Toward a Corporeal Orientalism: Foregrounding Arabian Erotic Figures in Algernon Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley

Chapter 2 investigates the corporeal Orientalism envisioned by Swinburne and Beardsley, two Pre-Raphaelite sympathisers who envisioned the East as a sexual dimension inhabited by Oriental female figures such as Scheherazade, Dunyazad, Salome and Bersabe – namely, hur al-ayn – evoking the sensual and pornographic content of the Arabian Nights. Both Swinburne and Beardsley exalted Sir Richard F. Burton and his uncensored translation of the Arabian Nights, which aimed to reveal the erotic customs of the Muslims. On the one hand, Swinburne’s cognitive grammar reveals the use of binary world-builders (West and East) attesting to the superiority of the East, as exemplified by his poems dedicated to Burton and The Masque of Queen Bersabe. On the other hand, Beardsley’s conceptual metaphor East is sexual freedom is projected on to his grotesque pen-and-ink illustrations of Salome and Ali Baba and on to his Oriental poems (‘The Ballad of a Barber’ (1896) and Under the Hill) by blending together the sacred and the profane, the Middle East and the Far East. His radical mode of repatterning old Oriental schemas into new ones is aimed at desacralising the Orient and, in a way, at (de)Orientalising Western and Eastern schemas.