unnamed narrator, retires to a friend's "smoking-den" to savor a cigarette he brought back from Cairo. Here Chopin describes the first sensations of inhaling the mysterious pale-yellow cigarette and the beginning of the fevered, masochistic reverie it induces.

I took one long inspiration of the Egyptian cigarette. The gray-green smoke arose in a small puffy column that spread and broadened, that seemed to fill the room. I could see the maple leaves dimly, as if they were veiled in a shimmer of moonlight. A subtle, disturbing current passed through my whole body and went to my head like the fumes of disturbing wine. I took another deep inhalation of the cigarette.

"Ah! the sand has blistered my cheek! I have lain here all day with my face in the sand. Tonight, when the everlasting stars are burning, I shall drag myself back to the river."

He will never come back.

Thus far have I followed him; with flying feet; with stumbling feet; with hands and knees, crawling; and outstretched arms, and here have I fallen in the sand.

The sand has blistered my cheek; it has blistered all my body, and the sun is crushing me with hot torture. There is shade beyond the cluster of palms.

Kate Chopin, A Vocation and a Voice: Stories (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 68–69.

More often than not, however, "fake" Orientalism was the product of aesthetic failings born of serious, rather than satiric, intent. This kind of Orientalism was consecrated in public spectacle, like the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The masses wandered through a mock Turkish village, visited the Moorish Palace, watched belly dancers in the Egyptian theater, and lost their nickels and dimes at midway carnival attractions on the "Streets of Cairo." Celebrating the rise of American power in the world, the exposition enabled more than two million people to capture glimpses of an exotic world seemingly open to enlightened conquest.

In the cinema, audiences of 1916 were awestruck at the Babylonian sequences in D. W. Griffith's (1875–1948) "colossal spectacle" Intolerance. Kitsch is often defined as artistic ambition that exceeds conventions of "good taste," and the massive plaster sets and thousands of extras in "Middle Eastern" dress produced a monumentally kitschy rendition of Babylon. The vast processional pageantry of Intolerance was offset by the titillating spectacle of scantily clad women in the "Love Temple," writhing seductively in the rituals of the "sacred fires of life." Still, Griffith insisted that the vulgar splendor of his "vision" was authentic. One of the many dogmatic intertitles earnestly assured cinema-goers: "Note: Replica of Babylon's encircling walls, broad enough for the passing of chariots."

Similarly kitschy was the persona of one of the greatest early film divas, Theda Bara, who enacted such characters as Cleopatra in Cleopatra (1917), Salome in Salome (1918), and the priestess in The Soul of Buddha (1918). Her trademark kohl-rimmed eyes and "vamp" personality were hugely popular, and many fans suspended their disbelief about the Cincinnati-born star who was, as studio publicity maintained, born "in the shadow of the pyramids" and whose name was an anagram of "Arab Death." Such versions of the East, however seriously intentioned, are so inauthentic as to constitute camp, a strain in American Orientalism that mirrored much of the visual excess of such academic realist painters as Jean-Léon Gérome and Henri Regnault. French Orientalism's visual iconography provided much of the inspiration for more popular spectacle in American culture that pushed renditions of the East even further into fanciful excess.

ORIENTALISM, AUTHENTICITY, AND MODERNISM

By contrast, a more serious effort at representing the Orient, and more dutifully borrowing Asian aesthetic practices in art and literature, developed alongside more demotic renditions of the East as a place of sensual pleasure and erotic fantasy. There was a distinctive strain of American Orientalism, emerging from more elite artistic and literary circles, that was marked by understatement and even "delicacy," which attempted to render the Orient in terms of tranquility, mystery, and remoteness from the debased Western values inhering in industrialism and urban life. This dichotomy is enacted in Griffith's 1919 film Broken Blossoms, which dignified the "Yellow Man," Cheng Huan (played by the Caucasian actor Richard Barthelmess) as a fragile, sensitive rescuer of an abused street urchin in the filthy hovels and opium dens of London's Limehouse. A male variation on Madame Butterfly, Cheng Huan renames the urchin White Blossom and, in a magical moment, places "a ray from the lyric moon" in her hair as she sleeps peacefully in his bed. He stands in direct opposition to the girl's drunken, violent, and abusive father and is therefore seen as a self-sacrificing and asexual aesthete who inhabits a world of pretty objets d'art. Thus Asia embodied, for American artists and poets, the aesthetic appeal of gentle understatement and handcrafted refinement in opposition to the coarseness of mass-produced consumer goods churned out of factories by alienated pieceworkers.

Chief among American visual artists in the period who relied on Asian forms and themes were James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Whistler popularized Japanese artistic motifs and methods in his domestic interiors (such as the splendid Peacock Room of 1876–1877) and misty oil paintings. In such works as Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Chelsea (1871) Whistler superimposed on portrayals of industrial London an escapist, mysterious, and idyllic "mood" derived from Japanese landscapes. Whistler was also instrumental in popularizing the use of Asian objets d'art and dress in his society portraiture, influencing later generations of portraitists such as William McGregor Paxton. Paxton's The New Necklace (1910) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, depicts a young American woman languorously seated at her writing desk (upon which is set a geisha doll), set against a silk screen, wearing a pink silk tunic, the very picture of resplendent Orientalist consumption. Even more directly influenced by Japanese aesthetics and techniques was Mary Cassatt, whose drypoint and aquatint works of the early 1890s depicting women and children in domestic interiors were among the high points of her career. Entranced by the Japanese woodblock prints she collected, Cassatt emulated their compositions and soft, pale chromatics. Spare, elegant, formal: these characteristics of Asian art and literature energized modernism in all its forms, perhaps most significantly for literature in a movement known as imagism.

Before Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Amy Lowell (1874–1925), among others, transmuted Asian aesthetics into poetry to "make it new," as Pound enjoined others to do, the journalist Lafcadio Hearn popularized the charm of Japan and Japanese art forms in America in a dozen books, beginning in 1894 with Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan. His essays respectfully enlightened American readers on the frequent superiority of Japanese culture and, in particular, praised the visual beauty of the ideograph over the West's "dull, inanimate symbols of vocal sounds." Similarly, Ernest Fenollosa, after twelve years of teaching in Japan, returned to America to popularize Asian literature and art, inspiring Ezra Pound to adopt Asian poetic models and theories of the ideograph in his own poetry of the mid-1910s. Ostensibly, Cathay (1915) consists of Pound's reworkings of Fenollosa's notes, but the effect of the work is strikingly modern and original: simple, elegant, refined poetry stripped of all Victorian moralizing and bombast. "In a Station of the Metro" is only the best-known and most anthologized of Pound's prolific, Asian-inspired works of the period; these, in turn, inspired a short-lived vogue in the late 1910s for accessible, concentrated, image-oriented poetry modeled on the Chinese and Japanese. Amy Lowell's Pictures of the Floating World (1919) and John Gould Fletcher's Japanese Prints (1918) were two of the most prominent imagist efforts, however individually personalized and even Americanized, at responding to Asian verse forms and thematics. The titles of some of Lowell's poems in her collection suggest the Orientalist effect she wanted to achieve: "Passing the Bamboo Fence," "Temple Ceremony," "The Camellia Tree of Matsue," and "Ombre Chinoise."

If imagism was the most refined and respectful manifestation of Orientalism in American modernism, more populist modernism in the cinema displayed the racism inherent in the concept of the "Yellow Peril." Cecil B. DeMille's (1881–1959) 1915 film The Cheat endures as an astonishingly modern examination of the limits of female agency within upper-class marriage in a consumer society, and its formal aspects, such as cinematography and narrative pace, were miles ahead of Griffith's ponderous Victorian pageantry. Yet DeMille was as unenlightened as Griffith. The Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, playing the role of a wicked "Burmese ivory king," is portrayed as a monster of possessiveness, infiltrating and contaminating the world of the "Long Island smart set," corrupting the female protagonist, and ultimately burning his mark on her body with an ivory brand. This shocking act is obviously a displacement for an otherwise unrepresentable sexual assault. The Cheat was merely the most technically sophisticated rendition of much cultural production that used the conventions of Orientalism to express a terror of miscegenation and cross-racial sexual relations—and the ensuing collapse of a social order predicated on a racial hierarchy.

Tracing the ways America has engaged with its own imaginary representation of Asia suggests that America has looked eastward for cultural inspiration out of alienation from the West and has established its own identity as a Western nation in opposition to the East. Perhaps even more significantly, America could better express itself as a "modern" nation by looking away from Europe and toward the Orient, a new, fresh source of inspiration in the arts and literature. This complex cultural dynamic of attraction and repulsion has been a feature of the American cultural landscape at all levels, from elite culture to the carnival sideshow and nickelodeon, making American culture all the more rich for its appropriations, however much they might be lacking in true respect and integrity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adams, Henry. The Letters of Henry Adams. Vol. 3, 1886–1892. Edited by J. C. Levenson et al. 6 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982–1988.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. Edited by Nancy A. Walker. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1993.

Hearn, Lafcadio. Writings from Japan: An Anthology. Edited by Francis King. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. 1904. New York Edition, vol. 23. New York: Scribners, 1937.

Lowell, Amy. Complete Poetical Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955.

Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 1876. Northwestern-Newberry edition, vol. 12. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991.

Twain, Mark. Following the Equator. 1897. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. 1905. Edited by Martha Banta. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Whitman, Walt. "Passage to India." 1870. In Poetry and Prose. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1996.