A Female Poetics of Empire

From Eliot to Woolf

Julia Kuehn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134663132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour les femmes auteures

Many well-known male writers produced fictions about colonial spaces and discussed the advantages of realism over romance, and vice versa, in the 'art of fiction' debate of the 1880s; but how did female writers contribute to colonial fiction?

This volume links fictional, non-fictional and pictorial representations of a colonial otherness with the late nineteenth-century artistic concerns about representational conventions and possibilities. The author explores these texts and images through the postcolonial framework of 'exoticism', arguing that the epistemological dilemma of a 'self' encountering an 'other' results in the interrelated predicament to find poetic modalities – mimetic, realistic and documentary on the one hand; romantic, fantastic and picturesque on the other – that befit an 'exotic' representation. Thus women writers did not only participate in the making of colonial fictions but also in the late nineteenth-century artistic debate about the nature of fiction.

This book maps the epistemological concerns of exoticism and of difference – self and other, home and away, familiarity and strangeness – onto the representational modes of realism and romance. The author focuses exclusively on female novelists, travel writers and painters of the turn-of-the-century exotic, and especially on neglected authors of academically under-researched genres such as the bestselling novel and the travelogue.

1 Exoticism as System

Difference and Representation

The present study analyses representations of the exotic by British women writers and female artists in a number of canonical and popular novels, travelogues and paintings from the 1870s to the 1930s. The authors it discusses range from George Eliot, through Anglo-Indian popular novelists, female Orientalist painters, women travellers to the Middle East and North Africa, desert romancers to, finally, Virginia Woolf. The study starts in Britain's colonial centre, touches on Palestine, and then moves to India, the Middle East (the ‘Holy Land’, the Levant, ‘Greater Syria’ and Persia) and North Africa (especially Egypt and Algeria), ending with a sea voyage from London to a fictitious British colony in South America. Central to the analysis of the individual images and texts—both fiction and nonfiction—is an understanding of exoticism as theory and as critical framework for an analysis of artistic products of the colonial era. So how can we understand and critically employ exoticism? As Victor Segalen wrote:

Introduction: The idea of exoticism. Diversity.

Clear the field first of all. Throw overboard everything misused or rancid contained in the word exoticism. Strip it of all its cheap finery: palm tree and camel; tropical helmet; black skins and yellow sun; and, at the same time, get rid of all those who used it with an inane loquaciousness…. What a Herculean task this nauseating sweeping out will be! Then, strip the word exoticism of its exclusively tropical, exclusively geographic meaning…. From there, move rapidly to the task of defining and laying out the sensation of exoticism, which is nothing other than the notion of difference, the perception of Diversity, the knowledge that something is other than one's self; and Exoticism's power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise.¹

Thus wrote this French naval doctor, traveller, ethnographer and writer in his diary on 11 December 1908, setting out the plan for what would remain the fragment Essay on Exoticism. After Segalen rejected what he considered a ‘false’—because compromised and reductive—version of exoticism, he planned to enquire into the raison d’être of the exotic, its epistemology and its narrative and poetic features.²

Unfortunately, Segalen's philosophy of exoticism, which he developed in diary entries over the fourteen-year period between 1904 and 1918, remained unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime; ‘perhaps an indication’, as Yaël Rachel Schlick suggests, that ‘Segalen was not able to smooth out the contradictions of his own reconceptualization of exoticism’.³ This may be true, and we need to turn to recent postcolonial critics' contemplations on exoticism for a more complete and detailed reevaluation and reconsideration of the concept. First, however, we should retrace the existing two persuasive steps of Segalen's theory of the exotic—which follow, in Charles Forsdick's words, the logic of negation and expiation⁴—before turning to the third step of the revision; not just because Segalen's fragment is the earliest philosophical attempt to theorise exoticism but also because it was written at a critical time in modern colonial history, into which my project, too, taps.

As a first step, Segalen discards the commonplace and, in his view, ‘cheap’ idea of exoticism as tropicalism:

Despite its exotic title, [this book] cannot be about such things as the tropics or coconut trees, the colonies or Negro souls, nor about camels, ships, great waves, scents, spices, or enchanted islands. It cannot be about misunderstandings and native uprisings, nothingness and death, colored tears, oriental thought, and various oddities, or about any of the preposterous things that the word ‘Exoticism’ commonly calls to mind. Even less so can it be about those writers who gave Exoticism this meaning.⁵

The objection here is to a clichéd and geographically determined exoticism in the tropics, which Segalen sees in, for example, Gauguin's Tahiti paintings.⁶ He is adamant that for a more general and more productive philosophy of exoticism one has to first ‘remove all that is bana… —coconut trees, camels’ and ‘[s]trip exoticism of its “geographic” component’.⁷

The second argument in Segalen's refutation emerges from his analysis of exoticism's literary tradition. Starting with The Travels of Marco Polo, which Segalen suggests inaugurated the tradition of spurious exotic literature that was then carried down through the centuries, the censure ends specifically with Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling.⁸ Most of the Loti's and Kipling's stories are located in geographically remote areas and often the torrid zone, but more than these authors' geographically encoded exoticism, Segalen objects to what he considers to be their alliance with French and British colonial orthodoxy. The speciousness of Loti's and Kipling's exoticism lies in an ideological colonialism, suggests Segalen, which he considers, like its geographical counterpart, to be a reductive version. Exoticism must not only be ‘about budgets and administrations’, Segalen argues, concluding that he would consider it the worst destiny for his literary works and also his Essay ‘to be forever dismembered, confused with, perhaps even celebrated in good faith under the rubric “colonial”, and classified as colonial literature’.⁹ Elaborating on his objection to exoticism as necessarily or exclusively affiliated with colonial politics, Segalen argues that

[f]or the colonial, Diversity exists only in so far as it provides him with the means of duping others. As for the colonial bureaucrat, the very notion of a centralized administration and of laws for the good of everyone, which he must enforce, immediately distorts his judgment and renders him deaf to the disharmonies (or harmonies of Diversity).¹⁰

In other words, both geographical and colonial exoticisms streamline and unify otherness, when Segalen believes that a more heterogeneous, fluid understanding is required.

Segalen's objection to the exotic residing ‘in’ specific places, certain people or distinctive objects and to the framing of exoticism as colonial ideology is Orientalism avant la lettre, as they point towards the Western misrepresentation of the other.¹¹ And yet Segalen's conception of exoticism differs from Said's model in so far as Orientalism, according to Said, serves political ends while exoticism, according to Segalen, serves imaginative ends; a point that critic Peter Mason has highlighted in his seminal study Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic.¹² Exoticism is about an artist's vision of an other—be this object, person, place or even time period—and how, in Segalen's words, only the ‘notion of difference, the perception of Diversity’ can make him one of the ‘great artists’.¹³ Exoticism affects the imaginative works of ‘painters and painter-novelists’, composers, travel writers; it belongs to the realms of music, literature, the plastic arts, and not politics.¹⁴

If Orientalism and exoticism thus pursue different goals and should therefore not be conflated—a conflation which has, however, occurred more than once and has led to exoticism's undeserved reputation as ‘the Black Plague’ of postcolonial theory and the labelling of exotic fictions as ‘imperialist nostalgia’—¹⁵ exoticism is the conceptually broader, more encompassing concept. As contemporary critics of exoticism have argued, exoticism has more ‘versatile potential’ than Orientalism for theorising representations of cross-cultural contact and can even address ‘the mutual implications of the interactions of cultures’.¹⁶ Exoticism can explore both a stable subject position, which relates it to Orientalism, but also one that is disturbed and fragmented by the foreign experience and the ‘alluring and potentially entrapping aspect of otherness’.¹⁷ As a theory, exoticism thus allows for more disruption and contradiction than Orientalism; exoticism is, on the whole, more ‘elusive and ungraspable, more slippery and less stably positioned than the “oriental” and more capable of sliding away or striking back’.¹⁸ If we accept that exoticism offers a more polyvalent and polydirectional model for cross-cultural contact, we might perhaps best say, with critic Philippe Jullian, that Orientalism is one manifestation, or ‘phase’, of exoticism. ¹⁹ Rather than being opposed to one another, Orientalism and exoticism are close relatives.²⁰

Indeed, the majority of the texts and images discussed in this study could be said to be Orientalist in one or more senses of the term: A few were produced by orientalists, or scholars of the East; some represent what the Victorians would have termed ‘oriental’ geographical locations and subjects and/ or were classified as orientalist by contemporary critics. Finally, many European representations of India, the Middle East and even North Africa produced in the years between 1870 and 1930 have been read as Orientalist in the critical sense. This work has been done, and been done well, as critics have analysed how particular colonial texts bear the marks of their creators' conscious or unconscious assumptions regarding their own cultural superiority. I am far from dismissing Said's concept or the critical work that has been done since 1978; many of my chapters build on this work, just like much post-1978 postcolonial criticism built on Orientalism.²¹ What I am suggesting is that exoticism is broader in meaning; more open, inclusive, heterogeneous, versatile and polyvalent. Hence it offers a more useful lens through which to study the diverse set of texts and images that my book analyses.

Returning to Segalen and his attempt to understand exoticism beyond the confines of geography and colonial ideology: Segalen did not employ such a rhetoric of instability, mutability and flux but he, too, felt the need to open up the discussion of exoticism and rediscover, by way of analytical deconstruction, all that is ‘good and solid’ in the term, ‘despite the bad uses to which it had been put’ in his time.²² His next step in making amends and rediscovering the value and primacy exoticism once possessed takes the form of an etymological enquiry.

Segalen's thoughts about synonyms for exoticism and its associations lead him to the meaning of the prefix exo-, which he realises in its most general sense implies distance and displacement beyond the immediate and towards the foreign: ‘Everything that lies “outside” the sum total of our current, conscious everyday events, everything that does not belong to our usual “Mental Tonality”’.²³ As the Oxford English Dictionary confirms, the term exoticism developed from the classical Latin exoticus, which in turn is derived from the Greek exotikos (έξώτıκóς), and which Forsdick sees as a ‘relative and shifting’ notion of foreignness, foreign and foreigner.²⁴ In its earliest English usage, noted in the Oxford English Dictionary, the term exoticism contained an obvious locational component, relating to elements ‘belonging to another country, foreign, alien’ and, when imported into England, designating something or somebody ‘from abroad, not indigenous’.

In the English language, from the late eighteenth century, however, there was a shift from this kind of reflexivity and relative situatedness—if such, in fact, ever existed—towards a more pronounced subjective value judgement. This attitude and idea made its way into nineteenth-century colonial discourse in particular, where ethnocentrism became especially prominent. The exotic now came to be associated with barbarism and inferiority, where foreign people, religions and customs were considered to be perhaps alluring but lacking the cultural authenticity and authority of a supposedly superior western culture and people. In other words, the slippage of the term exoticism from a locational (not native) to a chiefly cultural (not western) use began a process of evolution towards the predominantly ideological undertones (not civilised) of the word's nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century usage at the height of empire.

Segalen wrote at a time in the early twentieth century when such a subjective and judgemental fixity of meaning—verging on ideological obsession—was ubiquitous; both in the French and English contexts. He objected to both Gauguin's tropicalism and Loti and Kipling's imperialist exoticism because they moved away from the original, shifting, relatively value-neutral overtones that exoticism, to his mind, had once possessed. At the same time, Segalen was aware of the difficulty of producing value-neutral representation of otherness beyond cliché and ideology. As he wrote in a letter to Claude Debussy from Shanghai, addressing the inevitable subjectivity and artificiality of any exotic representation: ‘After all, it's neither Europe nor China which I've come to seek here, but a vision of China’.²⁵ Segalen's voice can be seen as pioneering in an age that increasingly saw the consequences and potential drawbacks of a western expansion through travel, commerce or empire. After delineating, in OED manner, exoticism's various phases of signification in an isolating, chronological approach, Segalen sought to demonstrate that exoticism as system depended on more than geographical-locational or ideological determinism. Here, he returned specifically to the concept's primary epistemological roots—the notion of diversity and difference—and, most importantly, their relativistic and shifting usages. His revised, overarching and epistemological understanding would unfortunately remain unfinished; however, its summary can be seen in the single observant and accurate statement that exoticism is ‘the feeling of experiencing the purity and intensity of Diversity’, and ‘nothing other than the notion of difference, the perception of Diversity, the knowledge that something is other than one's self; and Exoticism's power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise'.²⁶

Segalen's Essay on Exoticism is thus, in many ways, both a precursor to and foundation of recent attempts to redefine and theorise the epistemology of the exotic and return to the concept's primary relativist and neutral connotations. If issues of ‘difference’ and ‘relation’ are thus central to the epistemological dimension of exoticism, the other dimension of this theorisation must surely be ‘representation’ or ‘aesthetics’. If we wanted to specifically ‘relocate’ exoticism in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, we could claim that it actually also contains the two central principles of colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. Segalen's project was to enquire into the epistemology of exoticism, to see how a perception of difference enhanced a subject's perception; unlike me, he wanted nothing to do with empire literature itself. His project was philosophical (even if aesthetics were at the heart of it), while mine is primarily aesthetic. The following elaborations, which present the third step in Segalen's unfinished theory of exoticism, therefore follow a dual structure: The first section on ‘difference’ is very much related to Segalen's unfinished enquiry into what constitutes diversity, and the second one relates to representation.

Critics of exoticism may emerge from various academic disciplines...