Although there has never been a political area called the Orient, the words "Orient" and "Orientalism" have become common usage because the Orient has been a long-standing Western invention: it is an imaginative geography but one with enormous consequences. Orientalism in the mid-nineteenth century was a nexus of political, ideological, racial, cultural, and aesthetic investments in the various parts of the world that denoted the "Orient" in the U.S. cultural imagination: Asia and the Near East, including Egypt and the Holy Lands. It is best approached in Edward Said's sense of Orientalism as being both a means of Euro-American self-definition and a method for having authority over the Orient, although in the nineteenth-century United States it also served to mark the nation as important in relation to European colonizing powers, a new empire ready to lead the world.

Although the particularities of this use of the Orient varied with the kind of discourse—political writing, travel writing, novels—the idea of these Orients as being storehouses of knowledge, embodying the past and needing regeneration in the present, remained remarkably consistent. As revealed in a special Knickerbocker article of June 1853 devoted to describing the scenes evoked by the word "Orientalism," in the American mind it meant a combination of luxury, indolence, and unreality:

We frame to ourselves a deep azure sky, and a languid alluring atmosphere; associate luxurious ease with the coffee-rooms and flower-gardens of the Seraglio at Constantinople; . . . We see grave and revered turbans sitting cross-legged on Persian carpets in baths and harems, . . . we then bespread over all a sort of Arabian night-spell. (Pp. 479–480)

The stimulus for U.S. interest in Egypt was the military forays of the French and the British. The French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion's deciphering of the hieroglyphs in 1822 created intense scholarly and political excitement which affected popular culture as well. P. T. Barnum acquired two mummies in 1826, and in 1832 Colonel Mendes Cohen of Baltimore returned from Egypt with 680 artifacts to establish the first private Egyptian collection in the United States.

By the early nineteenth century the United States, like Europe, would also be affected by what Raymond Schwab has called "the Oriental Renaissance" generated by the arrival of Sanskrit texts in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Interest in Asia is evident in the fact that in 1817, Thomas Moore's long poem Lalla Rookh, set in India, sold more copies than any other book published that year in the United States. For American readers, Oriental literatures were not simply exotic, trivial entertainment but literatures that warranted commentary and critique. Between June and November 1840, for instance, the Southern Literary Messenger published three papers on Arabian literature.

VISIONS OF EMPIRE AND CONTACT WITH THE ORIENT

In addition to the popularity of Orientalist works, the Orient was also brought closer because of increasing commercial interests both in the Near East and in Asia. Oriental trade was important, both in itself and as a sign of national power. By the 1830s trade with the Barbary States of North Africa became well established, and in 1832 alone, forty-six U.S. ships had landed at Smyrna and fourteen in Constantinople. More than trade with the Near East, trade with Asia was vigorously sought after. The leader in this trade, it was presumed, would lead the world. For many other thinkers, Asian trade exemplified the idea of civilization coming full circle. It was popularly held that empires had started in the Far East, moved to Europe, and were heading to the New World. Jefferson had been fascinated with the idea of "the North American road to India" since 1787, an idea taken up again in the early nineteenth century by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, who cast his arguments about trade in terms of the human race and civilization moving west and the return of republican ideals to Asia.

With the introduction of steam packets in the 1830s, tourists from the United States started to choose Oriental destinations, the most popular of which were Egypt and the Holy Lands. U.S. appetite for Oriental travel is evidenced by the fact that by the winter of 1838–1839, Egypt had more travelers from the United States than of any other nationality but the British. The American Oriental Society in its first number lists thirty-four travel works about Asia, the Near East, and Middle East, all published between 1823 and 1843.

Most popular travel writers focused on the picturesqueness and exoticism of the "backward" Eastern races. Nathaniel Parker Willis's Pencillings by the Way, an account of a cruise on the eastern Mediterranean in 1833, no doubt fascinated readers with its raptures over Mediterranean sunsets, twilights, and veiled women. Similarly John Lloyd Stephens, author of Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837) and Incidents of Travel in Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland (1838) had royalties reaching an unheard-of $25,000. Travel writing continued to enjoy popularity in the mid-nineteenth century with George William Curtis's Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852), the first an account of a journey along the Nile and the second a description of travels across Cairo, the Arabian deserts, Jerusalem, and finally, Damascus.

The most prolific of Oriental travel writers was Bayard Taylor (1825–1878). Taylor recorded his twoand-a-half years of travel in three volumes: A Journey to Central Africa (1854), The Lands of the Saracen (1856), and A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 (1855). In addition Taylor wrote Japan in Our Day (1872) and Travels in Arabia (1872). Although Taylor had a flair for the dramatic, and his appearance on the lyceum circuit clad in Arab clothes and scimitar is reported to have made women swoon, many of his works deal with historical material rather than exotic Orient. Much of Taylor's A Visit to India, China, and Japan, for instance, corrects misconceptions about "ignorant" natives created by previous Orientalist writers, recounts the complex diplomatic maneuvers of the American commodore Matthew Perry in his gunboat diplomacy mission to facilitate the first Western trade treaty with Japan, and satirizes the imperial presumptions of his countrymen.

Missionary activity overseas began with the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in 1810; shortly thereafter the board began work in the Near East and Asia. The formation of the ABCFM was quickly followed by clergy journeying to the region. By 1818 the board was running eleven schools in India alone, instructing an estimated six hundred students. The board reported, "In these schools, we seem to see a thousand Hindoo hands at work . . . in undermining the fabric of Hindoo idolatry" (ABCFM, p. 211). The ABCFM similarly saw the Near East as an area for cultural conversion. Many countries had strict laws forbidding attempts at converting Muslims, but missionaries regarded the Oriental churches as equally fit objects of concern, particularly because of the interracial contact there. The ABCFM established missions in Beirut through a system of schools and was instructing six hundred children by 1827. Missionary and imperial enterprises were also often related. For instance, in 1835 Eli Smith, a missionary in Syria, requested official action from the United States, adding that Syrians should be taught "that we are a powerful nation. And there is no other way to teach them this but to make them feel it" (Field, p. 210).

The establishment of missionary activity in Oriental countries also facilitated the formation of the American Oriental Society in 1843. This was clearly a scholastic society, but missionary and scholarly activities were connected. In the first address to the society, the president made repeated mention of the exemplary work of American missionaries abroad and compared them with their European counterparts. Yet the ambitious scholarly programs of the society also expanded the cultural horizons of the United States. Essays ranged from discussions of Eastern religions to economies and medicine. In May 1844, for instance, Edward E. Salisbury gave a talk at the annual meeting of the society titled "Memoir on the History of Buddhism."

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE NEAR EAST

Despite imperial politics, literary representations of the Orient varied according to the region in question. The predominant genre of Near East Orientalist literature was satire, the object of which was both archaeological and missionary imperialism. The adventurer in the Orient was admirable and ludicrous, sincere but misguided in his role as discoverer. The same terms applied to missionary women. Writers thus produced missionary-colonial novels in which American men boldly ventured forth as archaeologists; American women were most often the conveyers of the gospel, converting Near Eastern women and steadying men in their purpose. Unlike Near Eastern women who were frivolous, indolent and oppressed, missionary women were independent and intelligent.

But while writers relied on the formulaic missionary-conversion plot, they also caricatured the ideological presumptions of American or Western heroes embodying imperial nationhood. Popular works in the genre were Henry Brent's "The Mysterious Pyramid" (1850), Maturin Murray Ballou's The Turkish Slave (1850), and John De Forest's Irene the Missionary (1879). It is significant that the immensely popular women's writer and author of The Lamplighter, Maria Susanna Cummins, also wrote a missionary novel, El Fureidîs, in 1860. William Ware wrote Zenobia (1837), the story of a Palmyrean queen who challenges the power of the Roman Empire, emphasizing the difference between Eastern and Western leaders as that between heart and head. Significantly, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance features a character named Zenobia. Near East Orientalist writing finds its most self-conscious expression and critique of archaeological imperialism in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) and Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921) and in Herman Melville's (1819–1891) Clarel.

Poe, Spofford, and Melville are the most important writers of Near East Orientalism. The comic and parodic critique of Orientalist power gives way here to a demonstration of the tragic consequences of mastery and control. The works critique the idea of the Near East as new frontier, and instead of confirming an imperial order, they close with chaos. Poe constantly parodied the culture's colonial use of the Orient, most notably in "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade." A more farcical subversion of Western cultural imperialism occurs in "Some Words with a Mummy," where a mummy comes to life and delivers a harangue on the inferiority of contemporary American civilization. "A Tale of Ragged Mountains" critiques British colonialism in India. In "Ligeia," signifiers of the Orient and U.S. southern womanhood intersect to generate an epistemological crisis about nationalism and empire. Ligeia and Rowena are more than abstractions of womanhood. Ligeia clearly represents Near East "Oriental" knowledge, control over which was a defining feature of U.S. nationhood in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

Like Poe, Spofford in "Desert Sands" (1863) dramatizes the dangers of imperialistic appropriation of the Orient. The story recounts the frantic efforts of the artist narrator, Sydney, to produce his masterpiece painting by capturing Arab lands on his canvas; it ends with the masterpiece completed but the artist struck blind. Writing contemporaneously with Spofford, Melville further complicates the idea of the Near East as the new frontier by dramatizing the resistance of the Near East to the hermeneutic mappings of the American hero. In 1856 Melville published a humorous piece called "I and My Chimney" in which he satirized the vogue for Egyptology popularized by travel writing. In autumn 1856 Melville traveled to Europe and then on to Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Palestine, all of which he documented in his journals. In his long prose poem Clarel, Melville fictionalized the doubts and hesitancies of the American hero seeking religious regeneration through a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. Through Clarel, a young theological student, Melville eroticizes the relationship between the United States and the Near East and demonstrates how the racial-cultural difference of the Near East cannot be simplified by creating mind/body dichotomies. Instead Melville's poem questions the ideological oppositions between the United States and the Near East through the circulation of homoerotic desire.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF ASIA

Like the Near East, Asia was fodder for the literary imagination. For example, sixteen-year-old Lucretia Maria Davidson wrote Amir Khan and Other Poems, posthumously published in 1829. In 1821, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) wrote a long poem called "Indian Superstition" for the Harvard College Exhibition. This fascination with the Far East culminated in the 1850s and 1860s in the works of writers such as Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Bret Harte.

The cultural representation of Asia was highly contradictory. Asia was revered as the land of scriptures and literatures, the birthplace of civilization; yet in order to be accommodated within the vision of empire in which civilization was seen as moving west, culminating in the New World, it had to be seen as either degraded present or transhistorical past. The acquisition of goods from India could be seen as the rightful fulfillment of Columbus's original dream or as a redemptive journey of the newest empire to the old. In either case, the present-day reality of colonial India had to be excluded, a feature evident in Thoreau's, Emerson's, and Whitman's highly contradictory sacralization of India as absolute spiritual past.

The politics of Asian Orientalism thus contributed to features that are commonly associated with transcendentalism—mysticism, spirituality, and a transcending of this world. Such a discourse was not divorced from history; it was in fact historically informed, being a product of the periods of colonization and slavery, even though it was ahistorically framed in its insistence on getting beyond history. In James Russell Lowell's (1819–1891) "Dara" (1850), Persia is an old, uninspiring empire, described in images of rot and sexual impotence. It is a "decaying empire," "wilted by harem-heats." Lowell's poem "An Oriental Apologue" (1849) similarly dramatizes the theme of the old, irrational Orient in need of youth and change. On the other hand, Thoreau in Walden (1854) recalls having spent many blissful moments immersed in the Bhagavad Gita and imagines Walden Pond, the metaphoric source of his knowledge, to have been fed by the Ganges.

Of all the transcendentalists, Emerson read Orientalist texts most extensively and used the Orient to stand for an absolute spiritual past against which a unified New World nationhood, as the latest seat of the westward Anglo-Saxon movement of civilization, could be formulated. This idea of Asia as unified "spiritual" territory was a political necessity for Emerson because it allowed him to deflect the idea of a fragmented nationhood. Emerson called his wife, Lydia, "Asia," and many of Emerson's essays rest upon binary distinctions between male and female, West and East, activity and passivity, dynamism and fate. In 1847 Emerson wrote, "Orientalism is Fatalism, resignation: Occidentalism is Freedom & Will," and "We occidentals are educated to wish to be first" (Journals, p. 90). Such ideas were crystallized in "Brahma," the most overtly Oriental of Emerson's poems, yet one in which the unity of India also stands for the unity of the nation.

Like Emerson, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was fascinated with the Oriental cultures the country was increasingly coming in contact with. Asia and, in particular, India appealed to Whitman's imagination both as a symbol of the farthest reaches of empire and as maternal space through which the New World could be seen as youthful and dynamic; in turn, Whitman's loving persona could imperialistically embrace the world. We must not be duped into thinking that it was simply a "mystical" Asia that the transcendentalists repeatedly used—even though, as Malcolm Cowley argued, Whitman's poems were a cross between the New York Herald and the Bhagavad Gita—because the sites of Whitman's poems of the Orient were often concrete historical-material situations such as the parade on Broadway and the installation of the Atlantic cables. Whitman was in fact an omnivorous reader and an obsessive recorder of details about Asia. In a lengthy journal entry on China in June 1857, for instance, Whitman noted details about Chinese forms of worship, Chinese tea, the physiognomy of the people, the manner of executions, and the status of the United States in China.

Whitman uses a poetic persona representing the nation as a strong, earthy male with a desire to embrace all. The Asian Orient in relation to this persona appears most regularly as mother, thus reinforcing the idea of Asia as past. In "A Broadway Pageant," the march on Broadway is figured as a march of the westward movement of civilization in which Japan is past and the United States is "Libertad." The Orient, as India, is associated with maternal images. It is the birthplace of civilization, the early nurturer or "nest" of languages, and like a good mother it bequeaths culture to the world. Whitman's poetry consciously creates the spiritual Orient based on the exclusion of contemporary colonialism, a process most evident in "Passage to India," which romanticizes colonialism yet, in recording the trajectory of foreign conquerors in India, forgets to mention the British. Transcendentalists attempted to valorize India as past while excluding its brutal colonization and, consequently, the humanity of its people. Thus Orientalism in the mid-nineteenth century was an intensely political domain, a signifier of U.S. imperial power and a screen onto which writers projected racial anxieties about the nation.

See also Americans Abroad; Chinese; Ethnology; Exploration and Discovery; Foreigners; Manifest Destiny; Satire, Burlesque, and Parody; Tourism; Transcendentalism; Travel Writing

Malini Johar Schueller