① What are the Effects of Soft-Orientalism?
Nord points out that “fascination with Gypsies in Britain was a form of orientalism” (3 italics added). When compared with the Irish or the Jews, the “racial” marker—in terms of their physical feature, including their color of skin—attached to the Gypsies seems to be more distinct, creating a certain distance from the Western population and rendering them closer to the Oriental figure. Like the Oriental or the colonized subject, Gypsies operated as a site of projection of the repressed desire and fear of the West. Also, perhaps, John Hoyland’s strong desire to associate Gypsies with Indians dissociating them from Egyptians reflects the Western desire to see Gypsies as the Oriental existence (though also in modern ethnographic discourse, the Romany’s Indian origin seems to be established as a scientific fact). Yet, at the same time, they were, unlike the “real” Oriental subjects, a domestic or an internal other, inhabiting within the Occident. How does this physical proximity function for the quasi-oriental imagination? Should we see the Gypsies as "other" Others or straightforward Others? How does their intermediate status—not quite Oriental, not quite Occidental—operate within postcolonial discourse?
② Difference between Gypsies and Jews: Time, Space, and Modernity?
As Nord argues, though the Gypsies shared “transnational (or at least non-national) and stubbornly distinct minority identities” with the Jew (5), these two groups differed greatly especially in terms of their relation to modernity. The Jewish desire (even if it might have been a little over-emphasized partly because of a construct/projection of British desire for quarantine the Jews) for modern nation state observed in Zionism marked a stark contrast with nonchalance about a specific land of the Gypsies, who apparently were satisfied with their nomadic life. Also, while the Jews were closely associated with urban or cosmopolitan cultures, situated within the center of the capitalism, the Gypsies functioned as embodiment of antiquity, especially British past, “allied with an aesthetic of the picturesque and with protest against modern encroachments” (Nord 6). In other words, it seems that whereas the Jew functioned in Victorian mind as an ominous incarnation of “hypermodernity,” the Gypsies played a role of antithesis/antidote of modernity. What do we make of this distinction in terms of their relation to modernity?
③ Gender Representation of the Gypsies: Dream of Androgyny?
Also remarkable is gender representation of the Gypsies. In contrast to the gender representations of the Irish and the Jews, in which female Irish/Jews are rendered desirable (whether ethereal or hyper-sensual) while male Irish/Jews are rendered repugnant, there seems no such gender distinction of aesthetic value in Gypsy representation. As Nord points out, the Gypsy was often represented in Victorian fiction as androgynous, a hybrid figure of male and female. Nord only argues about the imagery of masculinized female Gypsy, which provided Victorian female writers with fantasy of heterodox femininity reveling against patriarchy. Yet, Hoyland pointed out that male Gypsies, when they are young, “they are generally handsome,” which I found atypical for describing the male figure of racial minorities. As I have had an impression that the difference in aesthetic values associated with two genders in both Irish and Jewish cases might be related to the politics of interracial marriage, I am wondering how to interpret this androgynous representation of the Gypsies. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, though it is not a “Victorian” novel but a modernist exploration of androgynity, concerns with Gypsy representation, too, by the way.
④ How Do We Make of Dracula’s Minions?
Although we don’t have many literary examples of Gypsy representations yet, the presence of the Gypsies in Dracula’s last scene is memorable. Narrated from Mina’s point of view, the final moment of the novel documents the fight between Crew of Light and Gypsies as minions of Dracula (though, whether they are really Gypsies or not is unclear: “Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men’s clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind” (Dracula 322). ) What does this scene of the battle with Gypsies, which strangely substitutes for anti-climactic moment of Count’s death possibly mean? By the way, I couldn’t help smiling at Mina, who, though she must be busy watching her husband’s gallantry, is distracted by the gypsy male’s fascinating appearance: “The leader of the gypsies, a splendid looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed” (323).
That’s all for now, but please feel free to add more questions!
I am interested in the gypsy/Oriental question, too. We see the gypsies being described in the same terms and ideas as "Oriental" peoples--and interestingly, I think there are moments when they are seen as more threatening than the traditional Orient, as when Hoyland notes that even in Egypt the gypsies are wanderers, Others.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in the physical depictions of the gypsies as dark-skinned or "black." They are described as seeming to be very much racially marked in physical, noticeable ways, but the very existence of the foundling/swapped at birth/kidnapping legend seems to indicate that "passing" is a real fear--after all, you can't swap out kids unless the kids look at least reasonably alike.
I thought of Orlando, too, Madoka. It is with the gypsies that Orlando is able to escape her gender and nation. I don't quite know what connection I want to make between our texts for today and Woolf yet, but I'm writing on Orlando for Benji's class, so I'm sure at some point I'll come up with something insightful!
The British conception of gypsies seems to be something other than Said's Oriental other because the gypsies were seen as plain criminals. I don't think the Indians thought of the Suders (untouchables?) as criminals, and the British hopefully didn't think of the Oriental as a criminal, although Hoyland seems to here: "We have seen that the Gypsies are in the highest degree filthy and disgusting; and with regard to character, depraved and fraudulent to excess, and these are the qualities of the Suders." The gypsies seem to suffer from an extreme international ostracism, but they seem to embrace it, or live up to expectations in some permutation of Bhabha's mimicry?
ReplyDeleteIt makes sense that the gypsies embrace of their otherness could be a site of identification for those who would like to embrace a nonconformist sexual identity.
...I guess that would be gender identity
ReplyDeleteGreat questions, Madoka! (Thanks also for continuing to include these great images. I have to admit, I found this one terrifying. At first I thought that was great flying octopus in the sky.)
ReplyDeleteYour discussion on gender representation is fascinating, especially androgyny and hybridity. I’d also like to add the emerging rejection of the marriage plot. Nord points out that Eliot applies “the fantasy of the stigmatized, rather than elevated, birth frees the heroine from the cultural and literary requirements of the marriage plot. The eccentric female, whether heroine or author, imagines herself a Gypsy as a way of escaping from the exigencies of conventional femininity” (14). How can we interpret what is fantasized, stigmatized, or elevated in this case?
Wage labor
I was wondering if industrialized countries were responding to a potentially disconcerting feature of the “nomadic” lifestyle of this targeted group: their general non-participation in the wage-labor cycle. I believe Nord was addressing this when she notes:
[T]hey occupy a primal spot in the history of civilizations and contain in their culture clues to essential humanity that might otherwise be lost. For some writers, this meant that the Gypsy could remind modern men and women of a time before the corruptions of modernity corroded their souls. For others, who regarded the Gypsy as a pastoral figure, Gypsies could conjure an older, preindustrial England, a golden age before enclosure, urban encroachments, the railway, and other defilements of nature. In “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), Matthew Arnold famously associates Gypsies with resistance to the “strange disease of modern life” (9, my emphasis)
Prior to enclosure, people were free (or more free) to roam about and hunt as they pleased. With enclosure, this mobility—and independence—was severely hampered. But this group managed to stay relatively mobile and didn’t “buy in,” so to speak, to the capitalist cycle. Thoughts?
My comment was too simplistic. Juliette, your section on wage labor is the positive side of the discourse that Madoka might have been addressing with the term Soft-Orientalism. This term is new to me, and I would like to know more about it.
ReplyDeleteDoes speaking of "the other" in Orientalism always include some type of moralizing or moral judgment?
I notice what seemed considerable contradiction in the representation of gypsies. They’re described as swarthy, yet there is a “need to account for blue-eyed fair-haired Gypsy children” (Nord 11). They are feared as thieves and kidnappers, yet romanticized as pastoral figures. Ambiguous identity segues to androgynous gypsy characters invented by writers. Their history and origin are in dispute. Is it really their itinerancy (aside from British imagination) that marks them?
ReplyDeleteMadoka, I'm interested in this first question, too. It seems like weight of the claim that Gypsies were "domestic" and "internal" might be mitigated some by ubiquity that Nord notes early and often in the piece. Once again, it seems like movement is problematic ideologically; the notion that the Gypsy—like the figure of 'the Jew' we've already considered—was everywhere and nowhere seems intimately tied to the Gypsy's illegibility. All of this is to say, I'm not sure it really matters whether Gypsies were domestic or foreign, because the line seems to be that they aren't *British.* In this model, British normativity would be tied to stasis. That notion makes a lot of sense to me considering all the historical legislation in England regarding vagrancy (one text that considers these at length is George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London). We also encounter questions of origins in the Nord piece that complicate notions of domesticity.
ReplyDeleteTo add to Donald’s point about the drastic contradiction between the pastoral images of a people also thought to be rapacious thieves, it seems to me that this “at once” is different from those we’ve seen before concerning the Irish and the Jew. It is not a problem of nationalism but cultural or societal or even temporal belonging. The Jewish figure was seen to be either resisting modernity and the current system through his traditionalism, or exploiting the system through hypermodernism—in both cases they are still within society in some form—they are embedded as either a resistance to or a perpetrator of modern ills. For the Gypsies, it seems they will be forever outside society, on the periphery of civilization and left out of the system. They are either some “primitive” nomads, existing as pre-industrial icon of the halcyon days before Arnold’s “modern disease,” or they are unable to participate in modern society because of their own degeneracy, lack of education, etc., and live the disenfranchised and troublesome life of the knave and swindler. They are incapable of being modern. I think this ties into the fear of kidnapping: with the Gypsies forever on the outside where the British cannot go, and do not want to, there is no tracking these people without origin or recognizable language, religion or ethics. On either side of the binary they do not exist—they are either a pastoral myth or a the shadow of modernity’s failures.
ReplyDeleteTo shift drastically, I, too thought of the Gypsies in Dracula—both their presence at the beginning and the end. Their relationship to Dracula is an intriguing one worth pondering. I don’t know whether to see them as his minions or people he is exploiting, since they are low enough in society to still associate with him, and seemingly, not fear him. Yet, I also think it would be interesting to read Dracula as a Gypsy, so him having minion Gypsies would work with that reading. Is the British Gypsy the true metrocolonial subject? Are we misapplying terms here, or committing the error of “fetishizing the West” by setting up a lens that reads the Gypsy as possibly some kind of colonial subject from “the East” or Orient that the West would fear? It seems their lack of origin, or possible British origin problematizes this reading.