Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Nineteenth-Century British Popular Arts

Claire Mabilat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754659624
• eBook ISBN: 9781351555548
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Representations of music were employed to create a wider 'Orient' on the pages, stages and walls of nineteenth-century Britain. This book explores issues of orientalism, otherness, gender and sexuality that arise in artistic British representations of non-European musicians during this time, by utilizing recent theories of orientalism, and the subsidiary (particularly aesthetic and literary) theories both on which these theories were based and on which they have been influential. The author uses this theoretical framework of orientalism as a form of othering in order to analyse primary source materials, and in conjunction with musicological, literary and art theories, thus explores ways in which ideas of the Other were transformed over time and between different genres and artists. Part I, The Musical Stage, discusses elements of the libretti of popular musical stage works in this period, and the occasionally contradictory ways in which 'racial' Others was represented through text and music; a particular focus is the depiction of 'Oriental' women and ideas of sexuality. Through examination of this collection of libretti, the ways in which the writers of these works filter and romanticize the changing intellectual ideas of this era are explored. Part II, Works of Fiction, is a close study of the works of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, using other examples of popular fiction by his contemporary writers as contextualizing material, with the primary concern being to investigate how music is utilized in popular fiction to represent Other non-Europeans and in the creation of orientalized gender constructions. Part III, Visual Culture, is an analysis of images of music and the 'Orient' in examples of British 'high art', illustration and photography, investigating how the musical Other was visualized.

PART II

Works of Fiction: Rider Haggard and his Milieu

Chapter 4

Literature and Orientalism: Contextualizing Rider Haggard

Contemporary theories about orientalism are often linked to literature, and Edward Said uses a number of examples as primary case-study materials for his seminal Orientalism (1978). Since this groundbreaking publication, other scholars (and indeed Said himself) have utilized these theories in relation to other forms of cultural production, however orientalism theories still retain an important and relatively long-established role in academic discussions of British literature about Other cultures. The ‘Orient’ has been represented in British literature for centuries, taking its precedent from the works of Ancient Rome and Greece, however in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries aspects of orientalism (the theories of which are discussed in the opening section of this book) became established in these portrayals. In Orientalism, Said mentions fictional works from canonical British long nineteenth-century authors as diverse as Lord George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), George Eliot (1819–1880), Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and E.M. Forster (1879–1970), indicating how orientalism frequently overrides gender, class and literary–stylistic boundaries.

Only those fictional writers who incorporated examples of the employment of music to create images of otherness are analysed here: the authors studied include James Morier (1780–1849), Ella Haggard (1819–1889), Andrew Haggard (1854–1934), Arthur Haggard (1826–1925), George Meredith (1828–1909), G.A. Henty (1832–1902), Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), Bram Stoker (1847–1912), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), John Buchan (1875–1940) and Joseph Conrad. Owing to the particular breadth, diversity and richness of nineteenth-century British orientalist fiction, it seemed wise to choose a close study for this section: Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925) was one of the most successful and prolific writers of ‘Orient’ and Other in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and unlike many of his contemporaries he frequently alludes to music in his romances, thus making him particularly suitable as a close study for this book.

Haggard wrote his romances within a climate where artistic works regarding the Other were extremely fashionable, accordingly this is a contextualizing chapter, considering varied case studies of fiction from the second half of the long nineteenth century and exploring the diverse ways in which music is used either as a metaphor representing innate characteristics attributed to the Other or as behaviour displaying people’s otherness. The following two chapters focus on the popular romances of Rider Haggard which were aimed at mass dissemination to the general public, and the ways in which he concentrates on and develops the musical ideas touched upon by his contemporaries. The final chapter in this section acts as a coda to the analysis of Haggard’s works by discussing E.M. Hull’s The Sheik, providing an example of the ways in which Haggard’s orientalist gender constructions began to be subverted as the long nineteenth century drew to a close, and how music is used in this process.

H. Rider Haggard and his literary style

‘[F]lashes of a fine, weird imagination and a fine poetic use and command of the savage way of talking’;¹ it was with this compliment that Robert Louis Stephenson made contact with Rider Haggard following publication of the latter’s first romance, King Solomon’s Mines, in 1885. Haggard was a prolific and successful writer of fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He first experienced Empire when his father sent him to South Africa in his late teens where he learned Zulu and helped to investigate a spate of witch persecutions. He took part in an expedition to annexe the Boer Transvaal (1877), helping (literally) to hoist the Union Jack in Pretoria,² and was appointed Master and Registrar of the High Court of Justice for the Transvaal. After brief service in the Pretoria Cavalry in the wars against Cetywayo and the Zulus in 1879,³ he returned to England to take the bar and he began to write. Haggard’s early works were not only disseminated to a large readership, but were also critically acclaimed; reviewers were overwhelming in their admiration for King Solomon’s Mines and She, indeed those who disliked this work were in a minority.⁴ Despite the fact that Haggard’s writings were criticized for their sexual outspokenness⁵ they were not banned – in a climate that objected to the sexualized works of writers such as Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) there must be a reason for this acceptance; it is possible that Haggard’s works were not seen as excessively threatening to morality because their overt sexuality is placed in an orientalized context and often depicted through metaphors, particularly musical ones.

Haggard’s early imperial experience greatly marks his writings, as do his later travels in Egypt, South Africa, the ‘Middle East’, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Fiji, Hawaii and the United States. He was also influenced by his friendships with writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Andrew Lang (1844–1912) (to whom She is dedicated and whose poem backs the title page of Allan Quatermain).⁶ Haggard’s attitude to Empire was ambivalent – he found the idea pure and great in principle, but petty and often destructive in practice, leading to an ultimately unresolved tension in many of his works between the belief in white superiority and his respect for (some) Africans (particularly Zulus).⁷ Haggard expressed a number of conflicting statements on Empire and colonialism. In 1913 he wrote that

since my time [in Africa over thirty years ago] civilization has been hard at work among these peoples. Thus the Zulus who fought us at Isandhlwana had their vices; bloodthirstiness, superstition, and cruelty in war, for instance. But they also had many virtues, such as courage, loyalty, and freedom from meanness of vulgarity. Again, in the seventies I never heard of an assault upon a white woman by a Kaffir. Now that tale is often told … For good or ill civilization is sowing its seeds among these black races, and it must therefore be prepared to reap their harvest in due season. To my mind the great question of the future in Southern Africa is not, as so many suppose, that of the political dominance of Englishman or Boer, but of the inevitable though, let us hope, faroff struggle for practical supremacy between the white blood and the black.⁸

However in 1920, and perhaps with ‘rose tinted glasses’, he stated that ‘On the whole, the British Empire has done good in a disappointing world, and it will be sad if it is broken up or left desolate because of a lack of children to carry on its responsibilities and its glory.’⁹ Despite this ambivalence Haggard did much work on behalf of the government in the area of Commonwealth settlement and was knighted twice (in 1912 and 1919) for his political, as opposed to his literary, activities.¹⁰

Daniel Bivona in Desire and Contradiction (1990) suggests that the commercial success of Haggard’s works is partly owing to his comparatively sympathetic treatment of ‘native’ African cultures. British Victorian readers were accustomed to presentations of ‘natives’ that allowed them to remain religiously, sexually, politically and morally superior, but Bivona views Haggard as having developed a more ‘relativistic’ attitude by ascribing value to these ‘native’ cultures.¹¹ Haggard’s personal views of non-European cultures and his particular respect for the Zulu people create a ‘noble savage’ aspect in some of his ‘native’ characters. Haggard’s imaginary Africa, influenced by his perception of the Zulu, is a world of honourable warfare and strong masculinity in which the white man can rediscover the chivalric golden days lost in Europe and ‘experience undomesticated masculinity in its most agreeable fantasy form’¹² away from ‘white society’ which Haggard felt was now marred by industry, effeminacy and decadence.¹³ Haggard’s view of southern Africa influenced the Victorian public’s imagination in a similar way to Kipling’s India,¹⁴ so his writings not only reflected popular ideas, but aided in their creation – for example the painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was impressed by Haggard’s representations of the Other, as discussed in Chapter 10, and aspired to similar emotiveness in his ‘Oriental’ artworks.

Haggard divided his works into ‘novels’ (generally ‘domestic pieces’, set in England) and ‘romances’, located in Africa or an alternative uncharted territory.¹⁵ Although Robert Fraser asserts that romances contrast with novels, stating that the latter are often vehicles for social criticism, whereas the former frequently express and strengthen the widely-held values of a culture,¹⁶ this is a simplification. Questions regarding the literary significance of romance and his own written style were ongoing preoccupations for Haggard, as is indicated by his diary entry of 4 April 1918, concerning a review of his romance Love Eternal in The Times, which

As usual … falls foul of my writing and tells me that I am not a ‘literary artist’, though it is good enough to add that I make what I want to say very clearly understood. This, to my view, doubtless a quite inartistic one, is the real point of all writing!¹⁷

The qualities of the romance were also discussed by other nineteenth-century writers: in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) considers his book as romance ‘woven of’ a ‘humble’ ‘texture’ (much like Haggard’s ‘inartistic’ romance style). Like Haggard, Hawthorne refuses ‘relent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Series Preface
• Introduction Orientalism and its Relation to Music and Musical Representation
• I THE MUSICAL STAGE
• II WORKS OF FICTION: RIDER HAGGARD AND HIS MILIEU
• III VISUAL CULTURE
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index