[In the following excerpt, Schueller discusses Cummins's use and dissection of contemporary stereotypes of the “Near Eastern Orient” in her novel El Fureidis.]

Like DeForest, Maria Susanna Cummins, in El Fureidis (1860), also uses the figures of the male archaeologist and the missionary woman to provide a basic structure for the raced imperial narrative of the new frontier. In El Fureidis, however, the racial-cultural hybridity of the Near East powerfully intervenes into the dynamics of imperialism by making the Oriental subject resistant to definition and by providing gender possibilities that question the phallocentric basis of imperialism.

Cummins's very authoring of a Near Eastern Orientalist novel suggests the importance of the region in the cultural imaginary and the possibilities offered by the racial-cultural borderlands there. Cummins was, after all, the author of one of the most popular romances of her time, The Lamplighter (1854), which sold forty thousand copies in eight weeks and led to Hawthorne's well-known outburst against the “‘d—d’ mob of scribbling women.” Hawthorne asked, “What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘The Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?”¹ The popularity of The Lamplighter probably lay in its use of what Nina Baym has described as the staple plot of nineteenth-century women's writing—the story of a poor woman's struggle, her good fortune in finding a benefactor, and her final marriage.² The orphaned heroine of The Lamplighter, who is befriended by Trueman Flint, is a model of female dependency and purity and is rewarded for her virtues by marriage to a childhood sweetheart.

In El Fureidis, Cummins intersects the woman's plot with the Orientalist plot and radically reconfigures both. Just as Rowson used racial ambiguity to reconstruct gender roles in Slaves in Algiers, Cummins uses cultural and racial mixtures to rewrite the gender roles of the conventional courting plot. The liberation of the heroine from the shackles of the conventional plot is carried out through the ambiguous Near Eastern racial configuration of the heroine, which permits the transgression of normative gender roles. Yet the anxieties inherent in destabilizing the racial dichotomies on which the imperial body is constructed come to the surface when the very same heroine is positioned as the savior of the degraded Eastern woman, much in the manner of Rowson's Slaves in Algiers.

Cummins begins the novel by situating it within a discursive terrain of the imaginary Orient. The scholarly guides of El Fureidis, as Cummins tells us in the introductory chapter, are travel writers and historians like Edward Robinson, Jacob Burkhardt, and Sir Richard Burton. Through the male archaeologist, Meredith, Cummins critiques the unreal and imaginary Orient of the popular imagination. Nearing the Syrian shore, Meredith enters a dreamworld of “promise, of beauty, of ancient records, and of sacred lore.”³ Popular Orientalism is a projection of the Westerner's fantasies of sensuality and a site removed from the sphere of work, a space that Meredith pleasurably creates for himself as he travels to Syria: “Now feasting his eager eye upon the harmonious picture, then lifting it with equal wonder and delight to the deep-blue canopy of sky above … and all the while breathing in an atmosphere whose purity and fragrance are nowhere else inhaled, the Eastern-bound traveller acknowledges all his longings satisfied, all his day-dreams realized” (2). But Meredith's fantasy scene also signifies on the wondrous descriptions of the New World popularized through Columbus's letters and promotional tracts. By mapping the New World imaginary onto the Near East and exaggerating its effects, the text critiques (even as it evokes) the construction of the Near East as the new frontier.

Just as Cummins ridicules the excesses of Oriental lore, she also undermines the raced hierarchies of imperialism and the stature of the imperial body by representing Meredith, the archaeologist, as overwhelmed by the language and culture of the Near Eastern Orient. The Near Eastern Orient cannot simply be scripted as an Other, the alterity, barbarity, and excess of which can confirm the coherence of the Western body. In Damascus, in the house of a Muslim trader, Meredith finds himself lost within a bewildering variety of forms and figures that undermine the heteronormative gender identity on which the stance of imperial power depends.

As his eye ranged up and down the lofty walls, he felt himself lost amid mazes of coloring, and bewildered by architectural forms. Arches with fluted pillars … on which inscriptions from the Koran were engraved in graceful Arabic characters, light galleries and colonnades festooned with passion-flower … all these elements of beauty assailed his senses at a glance, and, reflected in innumerable little mirrors inserted in the wainscoting, were repeated in endless perspective. In vain did the imagination attempt to trace the pattern of flowers and scrolls. …

Was it the rippling of a new fountain, just starting into play, which now chimed in with the other sounds. … Was it a picture, such as the artist never painted before, or was it a living ideal, which had come to perfect the scene? …

Opposite to him, however, mirrored in glass, or possibly in fancy, were two figures, whose loveliness, grace, and picturesque attire harmonized so perfectly with their fairy-like surroundings, that they seemed an indispensable part of the whole. … Now they paced slowly around the railed gallery which ran around the court, and then paused to pluck a passionflower or smell a rose, then idled on. Meredith watched them breathlessly for a moment, then they were gone.

(288-89)

Instead of scopophilically constructing the scene as the object of his gaze, Cummins's hero is confronted with “innumerable little mirrors” that challenge both his powers of interpretation and his sense of self. Like Royall Tyler's Updike Underhill, whose authority was undermined by his ambivalent racial and gender construction within the walls of the Moslem college, Meredith's imperial, patriarchal position is severely challenged here. Meredith's mental wanderings take place in the proximity of the harem, a space marked not simply as repressive and as a metonym for the Orient but also as a space of women's sexuality. Western writers, in fact, were both disturbed with and fascinated by the idea of “women [in the harem] being freely and continuously together, and the degradation and licentiousness, and corruption that must inevitably ensue.”⁴ Meredith, in his dream vision, is similarly thrown into confusion by the intimacy of Havilah and Maysunnah. Cultural and gendered otherness intersect to undermine the coherence of the imperial body. Meredith's embodiment of maleness and power is challenged as he is “lost,” “bewildered,” and “assailed” not only by the “Arabic characters” and Koranic inscriptions that interrupt his cognitive mapping of the Orient but by the women, whose intimacy threatens his sense of heterosexual wholeness. And instead of the Orient mirroring his desire and becoming the narcissistic projection of his needs, Meredith finds mirrored his own inability to create order in a culture whose otherness he has come to interpret.

In representing the epistemological crisis of Western logic and of patriarchal authority in the context of voyaging the Near Eastern Orient, Cummins participates in an important critique of the technologies of imperial knowledge, a knowledge that had been appropriated by the popular imagination in the wake of Egyptology. For some women writers, the idea of the Westerner attempting to construct the Orient as a species of knowledge was quite appealing. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, in The Story of Avis, used the Sphinx, an admittedly overdetermined figure, to demonstrate the resistance of the Orient to the calculations and the control of the West. Avis, the artist whose creativity is stifled under the burden of marriage and child rearing, turns repeatedly to her painting of the Sphinx in an attempt to solve its enigma. Like the male archaeologist of the missionary novels, Avis tries feverishly to interpret the Sphinx: “Against a deep sky, palpitant with the purple soul of Egypt, the riddle of the ages rose with a certain majesty. …”⁵ Finally, overcome by want of time, money, and fresh inspiration, Avis strikes the Sphinx dumb by painting an Arab child “looking at the sphinx with his finger on his lips, swearing her to silence.”⁶ Although there are obvious class differences between the leisured and moneyed archaeologist and the impoverished artist laboring in her home, the confidence in being able to interpret the Orient is similar in both. Indeed, Phelps exposes the presumptions of her heroine by having the heroine see the Sphinx in a vision where it stands for all womanhood: “The riddle of ages whispered to her. The mystery of woman-hood stood before her, and said “Speak for me.”⁷ White womanhood is invited to speak for all women through a figure that is ambiguous in terms of both race and gender and that is thus an apt symbol of the fear of African womanhood and the alterity of the Near Eastern Oriental woman. Phelps, by dramatizing Avis's repeated frustrations in giving voice to the Sphinx, critiques the idea that the Orient needs to be spoken for.

In El Fureidis too, the embodiment of the hero as explorer and interpreter of the Orient is complicated and thwarted by cultural-racial borderlands and hybrid constructions. The ruins of Syria, we are told, have passed through Roman, Christian, and Saracenic dynasties, each of which have left their impress on the culture and resist easy interpretation. Yet the text continues the Columbiad vision, appropriating the Near East as the new frontier. Meredith, a self-exiled aristocrat from England, comes to El Fureidis, a veritable “colony” described in terms that echo New England patriarch William Bradford. El Fureidis is “a beacon set upon a hill,” an example to the rest of the country and a means of uplifting the natives. This nineteenth-century, Near Eastern beacon on a hill is a paradigm of the new imperial frontier. Father Lapierre, the spiritual head of El Fureidis, explains:

Already men's eyes are turned upon us. Western Europe and enterprising America are emulating each other in their beneficent labors in this direction. Science is sounding our harbors, calculating the height of our mountains, surveying our wildernesses, and taking the measure of our streams; and religion lends her aid and sanction to the work, for a faithful band of Christian missionaries are in the van of the reforming army.

(272)

The transfer of the rhetoric of colonial New England onto the Near East constructs the latter as a nineteenth-century frontier. And as with the early New England colonizers, racial alterity and anxiety is a fundamental condition of this frontier. Meredith is guided into El Fureidis by the Arab youth Abdoul, of whom he is inordinately suspicious and distrustful. Once at El Fureidis, Meredith falls into a delirium in which the sight of Abdoul “never fail[s] to agitate or disturb” (30).

Cummins's version of the new frontier, however, undermines and questions the patriarchal construction of the westerly vision. Here, the hero's body is subject to the voyeuristic gaze of the Orientals. Lying passive in bed due to an illness, Meredith is the object of curiosity for native children, who “[take] possession of the outer room of the dwelling, and by their juvenile pranks and licensed stares excit[e] the Englishman almost to frenzy” (30). Once recovered from his illness, Meredith sets his sights on Havilah, the daughter of American businessman M. Trefoil, but is rebuffed. Unlike DeForest's novel, where the self-aggrandizing archaeologist is rewarded from the beginning with the affections of Irene Grant, in El Fureidis the racial borderlands of the Near East are used to reconfigure the heroine, undermine the phallocentric and imperial stature of the exploring hero embodying the New World, and rewrite the conventional love plot.

Havilah is differently gendered because of her dual acculturation as Western and Oriental. Her mixture is first described through the traditional oppositions between Western intellect and Eastern passion: “Born beneath an Indian sun, but with the fresh life of the West glowing in her veins, Havilah was at once the imaginative, impassioned child of the Orient, and the active, intelligent representative of a race … diverse to the Asiatic type” (62). However, Cummins soon makes clear that Havilah's cultural engendering represents a critique of the construction of woman's sphere in mid-nineteenth-century America and of the association of intellect with the West alone. Havilah's reading, for instance, is not that “with which a Western belle is wont to beguile an idle hour” but Greek and Syriac manuscripts, French scientific works, and Arabic lore (63).

It is not surprising, therefore, that Havilah becomes Meredith's cultural mentor, deciphering old Saracenic inscriptions and explicating differences among types of ancient architectures. Within the ideology of true womanhood, such a role as Havilah's would have been inconceivable. Although women in the mid-nineteenth century were avid readers and were criticized for this habit, what clergymen found reprehensible was the idea of women's pleasure. Clergymen wrote sternly about the loss of domestic values when idle women spent their time lounging on chairs, engrossed in licentious romances. But even though they were readers, women were seen as passive consumers of novels, rather than as active agents interpreting and transforming what they read. In El Fureidis, however, Havilah's mixed cultural embodiment enables Cummins to project Havilah as an active reader. In a dramatic moment that might well be a revision of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, where Roger Chillingworth is engaged in the process of “reading” the guilty minister, Dimmesdale, Cummins uses the trope of interpretation to describe Havilah's “reading” and rejection of Meredith: “[Havilah] was reading and comprehending him as no mortal had ever done before … she had probed the depths of his unsatisfied soul, and had beheld the void within” (97). In an inversion of the conventional women's plot, Havilah rejects Meredith's suit until he attains (moral) virtue and is rewarded.

Cummins uses cultural hybridity as a means both of questioning the West's ability to create a disciplinary knowledge of the Orient and of subverting the phallocentric and raced bases of U.S. cultural imperialism. Cummins also demystifies the most prevalent symbol of Western imperial desire—the harem—and thereby questions the dichotomies on which the imperial body within Near Eastern Orientalist discourse is constructed. In addition to using the harem, suggestively, as a sexual space that breaks normative heterosexual constructions of gender, Cummins also uses the harem as maternal space. While Havilah and Meredith are returning from Damascus to El Fureidis, they stop at the Bedouin encampment of Abdoul's family. The harem and the Bedouin encampment as a whole become sites through which complex racial questions are mediated and racial hierarchies questioned. Cummins takes us to the interior of the Bedouin structure, where the harem is represented primarily as a gendered, nurturing, domestic social space for women.⁸ It is at once “the storehouse, kitchen, bedroom, and nursery of the household” (334). Havilah rests in the harem while the women there engage in the household tasks of cooking and cleaning. Fatigued after the day's journey, Havilah is soothed into sleep “as by a lullaby, for the last sound she heard was the voice of the old woman, who, seating herself on the carpet, swayed her bent form backward and forward, and in monotonous tones invoked the peace of Allah upon her beautiful charge” (337).

This instance of breaking the silence of the Oriental woman is particularly important because it occurs in the harem and through an old woman who is very much part of the harem. In the context of mid-nineteenth-century America, this productive re-creation of the harem cannot help but recall the peculiar position of black women within the ideologies of womanhood and the sphere of the home. Just as the harem was fantasized as a sexual space (distanced from, yet inviting, the Westerner), the black woman was viewed as a figure of illicit sexuality (who had invited institutionalized rape).⁹ As black nanny, however, the black woman was a safe, if unattractive, figure. Cummins's re-creation of the nanny as the Oriental woman (and vice versa) questions forcefully the rigidity of racial gendering and upsets the polarities of Near Eastern orientalism.

Close to the end of the novel, Cummins recuperates the imperial missionary impulse through subplots in which Havilah (who is part American) saves the physically and morally imprisoned body of the Syrian woman Maysunnah from near death through the power of Christian conversion, while Meredith exposes the treachery and vileness of Havilah's childhood friend Abdoul. Through appeal to Maysunnah's Moslem father, who agrees to his daughter's conversion, Havilah rescues the Eastern woman. Maysunnah is figured as an object of pity; she is “beseeching, pathetic [in her] appeal …, encumbered and oppressed by the richness and weight of her costume,” “diminutive, feeble, and pale,” and “long imprisoned from the light,” in the darkness of the harem (290). Such pitiable representations must have held appeal to popular audiences regardless of whether or not any traveler had actually encountered a pitiable woman from a harem. Missionary reverend Henry Harris Jessup, for instance, titled his book on Arab life The Women of the Arabs. He delighted, among other things, in depicting the physical abuse of Moslem women and describing in detail torturous happenings he could not possibly have seen.¹⁰ Cummins's use of the figure of the abused Moslem woman, coming so close toward the end of the novel, suggests an analogous need to accede to popular representations.

Similarly, the hero is also shown to acquire imperial status. Meredith, who gains moral stature as the novel progresses by saving El Fureidis from destruction by flooding, feels toward the Arabs and all the “errant children of the earth, paupers in all that is wealth and joy to the civilized man,” an appropriate colonial paternalism. The novel ends with the marriage of Havilah and Meredith and with the couple's forgiveness of Abdoul, who forgets his illegitimate desires toward Havilah. The male explorer, transformed by the piety of the mission, unites with the pure (even if somewhat Eastern) missionary, and the specter of racial otherness is rendered harmless. …

Notes

1. Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1969; orig. pub. 1913), 140.

2. Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 11-12.

3. Maria Susanna Cummins, El Fureidis (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 1 (hereafter cited parenthetically in text).

4. Leila Ahmed, “Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem,” Feminist Studies 8 (fall 1982): 524. Male writers wrote about the horrors of lesbianism in harems they had never visited. George Sandys reported, for instance, that “it is not lawful for anyone to bring ought in unto them [harems] with which they may commit the deeds of beastly uncleanliness.” Some writers considered the blight of lesbianism to be spread through Muslim women in general. Robert Withers wrote: “much unnatural and filthy lust is said to be committed daily in remote closets of the darksome baths: yea women with women; a thing incredible.” Both Sandys and Withers are cited in Ahmed, op. cit., 524-25.

5. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Story of Avis, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 142.

6. Phelps, The Story of Avis, 205.

7. Phelps, The Story of Avis, 83.

8. Billie Melman has shown how nineteenth-century British women also desexualized the harem and mapped onto it the middle-class home; see Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918; Sexuality, Religion, and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 101.

9. [Hazel] Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39.

10. The following description of a woman being beaten to death by her husband clearly violates all probability: “One of my Moslem neighbors once beat one of his wives to death. I heard her screams day after day, and finally, one night, when all was still, I heard a dreadful shriek, and blow after blow falling upon her back and head. I could hear the brute cursing her as he beat her. The police would not interfere and I could not enter the house.” (Re. Henry Harris Jessup, The Women of the Arabs [New York: Dodd and Mead, 1873], 9). As a neighbor, Jessup might well have heard screams, but he could not possibly have heard where the blows were falling. His addition of imaginary details to an event that is obviously horrendous suggests not simply concern on the part of the writer but also a vicarious, misogynistic thrill.