The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East by Eleonora Sasso (review)

Among the varieties of exoticism practiced by the Pre-Raphaelites, the classical and medieval recreations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company remain the most familiar, well-represented in recent scholarship. In this respect, Eleonora Sasso's The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East happily brings light to an underappreciated facet of their writing and art. Her study treats the aesthetic consequences of the Pre-Raphaelites' fascination with the Arabian Nights (c. 1706 to c. 1721)—a childhood favorite of many nineteenth-century authors—in order to position them as interpreters of the East for Victorian culture. The book comprises a brief introduction and four chapters, covering painting, poetry, and prose from the Rossettis to Ford Madox Ford (whose inclusion represents one of the book's better impulses). The central question Sasso poses is straightforward and compelling enough: how do the Pre-Raphaelites adapt the Arabian Nights? The answers are somewhat less satisfying, the book's salutary investigation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's (PRB) Orientalism hobbled both by a paucity of scholarly engagement and by the foibles of method.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism is principally a study of intertextuality. It considers the ways in which images, themes, tropes, and topoi from the Arabian Nights—"its mystic aura, criminal underworld, and feminine sensuality"—find themselves transformed in the crucible of Pre-Raphaelite art (2). The Pre-Raphaelites, Sasso suggests, found in the Arabian Nights an entire grammar of the imagination with which to erect their own dream-worlds of sensual pleasure or political critique. One goal of this study is recuperative (or perhaps prophylactic): she argues that Pre-Raphaelite Orientalism does not, pace Edward Said, deepen and harden "the impenetrable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority" (2). She instead sees Pre-Raphaelite art as a "blended space," bringing together elements of East and West in order to produce new cognitive, aesthetic, and even political possibilities (4). On this fine distinction rests the book's contribution to discussions of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Thus, in chapter 1, Sasso paints D. G. Rossetti as "almost a precursor of cultural studies," committed to the celebration of diversity and the critique of British imperialism (13). The politics, it should be said, remain largely implicit in Sasso's readings. Rossetti's commitment to diversity emerges in the way he gives play to competing modes of representation (both Oriental and Western) within the blended spaces of his poems and paintings, maintaining rather than collapsing the differences among them.

The rest of the volume turns on similar kinds of figurative transformation. Chapter 2 treats the sensualism of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley in relation to the hammam or bath scenes in the Arabian Nights. Many Victorians read the Arabian Nights in Edward William Lane's bowdlerized 1840 translation. Swinburne, for his part, preferred the more sexually frank and literal version by Richard F. Burton, a friend in flagellation, and his reading of Burton produced a "corporeal Orientalism" designedly provocative to Victorian sexual mores (37). (Sasso suggests, but does not pursue, an intriguing analogy between the literalism of the translation and Swinburne's interest in surfaces, his confusions of figure and ground.) Chapter 3 turns to the comparably more chaste imaginations of John Ruskin and William Morris, who admired the Arabian Nights both for its elaborate design and for the moral flavor of its parables. Sasso convincingly argues that their own modes of storytelling—from the instructive fables of Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (1866) to the stories-within-stories of Morris's Earthly Paradise (1868–70)—were shaped by early reading in the Nights. Of particular interest to students of the Pre-Raphaelites will be the fresh attention paid to fairytales in chapter 4, an understudied PRB genre. (The chapter offers a useful complement to recent work by Molly Clark Hillard, among others.) The political dimensions...