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“Captain Burton's Oriental Muck Heap”: The Book of the Thousand Nights and the Uses of Orientalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Dane Kennedy
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Extract

In the final decade of his remarkable life, the Victorian explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton made a daring bid to provoke a confrontation with those forces in British society that he identified with moral intolerance and intellectual pedantry. Unlikely though it might seem, the instrument of this provocation was a work widely regarded as children's literature—the tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1885–86, Burton published a ten-volume translation of the tales, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, followed in 1886–88 by an additional six-volume Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The mammoth scale of the endeavor was matched by its audacity. Burton not only offered an English reading public the first frank and unexpurgated translation of the tales themselves; he also peppered the text with footnotes about esoteric aspects of Islamic culture, especially sexual customs, and closed the tenth volume with a “Terminal Essay” that included a lengthy discourse on pederasty. This quixotic enterprise thrust Burton into the middle of an intersecting network of debates about sexuality and purity, state regulation and personal freedom, the Occident and the Orient. To examine the intentions that motivated Burton's translation of the Nights and the reception it received is to explore some of the crucial elements of the late Victorian crisis of identity.

While the crumbling of a Victorian cultural consensus has long been a matter of interest, only recently has attention turned to the role that non-Western influences played in this process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 317 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

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30 Printing Times and Lithographer, 15 August 1885. A clipping of this brief news item can be found in Burton's copy of the Nights, vol. 1, Huntington Library, BL91(a).

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41 Burton, R., trans., Nights, 1:xxiiiGoogle Scholar. It should be noted in this context that Burton changed the subtitle of his work from “Notes on the Manners and Customs Described in The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night” to “Notes on the Manners and Customs of Oriental Men,” with “Oriental” replaced by “Moslem” when the volumes were in page proofs. See proof sheets of the Nights in the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

42 Burton, Richard F., “The Biography of the Book and Its Reviewers Reviewed,” in Burton, R., trans., Supplemental Nights, 6:403, 405, 431, 400Google Scholar.

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44 See Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar. In the epilogue to the latter volume, Mason observes that the campaigns of Josephine Butler and other late Victorian feminists have a strong antisensualist dimension to them.

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48 Ibid.

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57 See Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; and Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

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61 According to Brian Reade, Burton's “Terminal Essay” was “the first account in English of any length or breadth devoted entirely to this matter” (see Reade, Brian, ed., Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 [London, 1970], p. 30)Google Scholar.

62 Burton's sexual orientation has been the subject of intense interest and debate among his biographers. Both Brodie (The Devil Drives) and McLynn, Frank (Burton: Snow upon the Desert [London, 1990])Google Scholar make the case for Burton's homosexual leanings. Lovell rejects this view in her recent dual biography of Burton and his wife, insisting that his affections were exclusively heterosexual (see A Rage to Live). I am not persuaded. To cite just one example of the evidence supporting the claims of Brodie and McLynn, Swinburne wrote about “that lost love of Burton's, the beloved and blue object of his Central African affections, whose caudal charms and simious seductions were too strong for the narrow laws of Levitical or Mosaic prudery which would confine the jewel of a man to the lotus of a merely human female by the most odious and unnatural of priestly restrictions” ((Lang, , ed., The Swinburne Letters, 3:61Google Scholar).

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68 According to Rudi C. Bleys, ethnographic evidence of homosexuality in other cultures helped to instill a sense of moral relativism that aided the cause of emancipation for homosexuals (see The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750–1918 [New York, 1995])Google Scholar. Also see Murray, Stephen O., “Some Nineteenth-Century Reports of Islamic Homosexualities,” in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, ed. Murray, Stephen O. and Roscoe, Will (New York, 1997), pp. 204–21Google Scholar.

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73 The work was written by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi in the early fifteenth century and circulated in manuscript copies prior to its appearance in print in a French translation in 1850. See Jim Colville's introduction to al-Nafzawi, Muhammad ibn Muhammad, The Perfumed Garden of Sensual Delight, trans. Colville, Jim (London, 1999), pp. vii–xiGoogle Scholar.

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75 The biographer Wright, (Life, 2:195)Google Scholar thinks not.

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80 Ibid., p. 23, n. 1.

81 Ibid., p. vi.

82 See bound copy of Burton's, R. “Terminal Essay,” p. 114Google Scholar, in the Huntington Library, Metcalf Collection, B159.