Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas
- 2 Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley
- 3 The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden
- 4 Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Hur al-ayn and hammam: Swinburne, Beardsley and Burton's Uncensored Translation of the Arabian Nights
Of all forms of Orientalism, Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley appear to be representing what Said terms the ‘eminently corporeal’ (Said 1977: 184). Like Nerval, Flaubert, Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans, Swinburne and Beardsley belong to a community of authors depicting ‘the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes […] a fascination with the macabre, with the notions of the Fatal Woman’ (180). Swinburne and Beardsley seem to project into their works such a conceptual metaphor as East is sexual freedom, inscribing their texts in corporeal Orientalism. In their view, the East is a sexual dimension inhabited by such female figures as Cleopatra, Salome and Isis, evoking the strong sensual, even pornographic, content of the Arabian Nights.
As followers of the fleshly school of poetry, which combines aestheticism and immorality, Swinburne and Beardsley exhibit female carnality as a realistic feature of sensual love. It is not by chance that they both read the Arabian Nights in the plain and literal translation by Sir Richard F. Burton, the Victorian explorer and Orientalist who exalted the ethnographical and anthropological nuances of the East, and who is most remembered for his perilous journey to the sacred city of Mecca in 1853.
Unlike Ruskin, the Rossetti brothers, Morris and Ford, who used to read Lane's translation of the Arabian Nights, Swinburne and Beardsley privileged Burton's uncensored version, which revealed the erotic customs of the Orientals. According to Said, Burton's form of Orientalism occupies a median position between Lane and Chateaubriand, and between science and imagination:
He was preternaturally knowledgeable about the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes. All of his vast information about the Orient, which dots every page he wrote, reveals that he knew that the Orient in general and Islam in particular were systems of information, behavior, and belief, that to be an Oriental or a Muslim was to know certain things in a certain way, and that these were of course subject to history, geography, and the development of society in circumstances specific to it. (195)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Pre-Raphaelites and OrientalismLanguage and Cognition in Remediations of the East, pp. 37 - 64Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018