4 - Sir Richard Burton’s Orientalist Erotica: The Thousand Nights and a Night and The Perfumed Garden

Summary

Borges, let us not forget, was born at the height of the age of imperialism, when European colonial possessions covered most of the world. Empires were the realization of European economic and military power, and white men derived from these empires many business and career opportunities. And some other benefits too: colonies also became a sort of global sexual slums in which European men lived their sexuality in ways that, confined by legal, social, and moral norms, they could not at home. The sexual possession of distant lands was in itself a manifestation of the power relations that made empires possible. Several realities and motivations were at work in this phenomenon: in some cases, it was the necessity of the young colonial officials and soldiers who spent long periods of times away from European women and in contact with the native populations; in others, it was simply sexual tourism, as can be glimpsed in the Orientalist travelogues and private correspondence of European men, such as Flaubert. There was a whole Orientalist ideology that justified this domination: the ideology explained not only that European culture was superior (hence the legitimacy of the “civilizing” mission that empires took upon themselves) but also that white men were sexually more powerful than their effeminate Eastern counterparts, which “explained” why native women “welcomed” European men. Sexual imperialism was another facet of European superiority.

But within the imperialist experience and the ideology that justified it, there was a marginal trend and view that, while sharing the racism and social Darwinism of mainstream Orientalism, also differed significantly from it. Some of the colonial officials and/or sexual tourists were also interested in the sexual mores of Eastern peoples and, thus, not only engaged in sex but also undertook comparative research of sexualities. What animated them was both a very critical view of repressive European morality and the Christian religion that sustained it (à la Swinburne) and the belief that the East had not yet been corrupted and weakened by higher degrees of civilization as the Metropolitan societies had. Thus, the East for them was also a repository of less civilized, wiser, and healthier sexualities. The colonized societies also possessed knowledge and wisdom that could be imported to ameliorate the miserable sex life of Victorian Europe.