The Turban as Metonymy: Reading Orientalism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

Students frequently cannot interpret texts because they cannot see the stultifying cultural preconceptions they bring with them, nor can they easily perceive how their own biases, mutatis mutandis, match up with those of the writers they must confront in the reading process. This problem is particularly true for students grappling with British Victorian novels, whose at-times windy rhetoric must be endured, sifted, digested, and recontextualized, without which they can never hope to appreciate the critical incisiveness of Charles Dickens, the witty dialogue of Elizabeth Gaskell, the astuteness of Benjamin Disraeli, the self-indulgent Gothic humor of Wilkie Collins, or the overpowering technical mastery of George Eliot. Add to this problem our world of instant communication, and we teachers have a real challenge on our hands.

Stripping away preconceptions about cultural others is an apt exercise for students because Victorian writers incorporate many of the same stereotypes that students will not only recognize, but that the students themselves actually “know” and embrace in their own beliefs. Sometimes intentionally, often not, Victorians make us of figural tropes that, if properly read and explained, become not only the gateways for productively interpreting the longish works of the period students are asked to read, but they become as well the mirrors through which they perceive their own cultural biases. This essay centers on one type of cultural prejudice, namely, that circumscribed by Orientalism, and I focus the discussion on the many Orientalist signatures that Charlotte Brontë embeds in her novel Villette, her last published work and the one where an understanding of Orientalism becomes essential in interpreting what is an astonishingly well-written novel, but not one frequently used in classrooms because of its dense prose, pervasive use of French, trenchant critique of Catholicism, and Gothicized strangeness that hovers over the narrative.

Before introducing a novel like Villette, one that contains a rich tapestry of Orientalist themes and imagery, I conduct the following exercise. I write various countries of the Middle East and South Asia on the board (Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, Syria) and ask students to write down what they know about each country through the varying impressions and immediate thoughts that occur to them as think about each of the countries. Usually, students can remember some current or historical information about these countries, but not as much as might be expected, even with the deluge of media reports, images, and stories that are available, particularly after two Gulf wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. Indeed, the thesis of Edward Said’s book Covering Islam is that the persistence of cultural stereotypes about Muslims remains even with the availability of appropriate and accurate news about the Middle East. And even if students do have some of the “facts” that comprise a vague idea of the country, these facts are often intermixed or interpolated with other images and stereotypes, which as Edward Said predicted in Orientalism and other works, flattens understanding of any country in particular or this region of the world in general. When students review their work in class discussion, they uncover a dirty little secret: Their understanding of the Orient is mediated by metonymies—flying carpets, turbans, desert sands, white robes, magical entities and objects, primitive and violent behaviors with swords and scimitars— all of which contribute to a cultural bias that robs the region of its cultural difference and, also as Said asserted, freezes these Oriental Others in time. These others are forever locked in our imaginations as inferiors, requiring assistance and intervention, always subaltern, always ripe for colonization. In short, they need our help. This is sobering news indeed, and a lesson that must be learned before students can unpack the hidden cultural biases of texts they are required to interrogate.

To push the point home, however, I demonstrate that complex fictive narratives contain the same “pre-knowledge” (Said’s term) of Middle Eastern culture that students themselves unwittingly harbor and pass on. Instructors must shape classroom discussion in contextual terms that reveal cultural bias both in our own contemporaneous productions, as well as those that one finds in...