English 267: Victorian Literature

Professor Roy

19 March 2001

In 1834, Alexander William Kinglake traveled to Constantinople and found the plague everywhere he went.Thirty years earlier, Dr. William Wittman traveled to Turkey and, like Kinglake, also found the plague and wrote an extensive essay on it.Eleven years later, in 1845, Sir Richard Francis Burton made the same trip and found homosexuality.Burton would construct the only geographic theory of homosexuality to come into existence with his notion of the "Sotadic Zone" that, he argued, existed in the Middle East.In this paper, I intend to establish a link between Burton's Sotadic Zone and the regions through which Kinglake and Wittman traveled and found disease.Furthermore, I also intend to look at the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, more than a hundred years earlier than either of these travelers (1716-1718), as her letters back from Turkey establish a connection between same-sex female sensuality in the hammam and the inoculation of disease.Furthermore, I intend to use these texts to provide a way to read Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction with Edward Said's Orientalism.

Kinglake establishes the bath as a site of primary anxiety, especially couches in the male baths.Encountering Osman Effendi (a curious figure in and of himself; a Scotch born “Mohammedan”) after coming out of the bathhouse, Kinglake notes that Osman "was sadly afraid of me, for he shared the opinions of Europeans with respect to contagion" (Kinglake 156).Kinglake extrapolates further in a footnote, writing:

It is said, that when a Mussulman finds himself attacked by the plague he goes and takes a bath.The couches on which the bathers recline would carry infection, according to the notions of the Europeans.Whenever, therefore, I took the bath at Cairo (except the first time of my doing so) I avoided that part of the luxury which consists in being 'put up to dry' upon a kind of bed.(160)

Here, the bathhouse is the source of a heightened level of anxiety of contagion; the European's body is threatened by the very couches of the public bath.This echoes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who goes to the hammam but won't take off her clothes.Nonetheless, there are significant differences between the two, as might be expected in a hundred year span: Lady Montagu's description of the female bath is far more exoticized and eroticized than Kinglake's description.Somewhere between Montagu and Kinglake, the discourse shifts from the public bath being an anxiety-causing site of the exotic to being a site of an anxiety-causing site of terror and disease.

In this paper, I also intend to examine the quarantine, especially as it figures in Eothen.Benedict Anderson argued that the rise of print capitalism coincides with the rise of nationalism; I'd like to examine the quarantine border as a kind of "national border", drawn in print (in Kinglake) in such a manner as to create a concrete, knowable dividing line between the East ("plague") and the Europeans ("healthy").Kinglake's narrative begins with quarantine between Hungary on one side and Turkey and Servia on the other.He wrote "the two frontier towns are less than a gunshot apart, yet their people hold no communion.The Hungarian on the north, and the Turk and the Servian on the southern side of the Save, are as much asunder as though there were fifty broad provinces that lay in the path between them" (1).Upon a first reading, one might think that these two cities are at war, but they are not.

It is plague, and the dread of the plague, that divide the one people from the other.All coming and going stands forbidden by the terrors of the yellow flag.If you dare to break the laws of the quarantine, you will be tried with a military haste; the court will scream out your sentence to you from a tribunal some fifty yards off; the priest, instead of gently whispering to you the sweet hopes of religion, will console you at duelling distance, and after that you will find yourself carefully shot and carelessly buried in the ground of the Lazaretto.(1)

This passage is telling, as it is plague and, more importantly, the quarantine border that divides East from West.This quarantine has the combined forces of the law, the military, and the clergy behind it.Importantly, national flags don't fly over Semlin and Belgrade; yellow flags of quarantine do.National boundaries are drawn here as synonymous with quarantine borders, enforced with all the powers of the state and religion.These borders, however, only operate one way: to keep the East out.Benjamin Dunlap notes “it was also a plague-haunted kingdom of death as Kinglake traversed it from Belgrade to Constantinople to Cairo” (78).When Kinglake is on his way to Cairo, he bribes his way out of having the quarantine enforced on him at Gaza, and he openly defies the quarantine at Satalieh on his return to Europe.

Sir Richard Francis Burton articulated one of the most unusual theories of homosexuality to come out of the Victorian period in the “Terminal Essay” of his edition of the Arabian Nights.He rather famously wrote

1.There exists what I shall call a “Sotadic Zone,” bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N. Lat. 43º) and by the southern (N. Lat. 30º).Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt.

2.Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldæa, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir.

3.In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan.

4.It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established institution.

5.Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.(206-207)

Much can be, and has been, said about Burton’s geographical demarcation of the world into Sotadic (or primarily non-European) and Western zones, with homosexuality being “endemic” outside of Europe and being virtually unheard of in Europe, except the Mediterranean coast.What is interesting for the purposes here is how Burton constructs what Benedict Anderson calls an “imagined community”, but his imagining is not based on print culture but rather on sexual practices.The world can be broken into regions where some practice “the Vice” and others do not.Burton notes that he “hold[s Pederasty] to be geographical and climatic, not racial” (207).Therefore, it, like contagion, is something that a European can acquire if he or she travels abroad.This would echo later colonial anxieties explained by Rudi C. Bleys:

Policies, initiated earlier, were developed further to guarantee the upholding of social boundaries between the local populations and colonizers, as well as to maximize the output of colonial rule.As missionary efforts to ‘civilize’ the indigenous people often proved inadequate, anxieties arose about the potentially demoralizing effects of local prostitution, concubinage, or higher sexual tolerance among the European population in the colonies themselves.(148)

This shows that sexual morality was not considered to be inherent in the European colonizer, but was rather considered an effect of geography and climate.Sexual immorality, like the plague, was conceived as something someone could become infected with, a function of geography and climate rather than race.Felicity A. Nussbaum calls this the “torrid zone” (7).She wrote

I take as a central metaphor for the consideration of maternity and sexuality the concept of torrid zones, both the geographical torrid zones of the territory between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, and the torrid zone mapped onto the human body, especially the female body.A premise of my study is that the contrast among the torrid, temperate, and frigid zones of the globe were formative in imagining that a sexualized woman of empire was distinct from domestic English womanhood.These distinctions among people based on climatic variation appeared in the natural histories that began to be written in the eighteenth century.(7)

Nussbaum’s concept overlaps Burton’s in interesting ways.While he was writing primarily about homosexuality (although he does address women and the harem), the comparison is evocative and her focus on how these “geographies of perversion” began to be mapped in the eighteenth century provides an historical basis for Burton’s otherwise outlandish theory at the end of the nineteenth.

Later in his essay, Burton contradicts himself writing that “The Sotadic Zone covers the whole of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia now occupied by the ‘unspeakable Turk,’ a race of born pederasts; and in the former region we first notice a peculiarity of the feminine figure, the mammæ inclinatæ, jacentes et pannosæ, which prevails over all this part of the belt” (232).The Vice here is racial and inscribed upon the body of the “unspeakable Turk” in ways that degeneration theory would utilize with regard to homosexuality and Jewishness.Burton’s theory of sexuality was radically different from the sexological model that sprang out of the same period, although both operate to medicalize homosexuality to a certain extent.The sexological model explained homosexuality as a congenital condition, passed down by immoral parents to their children.Some sexologists articulated the notion that homosexuals, male and female, represented a “third sex”, and most sexologists sought to explain homosexuality as a medical, rather than a moral, condition.Burton’s “Terminal Essay” itself uses medical language, stating “Le Vice of course prevails more in the cities and towns of Asiatic Turkey than in the villages; yet even these are infected” (232).Le Vice is, in Burton’s words, an infection, “endemic” to the Sotadic Zone, especially plaguing Turkey.Havelock Ellis commented on Burton’s theory, including the Burton’s entire five-part explanation as a footnote in Sexual Inversion.Ellis wrote “On the whole, this proclivity seems more common in the hotter regions of the globe” (22).However, he goes on to point out flaws in Burton’s notion, writing

The theory of the Sotadic Zone is interesting, but as Symonds pointed out, it does not account for the custom among the Normans, Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, and Tartars, and, moreover, in various of these regions different views have prevailed at different periods.Burton was wholly unacquainted with the recent psychological investigations into sexual inversion.(22-23).

Ellis dismisses Burton’s theory as scientifically uninformed, even though he makes a similar statement connecting climate and sexuality.Nonetheless, Burton’s use of medical discourse to articulate his alternately geographical and racial theory of homosexuality operate to construct the Orient as a place of sensuality, disease, and excess while constructing Europe as a region of sexual restraint.

Bleys describes how Victorian European ethnographers projected homosexuality onto other cultures (or failed to, in the case of sub-Saharan Africa), noting that the Middle East and Asia were especially indicated by these ethnographers as regions of perversity.He wrote 

Most, either credulous of previous reports or hearsay, or witnesses themselves of an occasional case of sodomy, repeated the claim first made during the Middle Ages, that a close affinity existed between sodomitical practices and Islam.Others deduced this from close study of literary texts that often reveled in the beauty of boys, or from archaeological and historical research.(163)

Burton is no exception to Bleys’ observation about how homosexual vice is mapped, especially onto the Orient.In fact, Bleys comments that Islamic and Arabic cultures were regarded as being responsible for exporting homosexuality into sub-Saharan Africa, when Europeans did not take the blame for this themselves.As can be noted in Burton’s “Terminal Essay”, homosexuality denoted a lack of morality, and this lack of morality is given a distinctly Eastern character. Bleys noted that “Felix Oefele, also concerned about the moral status of cultures antecedent to Islam, wondered if the evidence of sexually transmitted diseases in Ancient Egypt was to be explained by a widespread ‘homosexual excess’, as it was, so he presumed, at his time” (163).Excess, homosexuality, disease, and Islam’s moral status were bound up together in the epistemological framework of these nineteenth century ethnographers.Of course, as Bleys also noted, this framework functioned to allow European colonialism as a civilizing mission, to improve the medico-moral status of the indigenous peoples.

Benedict Anderson attributes the rise of nationalism to the rise of print that was, in part, responsible for the census and for the mass production of maps.These, combined with the museum, were deployed by nationalism to draw boundaries and create what Anderson terms “imagined communities”.The map served to allow “leaders [to] begin thinking of boundaries as segments of a continuous map-line corresponding to nothing visible on the ground, but demarcating an exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties” (172).The quarantine flags flying over Belgrade and the Save river in Servia represented this border-drawing that demarcated the lines between a sovereign realm of health and a sovereign realm of illness, neither of which are visible but rather imagined.Anderson wrote “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6).According to Anderson, “the nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (7).Kinglake’s text and Burton’s “Terminal Essay” allow Europeans to imagine themselves as one kind of coherent community, albeit a limited one, while at the same time they imagine the Orient as another kind.For Kinglake, the boundary was one between well-being and disease; for Burton, between perversion and normal sexuality.For each, the difference is between Europe and the Orient.

Death and sexuality are linked together in the East in the context of Eothen.Dunlap wrote that the known world is broken into three general geographical groups by Kinglake:

Greece is obviously identified by Kinglake with boyhood imagination, asexual and free, presided over by a loving and lenient mother.England, like Tennyson’s Camelot, is the active world of the ego, entrammeled by civilization but vital and masculine.The East is Kinglake’s Shalott, a place of shadows, of feminine sensibility, of death and dark subconscious impulses (85).

Like Burton, Kinglake links the East to eroticism, sexuality, and the feminine, according to Dunlap, but takes this link a step further, also linking the East to plague, disease, and death.The Save river serves as a barrier, as I’ve noted before, between East and West, but also between erotic and epistemological modes.Dunlap wrote

Kinglake crosses the Sava into the infidel East as if it were the Styx, and from this point plague haunts Eothen like death in The Seventh Seal or sin in Pilgrim’s Progress.A vulture hangs over the rooftops as Kinglake approaches Belgrade; its houses are like windowless mausoleums.Groups of soldiers lie about smoking, “some lying flat like corpses upon the cool stones,” and “a dead perfume of strange spices” permeates the air.As they leave the city and enter the great Servian forest, they pass a mountain of skulls, and it is now that Kinglake—like the Childe Roland in his nightmare landscape—begins to meditate on his past.And mingled with voluptuous sensuality, the plague-death that Kinglake eludes and pursues, that implicit negation of all he is and remembers, is as much the goal of his quest as the dark tower is for Browning’s psychic traveller of the Fifties (85-86).

Dunlap further points out that Kinglake’s East is, like Beckford’s Vathek, excessive, each with their “mountains of skulls” and their “voluptuous sensuality”.Femininity, sensuality, excess, plague, and desire are all written onto the East.Dunlap notes that 

For Kinglake the atheist and bachelor, religious instincts are invariably associated with the power and beauty of women; female sexuality is in turn associated with death, and death is identified with the pest-ridden East. …for a persistent interest in sexual customs of the East and in the extravagances of oriental despotism were part of the tradition in which he wrote, and the plague was a fact of Ottoman life.(86)

I disagree with Dunlap’s equation of female sexuality, death, and “the pest-ridden East”, as within the context of Kinglake’s travelogue, there are very few examples of female sexuality.Those that exist, the Smyrna girls, Lady Hester Stanhope, and the Sphinx, are all three notably divorced from Eothen’s focus on plague and disease.In fact, he conjures and then dismisses this easy equation:

By some happy perverseness (occasioned, perhaps, by my disgust at the notion of being received with a pair of tongs), I took it into my pleasant head that all the European notions about contagion were thoroughly unfounded—that the plague might be providential, or “epidemic” (as they phrase it), but was not contagious, and that I could not be killed by the touch of a woman’s sleeve, nor yet by her blessed breath (168).

While I intend to further explore the “perverseness” of Kinglake’s notions of European medicine, it is interesting how he rejects the European notion that women’s sleeves or breath are vectors of contagion.Furthermore, Dunlap in many ways naturalizes the European discourse on the plague in the East, claiming it as “a fact of Ottoman life”, leaving this fact unexamined.Nonetheless, Dunlap’s analysis, that there is an association among Europeans of sexual customs of the East, its excesses, and the plague itself, is evocative.The medical discourse of differences folds into the sexual discourse, leading to an equation in European minds (even if this is not Kinglake’s own opinion) of Orient equals sensual equals plague.

Kinglake travels with his Tatar, Mysseri, and his fellow Englishman and school friend Methley.Soon after crossing the border into Turkey, Methley falls ill and remains ill until the travelers get to Adrianople."Before we reached Adrianople, Methley had been seized with we knew not what ailment, and when we had taken up our quarters in the city he was cast to the very earth by sickness" (18).The English consul refuses to take them in, in spite of Kinglake's assumption that they would: "I should have judged rightly under ordinary circumstances, but the levelling plague was abroad, and the dread of it had dominion over the consular mind" (18).Once again, we have the powers of the state imposing a barrier against illness based on "dread".One reading of this is that Turkey causes Methley to fall ill.However, there is some anxiety in the text over whether the traveling party will be welcome in Stamboul with Methley ill and Kinglake appearing as if he had spent years out in the wilderness.An alternate reading of this could be that Methley brought the illness with him from Belgrade, considering that Mysseri was the only Turk that we know Methley has come into contact with at this point in the text.

Kinglake, like Wittman before him, provides a theory about what the cause of the plague in Turkey is, and his analysis of European fears is interesting:

It is the firm faith of almost all the Europeans living in the East, that plague is conveyed by the touch of infected substances, and that the deadly atoms especially lurk in all kinds of clothes and furs; it is held safer to breathe the same air with a man sick of the plague, and even to come into contact with his skin, than to be touched by the smallest particle of woollen or of thread which may have been within the reach of possible infection.If this be a right notion, the spread of the malady must be materially aided by the observance of a custom prevailing amongst the people of Stamboul.It is this: when an Osmanli dies, one of his dresses is cut up, and a small piece of it is sent to each of his friends as a memorial of the departed--a fatal present, according to the opinion of the Franks, for it too often forces the living not merely to remember the dead man, but to follow and bear him company (24).

Kinglake, in this passage, is strikingly skeptical of European, and especially French, attitudes about illness in the East.Knowledge is characterized as "faith" and "opinion", not as scientific or medical certainty.Kinglake goes so far as to say "if this be a right notion", questioning the very foundations of the European assumptions.He goes on to note that it would be impossible in Stamboul to avoid touching another person's clothing in the streets or bazaars, up until he inadvertently touches a plague corpse on its way to burial: "this accident gave me such a strong interest in denying the soundness of the contagion theory, that I did in fact deny and repudiate it altogether: and from that time, acting upon my own convenient view of the matter, I went wherever I chose, without taking any serious pains to avoid a touch" (25).Dunlap notes that “Kinglake makes a fatalistic game of flirting with the plague—indeed one wonders if he were not himself an unconscious agent of the plague” (86).This passage links plague in an unusual way to desire, Kinglake himself in the position of possible infection vector according to Dunlap.His own medical epistemology is self-admittedly “perverse”; his flirtation with disease stems from a perverse form of desire.

There are a number of distinctly homoerotic elements of Kinglake’s text.For example, he spends a good amount of time reminiscing with Methley about their time at Eton as boys; fond memories, akin to what Adam Potkay wrote about with regard to William Beckford's “Heaven of Boys".Also, in his chapter titled "Infidel Smyrna", he encounters another Englishman named Carriagaholt who, while in the East, decides that he wants to marry a Greek woman, gets so far in arranging it as to excite various Greek families, and then decides he wants to purchase "a dutiful child that could be warranted to love him as a parent" (39).Carriagaholt is, in many ways, something of a precursor to Oscar Wilde.Later in the chapter, Kinglake notes that Greek men stand in the doors to observe the holidays of the Greek Church, but that Greek women stand in the window.When Carriagaholt is purchasing an apartment, he "objected that the windows commanded no view of the street; immediately the brow of the majestic matron was clouded, and with all the scorn of a Spartan mother she coolly asked Carriagaholt, and said, 'Art thou a tender damsel, that would sit and gaze from windows?'" (45).Carriagaholt purchases the apartmentanyway, and "for many a month, he kept the saints' days, and all the days intervening, after the fashion of Grecian women" (45).In a later encounter with Lady Hester Stanhope, Lord Byron is described by Lady Hester to Kinglake as having a “coxcombical lisp” and Lamartine, a Frenchman, as mincing “like the humbler sort of English dandy” (76-77).

More than once, Alexander William Kinglake refers to his own text as a form of “perverse” travel literature.In many ways, his identification of his own text as perverse is an historical irony: many later travelers, such as T.E. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, to the Middle East were familiar with Eothen and some of them wrote similar texts.Kinglake’s self-perceived perversity lies in how his text is primarily about his own perceptions and feelings of his travels, rather than a description of the things others expect him to write about, such as the Pyramids or the Sphinx.In his introduction to the text, Kinglake wrote

If I had been passing through countries not previously explored, it would have been sadly perverse to withhold careful descriptions of admirable objects merely because my own feelings of interest in them may have happened to flag; but where the countries which one visits have been thoroughly and ably described, and even artistically illustrated, by others, one is fully at liberty to say as little—though not quite so much—as one chooses (xxi, emphasis mine).

Withholding information from his readers becomes perverse; odd, but Kinglake clearly recognizes how his desires are at odds with the desires and expectations of his readers.For Kinglake, the relationship between reader and author is eroticized, and Kinglake revels in playing with them.In the event the reader misses the implications, Kinglake objects “this seemingly perverse mode of treating the subject is forced upon me by my plan of adhering to the sentimental truth, and really does not result from any impertinent wish to tease or trifle with readers.” (xxi, emphasis mine)His relationship with his readers, not intending “to tease or trifle with readers”, does so nonetheless, and herein lies the source of the text’s perversity.That a text could “tease or trifle with readers” is surprising enough; that it is “perverse” in doing so is even more so.

The author-reader relationship becomes infused with an erotic charge.Charisse Gendron wrote, “Kinglake took ten years to write Eothen; not until he hit on the pretense of addressing his memoir to the ear of his intimate friend Eliot Warburton was he able to shape his travel materials into memorable entertainment” (11).Considering that Kinglake had difficulty composing Eothen until he decided to address it to Warburton, who himself was about to embark on a journey to the Middle East, this perverse relationship between author and reader takes on an explicitly homoerotic character.Even beyond Warburton as audience, Eothen became as an object of exchange between schoolboys:Gendron notes “certainly “Kinglake’s devil-may-care brush with ‘the splendour and havoc of the East’ enchanted Victorian and Edwardian adolescents” (11).She further notes that Eothen was a text “once cherished by public school boys” (11).Her article notes how Kinglake’s text was originally rejected for publication on the grounds that it was “wicked”, that “to youths Eothen offered the apparent wickedness of Kinglake’s gallantry, exultant egotism, and independent opinions; to adults, the amused tolerance, in an age of moral partisanship, by which they recognized the author as a ‘sinner’ like themselves” (11).

Within Kinglake’s text, perverseness is linked to quarantine and the plague itself.

In the passage when he was greeted by a pair of tongs, cited earlier, Kinglake and his ideas about European theories of medicine are a “perverseness”, and he uses the term with what would later become fixed as its normalizing force. Europeans are expected to adhere to certain notions of the spread of the plague. By mingling with “the natives”, Kinglake is refused at the doors “Levantine” (a European living in the East), his letter of credit being taken literally with a pair of tongs. In a startling passage, Kinglake shows us how the Levantine lives:

The truth was that from fear of the plague he had adopted the course usually taken by European residents, and had shut himself “in strict quarantine”—that is to say, that he had, as he hoped, cut himself off from all communication with infecting substances. The Europeans long resident in the East, without any or with scarcely any exception, are firmly convinced that the plague is propagated by contact, and by contact only—that if they can but avoid the touch of an infecting substance they are safe, and that if they cannot they die. This belief induces them to adopt the contrivance of putting themselves in that state of siege which they call “quarantine.” It is a part of their faith that metals, and hempen rope, and also, I fancy, one or two other substances, will not carry the infection; and they likewise believe that the germ of pestilence lying in an infected substance may be destroyed by submersion in water, or by the action of smoke. They, therefore, guard the doors of their houses with the utmost care against intrusion, and condemn themselves, with all members of their family, including European servants, to a strict imprisonment within the walls of their dwelling. Their native attendants are not allowed to enter at all, but they make the necessary purchases of provisions; these are hauled up through one of the windows by means of a rope, and are afterwards soaked in water (165).

Like the quarantine border at Belgrade, the European shuts himself off from all influence of the East, ostensibly to preserve his health, but also to preserve his European-ness. Tellingly, the native servants are sent out to purchase necessities but not allowed within the European fortress (or prison). Europeans are kept inside, “including European servants”, now considered to be members of the family. Once again, identity is clearly demarcated between East and Europe, and Kinglake’s description of this construction of European identity upon the exclusion of the indigenous people as infected or source of infection is telling. An analogous space would be the Oriental harem, which shut women away from men ostensibly in order to protect them. In this passage, space itself, on a micro and a macro level, is mustered to produce identity through a series of exclusions based on race and fear of plague. The European fetishizes the hempen rope, the tongs and other metallic substances, submersion in water, and smoke, charging these and “one or two other substances” with the magical ability to ward off the plague and, moreover, the Orient. Kinglake’s text calls into question whether European medical knowledge is scientific or whether it is not just a matter of mere conjecture but a magical practice, based on wards and rituals involving fire and water, metal and rope. The medical fetish here serves to ward off European fears of the infectious nature of the Orient—whether the infection is Burton’s Vice or Kinglake’s Plague.

In her travels to Turkey, Lady Mary Montagu is introduced to the technique of smallpox inoculation by the Turkish women.She tests out the technique on one of her children, and brings it back to Europe with her.This eighteenth century characterization of the East is interesting in light of the way the discourse would shift by the nineteenth century.Kinglake had read Montagu’s letters, and in fact commented on them in the Quarterly Review the same year Eothen was published (1844); in fact, in the same issue that Eothen’s addressee, Eliot Warburton, reviewed it.In Lady Montagu's letters, the East is an exotic place, but not threatening to the constitution of the British body.In fact, it provides a technique for warding off illness.One hundred years later, however, the east, and Constantinople in particular, would prove to be a threat to even healthy Englishmen.Srinivas Aravamudan, in his discussion of the letters of Lady Mary Montagu, proposes an "inoculation theory".Aravamudan notes that "the bathhouse was a site for hygienic, aesthetic, and therapeutic practices; hence, it was common in that environment to find herbalists, magicians, and medical practitioners" (183-184).A century later, as I've shown, this would be completely different in the European imagination.About the smallpox inoculation, Aravamudan writes 

the technique was still dangerous, as the inoculation was performed with a live culture (rather than using a vaccine which contains dead bacteria, popularized later by Edward Jenner in 1798).However, the travels themselves serve a cultural function resembling the homeopathic act of inoculation that stalls a disease by subjecting the body to a weaker version of it.Travel narrative, after flirting with cultural crossover, acknowledges the superiority of the return home.Montagu's return with the actual technique of inoculation is a masterstroke, because it coincidentally provides a model for English cultural retrenchment.(184)

The Turkish culture is warded off at the same time a small portion of it is absorbed into the body politic (hence Mary's wearing of the Turkish turbans)--this renders the Ottoman Empire less of a threat, at least conceptually, to the growing British Empire.However, by 1835, when Alexander Kinglake traveled to Turkey, this conception of the East had shifted to one where the East is threatening to overwhelm British and other European soldiers with illness.To extend Aravamudan's analysis, the inoculation has failed and a panic about Turkish culture overwhelming British culture has replaced it.Borders are drawn with more certainty than before, this time as quarantine lines.

Many times in Kinglake's text, the "oriental" is described in terms understood as almost classically "orientalist": as being "who we once were".Europe came into its Renaissance after the plague, and Kinglake alludes more than once to this historical fact, letting the implication that the Ottomans are hundreds of years behind Europe linger in the background of his text.Dunlap notes “Eothen is the reverse [‘from this world to that which is to come’], to this world from that which it used to be—or from that which might have been” (80).The European journey to the Orient is a journey through time as well as through space, as is indicated by the translation of Kinglake’s title (“Eothen” is Greek for “From the East” or “From the dawn”).

Sir Richard Burton projects “Le Vice” onto the Orient.The male Turkish bath described by Kinglake would also be understood as a naked male homosocial space; the nudity that, in Montagu's letters, would be somewhat titillating becomes threatening to Kinglake and other European males, going to far as to become the site of disease itself.I would like to analyze Burton in light of Said's notion of Orientalism, but this is the part where Said and Foucault will have to be reconciled.Said comments once or twice on sexuality in general, and not once specifically about homosexuality or Burton's "Sotadic Zone".On the other hand, Foucault almost reifies the construction of the Oriental as having an exoticized "sexuality" (the term here is difficult, for in Foucault, "sexuality" is a product of scientific discourses; perhaps "erotic arrangements" would be a better phrase).In his own brief comments about the "ars erotica", he projects onto cultures of the past as well as non-European cultures a model of sexual understandings completely different from that of the West.He wrote

On the one hand, the societies--and they are numerous: China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies--which endowed themselves with an ars erotica.In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul.(History of Sexuality I 57)

The Orient (both far and near) is equated with ancient Western culture (Rome) in this short passage.Like Kinglake's projection of the Orient as being what Europe once was finds itself rearticulated by Foucault.In a sense, Foucault does with sexuality exactly what Said says the West does in general with knowledge about the East.

On the other hand, the closest Said gets to naming homosexuality in Burton's "Terminal Essay" is to note that it "was meant to be a testimony to his victory over the sometimes scandalous system of Oriental knowledge" (196, emphasis mine).He goes on to state "everything about it is presented to us by way of Burton's knowledgeable (and often prurient) interventions" (196, emphasis mine).Scandalous and prurient; what could Said be referring to?Later, his comments are a little more direct: "the relation between the Middle East and the West is really defined as sexual…the association between the Orient and sex is remarkably persistent" (309).Later, he notes that 

If Arab society is represented in almost completely negative and generally passive terms, to be ravished and won by the Orientalist hero, we can assume that such a representation is a way of dealing with the great variety and potency of Arab diversity, whose source is, if not intellectual and social, then sexual and biological.Yet the absolutely inviolable taboo in Orientalist discourse is that that very sexuality must never be taken seriously.It can never be explicitly blamed for the absence of achievement and "real" rational sophistication the Orientalist everywhere discovers among the Arabs.(311)

Again, Said talks around this sexual and biological diversity.There seems to be a taboo operating in Said's own reversal of Orientalist discourse.Making one connection relatively easy for me, Said notes that ""revolution is a bad kind of sexuality[…], and also a cancerous disease", linking sexuality, disease, the Orient, and political upheaval.In a hasty summation of this material (that I intend to flesh out more fully later), Said and Foucault exist in an uneasy relationship with one another; Foucault reifies Orientalist discourse while attempting to dispel other discourses of power, and Said reinscribes heterosexist discourses by refusing to name, beyond using very general terms, the sexual diversity he is discussing.

Said found Kinglake’s text to be rather unimpressive, comparing it unfavorably to Burton’s works and referring to it as an “undeservedly famous and popular work [that] is a pathetic catalogue of pompous ethnocentrisms and tiringly nondescript accounts of the Englishman’s East” (193).This is, of course, entirely true.Kinglake notably goes to the East only to contrast it to England, romanticizing both in the process.Travel to the East, for Kinglake, solidifies one’s identity as British and as European; Said notes that this “turns out to be little more than solidifying ‘your’ anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and general all-purpose race prejudice” (193).The construction of racial identity grounds itself in discourses of Self and Other that are often anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and racist.Furthermore, Kinglake’s attitudes towards Arabs, Musselmen, Osmanlis, and other persons living east of the Save river was increasingly harsh, culminating in Kinglake stealing water from two indigenous travelers in the desert because he’s thirsty and also considering killing a man only because his menservants want him to.Said also noted that “like many other travelers he is more interested in remaking himself and the Orient (dead and dry—a mental mummy) than he is in seeing what there is to be seen” (193).Kinglake admits as much in his introduction, cited earlier, although not in those terms.His travelogue is supremely egotistical, and he constructs his British identity by abjecting the Oriental.Said notes that “for all their vaunted individuality Kinglake’s views express a public and national will over the Orient; his ego is the instrument of this will’s expression, not by any means its master” (194).Nevertheless, Said does overlook Kinglake’s criticism directed at other Europeans and their attitudes and fears about the plague.In this, Kinglake does not identify himself with other Europeans but rather aligns himself with “Oriental” attitudes about plague.Specifically, Kinglake disidentifies with the European, at least every time he meets one in the East.

Susan Sontag briefly mentions Eothen in her essay “AIDS and Its Metaphors”, noting how disease and foreignness have been linked historically.She wrote “English traveler Alexander Kinglake [reached] Cairo at the time of the bubonic plague (sometimes called ‘oriental plague’)” (139).That the plague was called the “oriental plague” is interesting, as it has the effect of scape-goating the Orient.Moreover, she wrote that his text 

illustrates many of the enduring Eurocentric presumptions about others, starting from the fantasy that peoples with little reason to expect exemption from misfortune have a lessened capacity to feel misfortune.Thus it is believed that Asians (or the poor, or blacks, or Africans, or Muslims) don’t suffer or don’t grieve as Europeans (or whites) do.The fact that illness is associated with the poor—who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one’s midst—reinforces the association of illness with the foreign: with an exotic, often primitive place.(139)

While Sontag conflates a number of issues, including how Europeans deal with illness among their own poor and how Europeans regard illness in the Orient, her fundamental argument that illness is associated by the West with the foreign, the exotic, and the primitive is useful.Illness comes from some other place, whether it is bubonic plague or AIDS, and therefore the Other is responsible for it (whether that Other is an African in current discourses on AIDS or an Oriental in Victorian discourses on plague).

Eothen is, in many ways, very much a product of Victorian, and specifically British, understandings of science, medicine, and epidemiology.Statistical analyses and counting the sick were primary methods of understanding illness.Upon meeting another Englishman in the desert en route to Cairo, Kinglake wrote

…when we got within speaking distance, he said, “I dare say you wish to know how the plague is going on at Cairo?”And then he went on to say he regretted that his information did not enable him to give me in numbers a perfectly accurate statement of the daily deaths; he afterwards talked pleasantly enough upon other and less ghastly subjects.I though[t] him manly and intelligent—a worthy one of the few thousand strong Englishmen to whom the Empire of India[1] is committed.(152)

True to Victorian form, the plague in Cairo is understandable not only by the English soldier but by Kinglake himself as a numerical value.That the Englishman cannot give Kinglake this statement “in numbers” means he cannot give any statement at all about it—and does not.Scientific, or at least statistical and epidemiological, discourses are given precedence over experiential ones and Kinglake, who wrote about his experiences in the Orient, does not seem to notice or question this.

By the end of the nineteenth century, medical discourse on plague in the Orient had shifted considerably.British colonialism’s mode of power had shifted from an epistemological and scopic one, as evidenced by the travelogues of Lady Montagu and Alexander Kinglake, to an administrative one.The British more directly administered their primary colony of India, and with the governmental administration came a change in the medical discourse on plague.All the administrative power of the government was brought to bear to prevent plague in British India.David Arnold noted that

“The [Epidemic Diseases Act of 1897], which applied to the whole of British India and took immediate effect, gave the government power to inspect any ship or intending passenger; to detain and segregate plague suspects; to destroy infected property; search, disinfect, evacuate, open up for ventilation, or simply demolish any dwelling thought to harbor plague; to prohibit fairs and pilgrimages; to examine and detain road and rail travelers—in short, to do whatever medical and official opinion held to be necessaryfor the suppression of plague.(204)

On the surface, this appears similar to the quarantine Kinglake describes between Servia and the Ottoman Empire, but it is significantly different.While quarantine is one mode of governmental power brought to bear to prevent plague, it is not the only one.This is because the British colonial state had an interest in continuing contact and commerce with India, and quarantine would interfere.Furthermore, Arnold noted a marked shift in European attitudes towards their own susceptibility to the plague:

By contrast with cholera or typhoid, plague was not a disease that posed much of a threat to European life, though at first there was some uncertainty on this score.A suspected case of plague in a European youth in Calcutta in October 1896 hastened the formation of a plague committee there, and special cordons were subsequently set up to protect Simla and other European hill stations.But remarkably few Europeans caught the disease and fatalities were extremely rare.This apparent immunity contributed to the popular belief that Europeans were deliberately spreading plague in order to kill off unwanted Indians.Plague was more an inconvenience than a threat to Europeans” (207-208).

This is a marked shift in discourse from Kinglake’s text, where the plague was considered such a great threat to European health abroad that Levantines locked themselves in their homes and received visitors with a pair of tongs.Panic over plague subsided as European, and specifically British, colonial control over the Orient increased and took on a greater and greater administrative character.At this point, as Arnold notes, “the [colonized Indian subject’s] body, moreover, was exposed not just to the ‘gaze’ of the Western medical practitioner but also to his physical touch, an intrusion of the greatest concern to a society in which touch connoted possession or pollution” (211).Again, we have a shift from Kinglake’s scopic control of the colonial patient-subject to a tactile one; this shift is made possible by the British administration of government in the colonies.

Burton’s “Terminal Essay” and Kinglake’s Eothen “Orientalize” the East through similar means, which is the author’s scopic power to observe and describe what he sees.This is similar to the medical gaze as described by Foucault.Foucault writes "the gaze is passively linked to the primary passivity that dedicates it to the endless task of absorbing experience in its entirety, and of mastering it" (Birth of the Clinic xiv).Both Burton and Kinglake engage in this mode of absorbing experience in order to master it, and in order to master the Orient itself.The "speaking eye" seeks to know and through knowledge to dominate (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic 114).Kinglake’s autobiographical “I” easily slips into the medical “eye”, glancing at the Orient and diagnosing it as plagued; at the same time, Burton’s eye/I glances at the Orient to diagnose it as perverse.The power of each of these gazes has the same effect, which is to render the Orient as an imaginary space for Europeans, as either an imagined community of plague and disease, or an imagined community of sexual perversity, to be feared and seduced by at the same time.

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