orienting spectacle: the politics of 'Orlando's' sapphic camp - Dis

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1998 by D.A. Boxwell

Sackville-West, too, found the orient as a place for Western women's empowerment through abundant possibilities for masquerade and cross-dressing. Indeed, there is no better articulation of her sense of the orient's carnivalesque possibilities than in a sketch she wrote for the British edition of Vogue in June 1926, and which was interpolated as the coda, in Passenger to Teheran, to her account of the ritual festivities attending the coronation of the shah. Again, there is little question that Woolf, as her publisher, read Sackville-West's admiring account of the legendary Madame Jane Dieulafoy's presentation to the court of the Shah Nasr-ed-Din in 1881. The wife of an eminent orientalist, Madame Dieulafoy accompanied her husband to Persia by way of Constantinople, a place that Sackville-West camped up for her Vogue readers' expectations:

When she reached Constantinople her enthusiasm overflowed. Here were no trains (or at least not visible), no smoke, no coal, only slim caiques flying like arrows over the peaceful waters. The Dieulafoys stayed in Constantinople for a fortnight. They saw the Sultan, howled with the howling dervishes, gyrated with the dancing dervishes, ate kebabs and cheese pastry, explored the bazaars... (77)

What is truly remarkable about this essay is its association of the orient with gender transgression and transitivity for the "indomitable" Madame Dieulafoy, who has to command her husband's expedition when he falls ill, bravely running a gauntlet of Kurdish brigands (77). Eventually reaching Teheran, she astonishes the shah by her appearance a travesti:

"What," said the Shah, "is that boy a woman?" On being assured that it was so he addressed Jane in French. Why, he enquired, was she not dressed in the long skirts and garments of European ladies? Jane replied that she found man's dress more convenient, and that a European woman travelling in Mahommedan countries was too much exposed to an inconvenient curiosity. (77)

The implication of the sexual threat posed by the darker-skinned native male seems clear, but the tale of Jane Dieulafoy has a closing twist (a la Balzac's "Sarrasine") as Sackville-West relates to the reader the words of a French acquaintance:

"Yes," the voice was saying reminiscently, "I remember that as a child in Paris I was once allowed to be present at an evening party. My father, holding me by the hand, told me to look at the person who had just come into the room. I looked and saw a little grizzled old gentleman, in a smoking-jacket, with the Legion of Honour in his button-hole. "That," said my father, "is Madame Dieulafoy." (Passenger 142)

I suspect that this is, in part at least, a fabrication on Sackville-West's part. All the better, since what is germane to my argument is the way in which gender destabilization is put in play as a result of projecting the orient in a particular way: namely, a boundless space empowering the European woman to act out the fantasy of ambisexuality. To echo Marjorie Garber's pun, Sackville-West's 1920s literary production is suffused with the "chic of Araby" (321). "Madame Dieulafoy" is both a social critique of the fixed sex/gender hierarchies that Sackville-West resisted and attempted to subvert, and a camp artifact that revels in its cultural authority to inscribe a particularly fantastic conception of the orient. Also remarkable is the way Sackville-West embedded the piece from Vogue in Passenger to Teheran, at the conclusion of her account of the carnivalesque festivities of the shah's coronation.