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ABSTRACT
This article uncovers the first publication of Gertrude Bell, known in the early twentieth century for her exploration, archaeological work, and diplomacy in the Middle East. Examining her 1894 travel book, Persian Pictures, and contextualizing it within fin-de-siècle Aestheticism and Decadence, I argue that Bell shapes a unique version of Decadent aesthetics and experimental prose far from the European metropole. Suggesting connections between her early aesthetic work and her later diplomacy, I foreground how Decadence allows a young woman traveling at the perceived margins to engage with geopolitical, gendered, and imperial conflict, and thus expand the view of Decadence as inherently male and intrinsically European. Concluding with a brief examination of texts by twentieth-century Persian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, this essay proposes some ways that, for both Bell and Farrokhzad, both of whom were women at the margins, Decadent representations of Eastern landscapes facilitate revisionary ideas of gender and geopolitics.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Bell, Persian Pictures, 38.
2 Howell, Gertrude Bell, xix.
3 Wallach, Desert Queen, xxiv.
4 Ibid.
5 A 2018 documentary entitled from Baghdad, composed almost entirely of primary documents and featuring Tilda Swinton as the voice of Bell, has sparked some new interest in Bell, as has a less successful 2015 film entitled Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Werner Herzog.
6 However, scholars of Modernism might find Bell’s later friendship with Vita Sackville-West interesting. Sackville-West visited Bell in Tehran in 1926 and described the visit in A Passenger to Teheran.
7 Throughout this essay, the capitalized words “Decadence” and “Decadent” address the English and French aesthetic movement and its associated stylistic qualities and politics; “decadence” uncapitalized points to a sense of cultural decline, historical belatedness, or generalized anxieties characterizing the end of the nineteenth century. Similarly, “Aestheticism” refers to the late-Victorian aesthetic movement of which Decadence is a part, while “aesthetic” uncapitalized refers broadly to discourses of beauty and art.
8 Mahoney, Literature and the Politics, 14.
9 Ibid., 16.
10 Ibid., 17.
11 In her diary, she writes,
I, crossing the little thread of rail that binds me here to the outer world, felt like the Fate with the shears – Clotho, to whom we bow the head. I have cut the thread. I can hear no more from you or from anyone, and what is more, do you know that I am an outlaw? Louis Mallet has informed me that if I go on towards Nejd [Najd] my own government washes its hands of me, and I have given a categorical acquittal to the Ottoman Government, saying that I go on at my own risk. January 16, 1914 (Gertrude Bell Archive).
12 Workman, “Gertrude Bell,” 185.
13 Ibid., 191.
14 Ibid., 185.
15 Murray, Landscapes of Decadence, 22.
16 Mahoney, Literature and the Politics, 4.
17 Vance, “Decadence from Belfast,” 563.
18 Quoted in Ross, “Preface,” 5.
19 Bell, “Preface,” The Desert and the Sown, iv.
20 See Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America, Chapter 18; and Talib, “Le Gallienne’s Paraphrase and the Limits of Translation.”
21 Winstone, Gertrude Bell, 37.
22 Consider Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1885−1887), Arthur Symons’s Spiritual Adventures (1905), John Addington Symonds’s In the Key of Blue and Other Prose Essays (1893), or James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s paintings Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871) and Symphony in White, Nos. 1 (1861–1862), 2 (1864), and 3 (1865–1867).
23 Bell, Persian Pictures, 34. The poem is from Robert Jones, Muses’ Garden of Delights, 1610, in Bullen, More Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age, 60.
24 Murray, Landscapes of Decadence, 23.
25 Murray, “Fin-de-Siècle Decadence,” 483.
26 Bell, Persian Pictures, 34.
27 Wilde’s “The Sphinx Without a Secret,” 1887; also Wilde’s The Sphinx (1894, the same year as Persian Pictures), decorated by Charles Ricketts, features an excessive, playful, eroticized catalogue of Eastern imagery and repeated references to secrecy.
28 Ghaderi and Yahya, “Exoticism,” 128.
29 Bell, Persian Pictures, 34–5.
30 Symons, “The Decadent Movement,” 106.
31 Ibid., 106.
32 Bell, Persian Pictures, 73. Vita Sackville-West was also captivated by nomadic groups in the Near East, and published a poem entitled “Nomads” in 1917.
33 Bell, Persian Pictures, 73.
34 Pater, The Renaissance, 120.
35 Bell, Persian Pictures, 32.
36 Ibid., 32.
37 Ibid., 32–33.
38 Pater, The Renaissance, 119.
39 Quoted in Howell, Gertrude Bell, 51.
40 Ibid., 51.
41 Ghaderi and Yahya, “Exoticism,” 123.
42 Ibid., 133, 124.
43 Ibid., 128.
44 Bell, “Preface,” The Desert and the Sown, x.
45 Quoted in Howell, Gertrude Bell, 51.
46 For Bell’s attitude toward women’s suffrage, see Howard, Gertrude Bell, 68–73.
47 Bell, Persian Pictures, 76.
48 Murray, Landscapes of Decadence, 22–23.
49 Ibid., 22–23.
50 Bell, Persian Pictures, 76.
51 See anthropologist Edward Tylor’s 1871 Primitive Culture, in which he coined the term survivals as “processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home” (320).
52 Bell, Persian Pictures, 187.
53 Ibid., 189.
54 Ibid., 190.
55 See Katouzian, The Persians, 10.
56 Bell, Persian Pictures, 156.
57 Henry James also refers to “the spiritual ear” in “The Last of the Valerii” (1874), also in reference to an encounter with the ancient past. James’s narrator enters the Pantheon in Rome and ponders the “huge dusky dome” which “seems to the spiritual ear to hold a vague reverberation of pagan worship, as a shell picked up on the beach holds the rumour of the sea,” 26.
58 See Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776, 1781, 1788–1789), the first major source in England on imperial decadence.
59 Vance, “Decadence from Belfast,” 565–66.
60 Bell, Persian Pictures, 156. Scutari, now called Üsküdar, is a district of Istanbul alongside the Bosphorus, also known as the Strait of Istanbul.
61 Bell, Persian Pictures, 157.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 98.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 Katouzian, The Persians, 143. Also, Ghaderi and Yahya’s article concisely examines Bell’s various positions in this complicated political situation.
67 Bell, Persian Pictures, 56.
68 Vance, “Decadence from Belfast,” 565–66.
69 Nordau writes in Degeneration, “Another mental stigma of degenerates is their emotionalism. […] He laughs until he sheds tears, or weeps copiously without adequate occasion” (16).
70 Bell, Persian Pictures, 57.
71 Ibid., 54, 57.
72 Ibid., 88.
73 Ibid., 90.
74 Huysmans, Against Nature, 37.
75 Bell, Persian Pictures, 90.
76 Ibid., 92.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 93.
79 Ibid.
80 Bell, Persian Pictures, 35.
81 Wolpé, “Forugh Farrokhzad,” xvii–xviii. I refer to “Iran” now instead of “Persia” to reflect the Iranian government’s urging in 1935 that other countries should use this term. “Persian” was still commonly used until the revolution of 1979, and still refers to the most populous ethnic group in Iran, as well as to their language. Farrokhzad is Persian and Iranian. For additional information about the history and controversy over these terms, see Katouzian, The Persians, 1–3.
82 See Wolpé, “Forugh Farrokhzad,” xix–xxi.
83 Farrokhzad, “Sin,” 3.
84 Farrokhzad, “Bathing,” 11.
85 Ibid.
86 Ostriker, “Foreword,” ix.
87 Farrokhzad, “Later,” 16.
88 Ibid., 17.
89 Farokhzad, “Rebellious God,” 21.
90 Ibid., 21–22.
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Angie Blumberg
Angie Blumberg is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department at Auburn University. Her research examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish writers turn to the past to intervene in discussions of gender and sexuality, aesthetics, and modernity, and appears in peer-reviewed journals including Victoriographies, Literature Compass, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. She is particularly interested in archaeology’s role in shaping these discourses, and her book British Literature and Archaeology, 1880–1930 is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.