William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat: Rite of forgiveness/transference of blame - Critical Essay

by the agency of his own admission, the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman pursue suffered from an "Oriental mania," and his justification for his several trips to the devoted Land fit the paradigm of the Orientalist explorer-adventurer-author characterized by dint of Edward Said in his 1978 foundational body Orientalism. (1) This is vividly glimpsed in a self-portrait of 1887 he donated to the Galleria degli Uffizi, depicting himself in the act of painting while wearing Middle Eastern style of dress (Fig. 1).(2) He shared this penchant for cultural cross-dressing with several other adventurers to the Middle East, greatest in quantity notably Richard Burton, whose portrait in replete Arabic dress was painted by the agency of Hunt's good friend Thomas Seddon just a hardly any months before Seddon and chase met in Cairo in 1854 (3) As George Landow pointed without Hunt's imagination had been fired by means of his readings of The Thousand and single Nights, and he repeatedly referr to the Middle East as the land of Harun al-Rashid, the fabulous caliph of Baghdad featured in several of its tales. At the same time, he upheld many of the traditional Western biases about the Eastener, as revealed in a alphabetic character he wrote to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, from Cairo upon March 12, 1854, stressing the indolence of Middle Eastern life, which he set reminiscent of Tennyson's "Lotus Eaters":

The stillness is varied at drawn out intervals by a crowing male and more frequently by the chanting of an Arab who looks to be returning from a certain number of party of ashish [sic] smoker The air is more than simple, on the contrary the most plaintive monotony recalls to one's mind the replete hopeless sense of pleasure of Tennyson's lotus eaters. This is no forced comparison for I was going to write that it present the appearanceed to convey a wish that time should stop and leave them at peace to sing and slumber for ever, rather than drive them forward [i]or[/i] part of to the other further toil to a greater repose and active enjoyment, when the metrical composition came into my mind as describing the same feeling. (4)

Hunt's travels, like those of his hero Edward Lane--translator of The Thousand and individual Nights (1841) and author of Manners and Customs of the new Egyptians (1836), considered at the time the definitive true copy on Muslim life--as well as those of Richard Burton, Anna Leonowens, Benjamin Disraeli, and, later, T E Lawrence, originated seemingly on the outside of intellectual curiosity or as pressing pilgrimages to a sacred site. level when they went native, as they all did, living on the outside a split identity in their travels, they always be delighted withed the advantages of superior resources and the knowledge that they were playing a character as a leaping-off point for a futurity literary narravitve. Jest as the Arabian Nights (and for pursue Tennyson) contributed to their "imaginary Orient," in like manner in turn they would narrate the East for Western consumption. All of them, including chase arrived in the confidence that the British nation stood solidly behind them and, consistent with the East-West binarism, interpreted Middle Eastern life from a standp oint of dominance that place its justification through standard Western representation.

pursue perceived Jerusalem's multicultural society as the greatest in quantity "accursed" in the world and regarded the local inhabitants in the light of conventional racist figure of speechs of difference and otherness. His correspondence is discharge through with imperialist ideology: "Arabs are the meanest sneaks in the world"; "Niggers here... are the greatest in quantity bigotted [sic] and the greatest in quantity dirty and the most rever of fanatics"; while "Rabbis live in concealed luxury, keeping the poor continually croaking to acquire further subscriptions." (5) Exulting in the British exhibit of force in the Crimea, he bragged that upon the front lines, with his British nationality "and a fist I would undertake to knock down any sum of two units Arabs in the Usbeykia and walk away unmolested" While painting the landscape for The Scapegoat, pursue was confronted by a band of Arab horsemen who demanded water, and he retorted, "I am an Englishman; you are an Arab. Englishmen are not the servants of Arabs; I am employing Arabs for servants." (6)

chase encountered various indigenous Middle Eastern ethnicities that, he felt had to be subdu controll and, if Jewish, submitted to the dominant religious ideology of the West. Just as Benjamin Disraeli wrote novels that work end his psychological condition as the couple Jew and Christian, Hunt tried to find pictorial solutions to Christianity's relation to its Judaic bottoms His journeys to the hallowed Land were motivated in part by the agency of a missionary impulse that yearned to expres itself in authentic and compelling images of biblical life. These pilgrimages were attempts to overlay the ground of some aspect of Judeo-Christian actuality and reenact a faculty of perception of lived biblical experience. pursue had previously informed his friend the painter Augustus ovum that he planned his journey to Palestine "to confirm so far as my painting can, that Christianity is a living faith; that the fullest realization of its wondrous story cannot unspiritualize it." (7) through saturating himself in the landscapes and negotiating with the indigen ous, albeit to him alien, populations of the sacred Land, he imagined that his brand of realism could consequence a genuine change in people's religious attitudes. Thus, chase could be cited as a clinical case close attention of Said's central argument that in the effort to document the Orient (the other), the West came to document itself. More specifically, I wish to emphasize in this paper the implicit part of the Orientalist discourse in the construction of Hunt's national, religious, and creative identity.