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Gertrude Bell 's Persian Pictures : A Study Of The Landscape

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Hassan Al-Kalo
Student No. 201209804
Module No. 14124

Oriental Eyes in Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures: A study of the Landscape This essay is an attempt to investigate how the Eastern landscape has been othered by the West through inspecting Gertrude Bell’s travel book Persian Pictures (1894). The essay adopts Edwa rd Said’s concept of Orientalism to highlight the western ideology of othering the foreign landscape. The crux of ‘Orientalism’, being the vehicle of studying the colonial conflicts and the cultural hegemony, demarcates the European’s map road of dealing with the Other. It is one-sided ideology that reflects the Westerners’ views of the Orient as they have imagined it to be. I aim in this essay to scrutinise Bells’ narration of using the male voice in tackling the landscape in the texts under investigation. The abundant reports, literary narratives, and the variety of representations of the early travellers, present the Orient as strange, eccentric, savage, hostile, irrational, exotic, and mysterious, that has unresolved secrets, alien creatures, sensational women, monstrous and beast-like people. Said claims that it is sufficient for ‘us’ [Orientalists] to ‘set up these boundaries in our minds’, and ‘both the Other’s territory and their mentality’ have been ‘designated as different from “ours”’ (Said, 2003: 54). The essence of Orientalism in its true form, is to define the non-European and his landscape as the Other. This process could only be

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