Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures through the Lens of Orientalism: A Critical Analysis
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Abstract
Western literary and academic traditions have long constructed the East through a lens of exoticism and inferiority. Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures exemplifies this orientalist tradition, aligning with Edward Said’s critical framework on how the West imagines the East. While Bell’s work has been studied for its historical and political dimensions, there is limited critical engagement with how her travel writing perpetuates orientalist discourse through metaphor and narrative style. This paper aims to analyze Persian Pictures through intertextual and orientalist lenses, highlighting the literary mechanisms that reinforce Western superiority and Eastern otherness. According to the study, Bell's terminology portrays the East as inherently hostile, socially inactive, and spiritually desolate. In line with Said's idea of the Orient as the inferior "Other," her portrayals focus on dehumanizing imagery, likening nomads to animals and characterizing Eastern landscapes as chaotic and sterile. The analysis shows how Bell's story is enmeshed in a larger Western ideological framework that disguising colonial power as cultural observation by fusing Said's orientalist critique with Julia Kristeva's idea of intertextuality. By revealing how trip writing served as an imperial cultural instrument, this work advances postcolonial literature. It highlights the need to eliminate remaining orientalist constructions in scholarly and literary discourse and promotes a reevaluation of the canonical books that influence East-West interactions.
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