Enlightenment Orientalism in the American Mind, 1770-1807

Matthew H. Pangborn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429784347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study engages with the emerging field of energy humanities to provide close readings of several early American oriental-observer tales. The popular genre of orientalism offered Americans a means to critique new ideas of identity, history, and nationality accompanying protoindustrialization and a growing consumerism. The tales thus express a complex self-reflection during a time when America's exploitation of its energy resources and its engagement in a Franco-British world-system was transforming the daily life of its citizens. The genre of the oriental observer, this study argues, offers intriguing glimpses of a nation becoming strange in the eyes of its own inhabitants.

1 American Oriental Tales

As in the maze of fancy pleas’d I rove,

In airy flight, or in th’ sequester’d grove;

Whether the sportive dame presents a scene

O’ Fairies triping o’er the enamel’d green;

Or to my view restores old Saturn’s reign,

With all the joys which licens’d poets feign:

Or wraps reflection into future themes

Gives me to stray amid prophetic dreams:

Transports my senses o’er their present bound,

Urges my footstep on celestial ground:

Bids me explore the hidden laws of fate,

Causes, howe’er abstruse, investigate:

Soaring from each effect up to it’s source,

Pursuing every labyrinth’s winding course:

Still, in her giddy wild, fantastic round

If aught that’s beneficial may be found

That good assiduously I would collect,

On every useful hint, well pleas’d reflect.

—Constantia, “Reverie, occasioned by reading the Vision of Mirza”¹

In a piece submitted to the Boston Magazine in the summer of 1785, Constantia offers an appreciative reading of Joseph Addison’s landmark oriental tale “The Vision of Mirza.” Addison’s fable, as it appeared in The Spectator Number 159 (September 1, 1711), presents the reader with a doubly Eastern setting: not only is the story itself set in Baghdad, but Addison also claims it is a translation from an “Oriental manuscript” he obtained while in “Grand Cairo.” In it, the Eastern narrator mounts to the hills outside Baghdad for his daily prayers and soon falls into a “profound Contemplation on the Vanity of human Life.” In this mood, he is approached by a shepherd who reveals himself to be the “Genius” of the place and who provides for Mirza a survey in the valley below of a bridge of many arches, upon which tiny figures make their progress above an ocean torrent. The narrator very quickly comes to recognize that he is beholding an allegorical scene. The bridge represents the span of human life, the ocean below the flood of time, and the effect of the whole is to impress upon the speaker a more profound sense of human “Misery and Mortality,” which the Genius answers by pointing out the “happy islands” greater in number than the “Sands on the sea-shore,” to which the human figures retreat after their journeys. “Does Life appear miserable,” the Genius asks the narrator, Mirza, “that gives thee Opportunities of earning such a Reward?” The narrator’s mood is lifted, and he asks to know exactly what occurs in the “dark Clouds” at the end of the bridge, only to discover the Genius has left him, and the scene transformed back into the “Valley of Bagdat, with Oxen, Sheep, and Camels grazing upon the sides of it.”²

Constantia’s response in the Boston magazine tells us many things about how Americans read such tales. First, her article’s lack of introduction demonstrates that, among the readership of the magazine, one might safely assume a familiarity with Addison’s text, although it had been published nearly three-quarters of a century before. All the writer has to do is mention that she “experienced last evening, while perusing the vision of Mirza, which is contained in the second volume, No. 159 of the Spectator, sensations truly pleasurable,” and off she and the reader may go into her own version of the story.³ Indeed, in the poem that precedes the writer’s prose description of her own reading, reproduced as the epigraph for this chapter, the writer might evoke for her own reader an experience of such pleasure without reference to its object. That pleasure is one she describes as a kind of mental, but also material, progression, from a “maze”-like admiration to a contemplative collection of every possible “good.” As such, the poem outlines a philosophy of reading that strangely nebulous, but solidly established, period genre this present study examines, which has been known for centuries as the “oriental tale.” Again, I should caution the reader not to take the adjective as purporting to represent an actual people or even an identifiable region, for, as I will explore in this chapter, if the genre did lead Westerners to construct an imaginative category having to do with a vague and mysterious East, it always most accurately articulated the tale-tellers’ own self-reflecting purposes. Why such a specific kind of self-reflection should need to involve the projection of an imagined Other is also a question Constantia’s response helps us answer, as the experience she describes is one so powerful and transformative it can hardly be conceived as involving a stable, grounded self.

Constantia’s response thus shows how reading such tales was important to her own self-conception. Indeed, it supports the notion that the young Benjamin Franklin was not the only American to follow a program of self-conscious self-improvement by way of revising selections from The Spectator. In his Autobiography, that is, Franklin famously outlines his self-taught method of “improving” on Richard Steele’s and Joseph Addison’s work by rewriting selected passages from their magazine.⁴ Here, in this tribute to one of the best-known oriental tales of the age, another writer demonstrates a similar program in action. Constantia, pseudonym for a young Judith Sargent Murray, does not merely enthuse over Addison’s depiction of human life.⁵ She, too, actually revises it. She differs in certain respects from Franklin in that she concentrates less on the style of the original, which she already judges laudable, and more on the tale’s substance, altering it to express more accurately her own beliefs and moral values, in a way that reflects Americans’ concerns during the period. Her “fan fiction” is engaged, in short, not in something like Franklin’s own anxiety to acquire polish, persuasive ability, and thus power, but with notions of self-regulation on the purposes to which creative writing may be put. I will return to the young American writer’s improvements on the tale a little further on. But first it is necessary to provide some history for the scene.

The Atlantic History of the Oriental Tale

Western audiences had since medieval times shown as strong an interest in Eastern tales as in Eastern materials and products. Among the best known are Sendebar (1253), a Castilian collection of exempla, or short didactic and illustrative stories, derived from Arabic tales; Kalila and Dimna, or the Fables of Bidpai (750), an Arabic translation of the animal fables of the Indian Panchatantra, composed from oral literary materials in the third century B.C. and translated into various forms, including the English Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570); Disciplina Clericalis, a twelfth-century collection of fables and moral tales assembled by Peter Alfonsi, a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity and lived most of his life in England and France; and Barlaam and Josaphat, a tale of two legendary Christian martyrs derived, by way of many borrowings and translations, from the story of the life of the Buddha, which entered Eastern Europe in the ninth century.⁶ As is immediately obvious from the tales’ transmission history, these stories were shaped as much by their audiences as they were created by their original tellers—when those might even be identified. The genre might thus be best understood as a “hybrid commodity” shaped by both the East and the West.⁷

Martha Pike Conant, whose Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (1908) is required reading for anyone interested in the subject, tries to distinguish “genuine oriental” material from the “pseudo-oriental” constructions of Western imitators, but the prevalence of borrowing from earlier sources, usually unattributed, and the freedom with which the re-presenters of such tales felt in regard to altering them for their own purposes, makes finding such clear distinctions extremely difficult.⁸ Indeed, when interest in such literature experienced a dramatic resurgence in Europe, first in France at the end of the seventeenth century, nearly all such English materials were translations from the French, leading Conant to suggest the term “pseudo-translation” for those English texts that were rather faithless repackagings of French sources.⁹ What we might safely say is that each text can be placed somewhere on a spectrum, with an accurate retelling of an Eastern manuscript or oral tale on one end and a wholly original imitation by a Western author on the other, with most tales falling somewhere in between.

Nearly every critical work tracing the development of the Western genre of oriental tale credits its explosion in popularity to Western colonialism, the looking “outward” of European nations toward the seemingly “inscrutable” lands of the East.¹⁰ Under such a schema, it is usually Antoine Galland, a French archaeologist and diplomat with extensive travel experience in Turkey and the Levant, who is credited as sparking the eighteenth-century craze with Les mille et une nuit (1704–17). These were translations into French of Syrian tales, mostly from a fourteenth-century manuscript, which was almost immediately translated into English as The Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights. Galland’s methods of collection have often been criticized as haphazard, given his heavy editorial intervention and his incorporation of orally collected tales as well. But the tradition of creative translation and transmission was centuries old before Galland inherited it, and his serious scholarly interest in the cultures is evidenced by his completing Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s Bibliothèque orientale in 1697. This encyclopedic work focused specifically on Islamic cultures and would continue to be referenced—and continue to influence other writers—at the end of the next century. In any event, Arabian Nights immediately prompted imitation and sequel, most prominent among the early works being Turkish Tales (Contes turcs, 1707; English translation, 1708) and The Persian Tales, or the Thousand and One Days (Les mille et un jours, 1710–12; English translation, 1714) by Galland’s student François Pétis de la Croix. Addition and re-translation continued well into the next century, however, prompted by the popularity of such texts as the English translation by Robert Heron of the New Arabian Nights (1792) of Dom Chavis and M. Cazotte.

Complicating the narrative of the oriental tale’s outward-directed impulse being jumpstarted by Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights, however, is the fact that a quite different sort of Eastern-inflected literature was already underway before Galland’s collection. This tradition began with Giovanni Marana’s French L’Espion turc (1684–86), translated into English by William Bradshaw as Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687–93). In it, Marana presented the reader with an Eastern perspective on Western lands, through the persona of an Ottoman spy, Mahmut, at the court of Louis XIV. Contrasting with the outwardly and otherly directed tales of Galland, which all take place in exotic Eastern settings and involve seemingly non-Western beliefs in magic and legendary beings like genii, Marana’s text directed its readers’ attention “inward,” at their own customs and mores, and even more specifically their most recent developments of thought and habit, as participants in a modernizing world.

Marana’s work also prompted immediate imitation, beginning with Thomas Brown’s 1700 Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the Meridian of London, and continuing through many of Joseph Addison’s Spectator contributions, beginning with Number 50 (Apr 27, 1711). It came to include Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721; tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: America’s “Oriental Mirror”
• 1 American Oriental Tales
• 2 Mobility, Luxury, Textuality, and Liberty in Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (1770)
• 3 The “Oriental” Threat to the Body of America in The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787)
• 4 The Oriental Spectacle of Western Power in The Algerine Captive (1797)
• 5 History, Nature, and National Progress in Letters of Shahcoolen (1801–02)
• 6 Woman, Orientalism, and Empire in Salmagundi (1807–08)
• Epilogue: The Haunted House of “Oriental” History in The Alhambra (1832)
• Index