Contextualizing Persian Pictures

Gertrude margaret lowthian bell (1868–1926) was a distinguished Victorian woman with unique achievements in many areas: an experienced traveler, mountaineer, and translator, as well as an adept politician and scholar, she was fluent in Persian, Arabic, French, and German, and had a number of publications on archaeology, art, and her travels (Bassnett 236; Monroe 4–9). In her early years, she got to know many famous writers and intellectuals of her time, such as Henry James and Lord Arthur Russell, among others, through her stepmother, Florence Olliffe, who was a playwright (Monroe 5). Unlike most girls of her time, she was sent to school in London, at Queen's College at the age of 16, and later to Oxford to continue her studies at a time when society mostly rejected the value of women's higher education (Goodman 8–11). Bell found the place to be strongly male dominated. Before her arrival Dean John Burger had discouraged female students at Oxford, stating in a sermon: “Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end of time you will remain” (qtd. in Wagner 20), and in a history class they were asked to sit with their backs to the professor (Wallach 21). Still more frustrating were the Victorian codes for her gender, which would not even let Bell visit a museum without being chaperoned (Wallach 17).Footnote ¹¹ In spite of the patriarchal atmosphere of Oxford, she graduated with a first-class degree in modern history. The Times reported the news as she was the first woman ever to achieve such a distinction (Wagner 19–22).

As a member of a rich, upper-middle-class family, Bell was in close contact with politicians and thus took up Middle Eastern affairs as her life's interest (Laisram 172–74). She was a frequent visitor to the Orient, starting in 1892 and travelling to Persia, Mesopotamia, and Syria, among others. Bell was received with respect wherever she went due to her “impressive entourage . . . [and] the confidence of the British upper middle class” (Amoia and Knapp 151). She went to Jerusalem in 1899 to study Arabic and to the Syrian Desert in 1905, the account of which was published as The Desert and the Sown in 1907. It was this book that brought her recognition, not only as an experienced traveler but as a scholar (Wagner 47). Bell's publications on archaeology, The Thousand and One Churches (1909) and Amurath to Amurath (Reference Bell1911), though making a serious contribution to the field, did not enjoy the same reputation as The Desert and the Sown.

Bell is best known for her active role in and substantial contribution to British political imperatives in the Middle East. She is referred to as an “arch-imperialist” (Melman 5), “the uncrowned Queen of Iraq” (Wallach 324), and a “spy” (Wallach 145). Her Middle Eastern trips from 1900 to 1914 are considered to have assisted British dominance in that region by obtaining strategic information for the policymakers (Amoia and Knapp 153). Bell's invaluable information about the Arabs made her an “expert on Oriental affairs” and she became what she herself termed “a ‘Person,’ an identity unavailable to her as a woman in Britain” (Amoia and Knapp 154). She was “the only female Political Officer in the British forces” (Wallach 180), and was later appointed to the important position of “Oriental Secretary” by Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner of Iraq at the time (Monroe 19). From 1916 until her death in 1926, Bell mostly resided in Baghdad and Basrah.Footnote ¹²

In April 1892, Bell, twenty-four years old, accompanied her aunt Mary on a journey to Persia where the latter's husband Sir Frank Lascelles was a British Minister (Goodman 14). It was in Persia that Bell was introduced to the East and was “enthralled by the country, its language, culture, and above all the beauty of the desert” (Amoia and Knapp 148). Her experiences of a seven-month stay in and journey through Persia were published anonymously as Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book of Travel in 1894 in London.Footnote ¹³Persian Pictures presents images of the country which are mostly limited to Tehran and its surroundings. It is a short book, consisting of twenty chapters, which includes the portrayal of subjects as diverse as the King's treasure, religious ceremonies, gardens, palaces, and her Persian teacher, among others.Footnote ¹⁴

Not only has Bell's Persian Pictures been generally overlooked in recent studies,Footnote ¹⁵ but the scant critical response has dismissed it as the expression of a romantic writer articulating her infatuation with the East and its mysterious nature.Footnote ¹⁶ In his preface to the second edition (1928) of Bell's Persian Pictures, Denison Ross highlights the romantic nature of the book and attributes this feature to the influence of the Arabian Nights, stating that these tales throw a romantic aura over the Islamic Orient for Western travelers (11). Similarly, Denis Wright sees the work as “convey[ing] some of the youthful excitement of [Bell's] first encounter with the Middle East which was to become her second home” (13). Echoing previous critics, Pallavi Pandit Laisram's study finds Bell's Persian travel writing a “romanticization of the East as an escape world” (178), in which Persia is depicted as a “type which conforms to her personal, psychological, and cultural needs” (179).Footnote ¹⁷

Although Bell articulates her desire for the Orient by calling herself and her companions “pilgrims of a more distant land than holy Mecca” (118), and writes elsewhere in the text of being “athirst for unknown conditions” (190), her Persian Pictures is neither monolithic praise of nor a romantic infatuation with the country of her desires.Footnote ¹⁸ Rather, it is a conscious endeavor by a sensitive traveler who is aware of the complexity of intercultural representations and of the various factors informing the contact zone.Footnote ¹⁹ As a guest of the British Minister in Persia during her travel, Bell was well aware of the “Great Game” running between the two imperial powers of Russia and Britain and of their vying for supremacy in that country (Andreeva 5–6). The strategic position of Persia as a buffer to British India necessitated the British intervention and presence in the country which needed to be justified as a civilizing mission and “selfless support of a freedom-loving country” (Katouzian, State and Society 88). Ignoring Bell's ambiguous position as a Victorian woman traveler in a colonial setting and the key role of Persia for British imperial projects, studies of Persian Pictures have resulted in a reductive treatment that overlooks its complexity and multivocal nature. In what follows, we intend to show that Bell's Persian Pictures defies easy classification into any one category because, in her nuanced representations of Persia, the boundaries demarcating the British self and the Persian other are shifting – eroded, erected, and sometimes totally shattered.

A Victorian Exote: A True Traveler

Bell sees her travel as a serious endeavor, affording her the opportunity for “study in character and national characteristics” (171) as well as “a delightful field for observation” (195). Accordingly, she tries to differentiate herself from a group of travelers whom she implicitly dubs not genuine:

In the above passage, Bell criticizes British travelers for their ethnocentrism and touristic approach through which they interpret the differences of other people and “the peculiarities of foreign modes of life” as exotic and inferior measured against “the English customs.” Not being “travellers in the true sense of the word,” as Bell contends, they fail to go beyond their ethnocentric outlook, even though they have crossed over geographical borders. Bell highlights how these seemingly mobile travelers are in fact “static” and, as Roger Célestin would say, remain “at Home while traveling, consolidating the Center” by exoticizing the other (63, 67). Such a reductive representation of cultural difference is termed colonial exoticism and is mostly practiced by imperial apologists. They leave no room for accepting colonial difference as diversity and the alternative expression of another nation in an attempt to exert imperial hegemony and to achieve its political and economic imperatives (Bongie 16–18).

Such exoticist custom-and-manners representations of the colonial world by Victorian travelers were mediated through a post-Enlightenment Western classificatory paradigm and the emerging science of anthropology (Pratt 24–34; Rubiés 244–57). The lopsided relation of power between the West and the colonial world allowed the first travelers to fabricate a new version of “Europe's ‘planetary consciousness,’” a hegemonic vision which established Europe as the center of the universe (Pratt 15). In time, the idea of the West as civilized and superior was thus partly constructed and backed up through depicting other worlds based on Western codes as way down on the scale of progress and civilization.Footnote ²⁰ In this all-consuming Western codification, “nothing is seen on its own terms, nothing is ever just different, but arranged on a scale of value formulated by a culture that defines itself as superior and its values as universally applicable” (Egerer 26). Thus colonial exoticism denies the ontological autonomy of non-Western values and standards and denigrates them reductively to “mere variations or aberrations of a given, authentic, all-powerful original” (Célestin 40) and puts them in a hierarchy, in “a self-oriented relation that inevitably favors Me” (Célestin 14).

Far from a true engagement with other people encountered in the contact zone, the response of Bell's static travelers is superficial or, to borrow Ali Behdad's terms, a “touristic vision,” “an ‘inauthentic’ experience of déjà vu” channeled by the dominating view towards other colonials perpetuated through Orientalism (64). Simply put, travelers’ immediate intercultural encounters will be mediated through imperial tropes and codes regarding the colonial world which tend to be ethnocentric and exploitative.

Through her anti-touristic rhetoric, Bell implicitly casts herself, in contrast to British ethnocentric travelers, as a true, or sincere, traveler who is willing to engage with and is appreciative of the cultural other encountered in Persia. We draw from French theorist Victor Segalen's Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity to explicate Bell's multilayered and ambivalent figurations of the Persians and their culture in Persian Pictures. Segalen's conceptualization of exoticism as an “aesthetic of diversity” (67) seeks to present an alternative way of engaging with cultural difference – free from the realm of colonial power relations and their rigid ethnocentric binaries.Footnote ²¹ Although his theorization tends to ignore the historical and political contexts of the time, his emphasis on the autonomous worth of difference and the flexible relation between the self and the other allows for a plurality of exoticisms with versatile uses. It also helps strip exoticism of its monolithic and negative definition in postcolonial theory. Bell's response to and articulations of the other in Persian Pictures exemplify what is needed if a traveler is to be dubbed an “exote” by Segalen, in his words “a born traveler, someone who senses all the flavor of diversity in worlds filled with wondrous diversities” (25). Bell demonstrates this exote perspective in the following passage from her letter to Horace Marshall:

Segalen argues that exotes have “the ability to conceive otherwise” when facing difference, by which he means they show a tendency towards positive engagement with the other, a new figuration of the self and the other in a non-hierarchal framework which is not governed by Western prescriptive codes of evaluation and imperial imperatives (19).Footnote ²² The above passage depicts Bell as an exote whose relativistic outlook seeks to refrain from making presumptuous ethnocentric remarks in an attempt to acknowledge and respect encountered difference on its own terms, as diversity, rather than to assimilate it in accordance with a British table of measurements. Bell, instead, highlights the uneasy situation of representing her experience in the contact zone as she was fully conscious of how her viewing position of cultural difference was channeled by her personality – a complex confluence of various factors such as race and gender, among others, and their ideologies in the Victorian world. This intricate situation is best described by James Clifford, as “a state of being in [the self's] culture while looking at [the other's] culture” (93).

Undecided Rhetoric: The Inassimilable Nature of the Cultural Other

Far from condemning persian difference encountered in the contact zone as a lack in the other, Bell acknowledges its autonomous worth and respects its cultural opacity. She remarks: “The East is full of secrets – no one understands their value better than the Oriental” (34). By letting Persian difference be shrouded in mystery, rather than assimilated based on Western norms and presented as knowable and thus controllable, like its usual treatment in colonial exoticism, Bell's response is similar to an exote who recognizes the “incomprehensibility” and “impenetrability” of the Orientals and their culture (Segalen 21). Though Bell is aware of the surface attractions, “brilliance of colour, splendour of light, solemn loneliness, clamorous activity” (34), she finds Persia's “essential charm . . . of more subtle quality” as

Describing the religious ritual commemorating the death of Imam Hossein,Footnote ²⁴ Bell echoes the hegemonic Orientalist view of her time by calling the mourning procession “a wild and savage band” (52) and dehumanizing the mourners as “a compact mass of bobbing heads and naked shoulders” (53). However, she changes her positionality as she proceeds with her description and adopts an uncertain viewing position which avoids fixating difference as a stereotypical characteristic of colonial exoticism. Rather, Bell highlights the complexity of interpreting intercultural encounters: “There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion” (55), and points out that different laws rule Western and Eastern ways of showing feelings (56). Accordingly, rather than taking an authoritative stance, Bell engages in a flexible negotiation between the already established way of seeing this religious ritual and her own experience:

The uncertain rhetoric either in or of Bell's response to the Persians in the mourning procession ― “people plunged into the blackest depths of grief” or “this show of grief was a mere formality, signifying nothing” ― ends in a surrender to its inassimilable nature, neither in nor of “a view which was probably as erroneous as the other.” Instead of treating Persian difference as fetish and assigning it a fixed meaning like colonial exoticism, Bell approaches it as a sign. This view, as Deborah Shapple Spillman argues in her work on Victorian travelers, “highlight[s] the importance of signification as a process that takes place between cultures” (306). To give another example, Bell's response to the different life situation of a Persian princess's two young daughters at the end of a visit is left undecided, not assigned a specific signification: “The girls accompanied us into the outer court, and watched us through the half-open doors till we drove away, wishing, perhaps, that they too might drive out into the world with such unfettered liberty, or perhaps wondering at our unveiled shamelessness” (82). This non-assertive rhetoric indicates that Bell is an exote who seeks to avoid reducing the different Persian customs to an inferior otherness in line with British imperial agendas.

Dialogue with the Self: “Exoticism in Reverse”

Bell's figurations of persian cultural differences reveal her active critical engagement with the other, her recognition of the other's autonomous worth, and her interest in and receptiveness to diversity. Unlike practitioners of colonial exoticism and the imperial scribes who overlook intercultural experience and implications of the contact zone (Forsdick, “Travelling Concepts” 13; Behdad 21), Bell perceptively engages in self-ethnography, comparing and contrasting her country's codes of value and ideologies with those of Persia. After pointing out the impossibility and difficulty “for the uninitiated to judge how far the inward grace tallies with the outward form,” Bell remarks that “he can at least bear witness that the forms of the Mohammedan religion are stricter, and that they appear to be more accurately obeyed, than those of the Christian” (144). This pronouncement was very daring and rare for her time when the hegemonic view was exoticizing Islam pejoratively and portraying Muslims as hypocritical in their religious observances (Laisram 3–8). Moreover, juxtaposing Muslim mosques with Christian churches, Bell's comparative outlook praises the other at the expense of the self. In her view, Muslim mosques

Thus exoticism in Bell's text incorporates self-reflexivity, a dialogue with the self to affect a change or at least throw doubts on British practices and their regimes of value. This destabilizes critical responses to Persian Pictures as romantic infatuation with the other and/or of Bell's going native. As Célestin implies, self-consciousness and self-reflexivity dismantles exoticism as romantic musings (185–87) as we can see in this passage from Bell:

Contemplating her experience of the contact zone, Bell finds the Eastern view of the stationary nature of man more plausible than Western claims to universality. Her contention that Western laws about evolution and civilization are not only limited to “the little patch of the globe” but are also “not eternal, still less . . . universal” displaces the Western claim to natural superiority and undermines the colonialist view that Western norms are original and must be conformed to by other cultures which otherwise would be denigrated and codified as exotic. As Célestin points out, this hegemonic view has presented the West as “the Universal,” based on its hierarchical classification, and has promoted an image of itself as a “legitimate and even natural focus of reference, an ultimate standard of measurement for all other cultures” (14). Bell's relativistic approach to the differences between the East and the West in Persian Pictures allows for what Segalen has dubbed “exoticism in reverse” (41). As indicated, it is the West which is found by Bell to be an exception to the general rule, and hence exotic.

Moreover, adopting a critical outlook and re-evaluating Western assumptions, Bell gives the lie to the ideology underlying the British civilizing mission in her recognition of Persian difference in its own terms, in a non-hierarchal way, and in her remarks that there is no need for Britain and her presumably civilizing tutelage:

Bell's interest in the Persians and their culture is evident in her dialogic engagement with Sheikh Hassan, her Persian teacher with whom she studied Persian poetry and language during her stay in Persia. In stark contrast to the Orientalist view of her time, which portrayed the East as being in need of Western civilization, Bell subscribes to her teacher's opinion that Western ways cannot cure the ills of Persian life. In addition, her desire to salvage Eastern ways of life by rejecting Western imposition implies her recognition of and respect for a different, Persian, worldview:

Bell's dialogic involvement with her teacher exemplifies that of an exote, whose relativistic stance of difference allows for a bi-polar exoticism. In Segalenian theorization, exoticism is viewed as a “reciprocal process involving the generation of mutual knowledge and associated with processes of intercultural contact alternative to those of colonialism” (Forsdick, “Revisiting Exoticism” 51). In similar vein, Bell's flexible response to the other moves away from the monolithic colonial exoticism when she imagines how the West will be exoticized in the eyes of her Persian teacher in his later trip to Britain: “[I]t would be interesting to find what peculiarities in us and in our ways would attract the notice of his bright, observant eyes” (104). The versatility of exoticism in Persian Pictures and its reciprocal nature help to rethink the pejorative connotations of exoticism in postcolonial theory, in which it has been reduced to a medium for the political assertion of the colonizers over the colonized, and thus considered to operate in a single direction. Persian Pictures, however, demonstrates the flexibility of exoticism and its positive uses, as Bell allows subject (self) /object (other) relation changes in such a way that the British see themselves as the others of their others.Footnote ²⁵

Whereas in the previously cited passages, the demarcating lines between the British and the Persians were growing blurred and shifting, they are totally broken in the following excerpt which emphasizes the homogeneity of the self and the other in spite of differences. Bell exposes Western supremacy as a fabrication based on Orientalist tropes in an affirmation of the affinity and equality of the self/West and the other/East, both linked by bonds of humanity:Footnote ²⁶

Writing about nineteenth-century Western travelers to Persia, M. H. Braaksma contends that they were mostly fascinated by the surface differences and were content to merely “look at” rather than to “look into Persian humanity and its concerns” (Braaksma 72). As indicated, Bell's response to the Persians, however, differs markedly from her contemporary counterparts. Her desire to engage with the Persians and to look into their lives, in which she finds Persia's true charm, is noticeable in her pursuit of the individual stories behind the articles brought to her for sale by merchants: “There is a personal note about these charming materials which lends them an interest other than that which could be claimed by bright colours and soft textures alone. They speak of individual labour and individual taste” (Bell 175).

An Imperial Scribe: A Static Traveler

Even though bell's receptive approach to the cultural other in Persia, resulting from her ambiguous status as a Victorian woman in a colonial context, questioned and disrupted many established myths about the Orient, there are still instances in Persian Pictures where she succumbs to the dominant Orientalist view of her time. While the responsive nature of her gender keeps Bell from labeling the cultural other in British Hierarchical classification as aberration and exotic, her “English sediments,’’ to quote the epigraph to this essay, mold her articulations of Persia in accordance with the Western interpretive system. Thus Bell's Persian Pictures, as a small part of Victorian travel writing, can perhaps be seen as having contributed to British imperialist agendas by partly propagating, as Carl Thompson would argue, the “notions of cultural and racial superiority” to the home audience (53). This, however, is understandable when one contextualizes her travel and considers the political rivalry between Russia and Britain to win control of Persia. Celebrating the Western scientific outlook on life and promoting an image of the West as the harbinger of world safety, at the expense of an Oriental world view, Bell adopts an ethnocentric lens, in line with the British imperatives in Persia. It is in the Westerners’ fatherly protection and benevolent civilizing missions that Bell sees Persians’ only hope for the betterment of their lives:

Similarly, Bell's representations of Persian women and the andarun, the women's quarter, echo nineteenth-century Orientalist tropes. In the chapter “Three Noble Ladies” in Persian Pictures, Bell provides a lengthy description of her encounter with a Persian princess and her two daughters. However, Bell does not generalize her experience since it was an exception to general practice in Persia, given that the princess's husband's “residence abroad had made him more liberal-minded than most of his countrymen” (78). And his daughters were educated and the wife was “too civilized a woman to have recourse to the cosmetics which are customary in the East” (Bell 80). Apart from this single engagement with Persian women, other descriptions are presented as passing remarks which are molded by, and conjure up, nineteenth-century Orientalist tropes. Refusing to see the andarun as an alternative norm for a family structure different to that of established monogamous British practice, Bell exoticizes it as an aberration. This naturally results in a picture which is far from objective, in that difference is evaluated based on a home-made classificatory paradigm which generates dichotomies leading to, to borrow Hallam and Street's terms, a “hierarchical ordering of representations” in which the Western norm is privileged while Eastern style is discredited (7). In her passing references to Persian women, Bell calls them “dark-eyed beauties” (146) and portrays their lives in the andarun as “knock[ing] at the heart with a weary sense of discontent, of purposeless, vapid lives – a wailing, endless minor” (41). The images of Persian women as “thinly-clad and shrouded forms” (46) jailed in the solitude of the andarun located “at the further end of the garden beyond the reach of flowers” (41), along with their sad negro attendants (75), can be interpreted as Bell's deft echoing of the Arabian Nights and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, among other Oriental tales. These tropes were drawn upon by imperial apologists to voice the need for Western intervention on behalf of hapless Oriental women (Grewal 44–45; DelPlato 20).Footnote ²⁷ Such exoticist negative portrayals were made possible and plausible through the lopsided power relations between the Western self/colonizer/traveler and the Eastern other/colonized/travelee (Wan Yahya, Ghaderi, and Jusoff 782–83).