The Cognitive Process of Parable: John Ruskin, William Morris and the Oriental Lure of the Forbidden

This chapter examines the pervasive influence of Arabian marvel tales on Ruskin’s The King of the Golden River and Sesame and Lilies (1865), as well as on Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. More similarly to Marx’s ideological Orientalism, Ruskin and Morris sympathise with people’s misery, with their material life and the Arab townsfolk, and thereby with the criminal underworld. Ruskin’s ideological Orientalism is particularly evident in his lectures and autobiography whose rhetorical language may be analysed through possible world theory, Fauconnier’s mental space analysis and Oatley and Johnson-Laird’s cognitive theory of emotions (1987). By projecting such Oriental conceptual metaphors as East is poverty and East is corruption, Ruskin aims at sensitising his readers to the perils of imperialism. Morris’s fascination with the East is first and foremost connected with the Byzantine decorative arts and carpet-making. As founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), he promoted a campaign against the restoration of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the paramount example of Arab influence on Venetian architecture. His connection with the East can be better understood, however, by investigating the Oriental love scenarios in The Earthly Paradise, whose narrative poems seem to restructure the Arabian tales of the ‘Forbidden Chamber’ cycle.

Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley

Chapter 2 investigates the corporeal Orientalism envisioned by Swinburne and Beardsley, two Pre-Raphaelite sympathisers who envisioned the East as a sexual dimension inhabited by Oriental female figures such as Scheherazade, Dunyazad, Salome and Bersabe – namely, hur al-ayn – evoking the sensual and pornographic content of the Arabian Nights. Both Swinburne and Beardsley exalted Sir Richard F. Burton and his uncensored translation of the Arabian Nights, which aimed to reveal the erotic customs of the Muslims. On the one hand, Swinburne’s cognitive grammar reveals the use of binary world-builders (West and East) attesting to the superiority of the East, as exemplified by his poems dedicated to Burton and The Masque of Queen Bersabe. On the other hand, Beardsley’s conceptual metaphor East is sexual freedom is projected on to his grotesque pen-and-ink illustrations of Salome and Ali Baba and on to his Oriental poems (‘The Ballad of a Barber’ (1896) and Under the Hill) by blending together the sacred and the profane, the Middle East and the Far East. His radical mode of repatterning old Oriental schemas into new ones is aimed at desacralising the Orient and, in a way, at (de)Orientalising Western and Eastern schemas.

‘[S]elling old lamps for new ones’: D. G. Rossetti’s Restructuring of Oriental Schemas

The first chapter outlines Rossetti’s fascination with the East, as exemplified by his illustrations and paintings remediating the stories of the Arabian Nights. Rossetti illustrated the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad, Amine and Princess Parisad by employing the magical lamp of translation, fostering cultural diversity and Oriental pluralisms. By conceiving the East as a blended space, he produced Oriental ‘double works of art’ that blend together poetry and painting, East and West, and experiment with forms of Turkish and biblical Orientalism. Such conceptual metaphors as East is violence and love is destruction are projected on to Cassandra (1861) and Helen of Troy (1863), examples of Turkish Orientalism that remediate Oriental schemas by applying a tuning approach. Other Oriental double works of art, such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1849–50), The Beloved, or The Bride (1865), Astarte Syriaca (1876) and Mnemosyne (1881), represent Rossetti’s mental picture of biblical Orientalism. By restructuring a few variables of the Oriental biblical schema, and by blending Western female beauty with Eastern symbology, Rossetti creates an entirely new vision of the East.

Introduction

‘[S]ince one cannot ontologically obliterate the Orient […], one does have the means to capture it, treat it, describe it, improve it, radically alter it’ (Said 1977: 95). In the second chapter of Orientalism, Edward Said suggests that we know the Orient through three different cognitive modes, which can be summarised according to David E. Rumelhart and Donald A. Norman’s classification (1978) of knowledge acquisition: that is, ...

Consumers of Intoxicating Fruits and Elixirs: The Cognitive Grammar of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford Madox Ford’s Oriental Fairy Tales

The fourth chapter provides a cognitive grammar analysis of Christina Rossetti’s and Ford’s Oriental fairy poetry and narrative fictionalising scenes of drug consumption. Like consumers of banj (hashish) and opium, Rossetti’s and Ford’s characters (the petrified banqueters, Laura, the princess wearing poppies, Queen Eldrida, Princess Ismara and the blind ploughman) experience moments of hallucination caused by intoxicating fruits, elixirs of life and infusions of wind-flowers. Probably written in reaction to the Opium War, which facilitated the diffusion of opium-based laudanum, used for recreational purposes and health remedies, Rossetti’s ‘The Dead City’, ‘Goblin Market’ and ‘The Prince’s Progress’, as well as Ford’s The Brown Owl (1892), The Feather (1892) and The Queen Who Flew blend together parts of Oriental narratives in order to visualise the temptations of the East.