Paul Willocx, a member of the Brussels Brontë Group and graduate in Arabic and Islamic studies, took us on a very interesting literary journey, from Persia and Iran to the libraries and theatres of 19th-century Europe. His talk on Saturday, Feb. 7, focused on the influence of Middle Eastern writings on Western literature, including of course the Brontës.
After a brief introduction (impressively also in Arabic!) by Pauline Ghyselen, Paul explained how the One Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights) could be found in virtually every 19th-century library or bookcase, so it is no wonder that the Brontës would have been exposed to the stories at a young age.
The first version of Elf Leyla wa Leyla was in fact in Persian, with the earliest Arabic version appearing in the ninth century under the rule of Caliph Harun al Rashid. This means that calling the tales The Arabian Nights is not quite correct, but this is indeed how many people are familiar with it in the West. There is no single original version – some versions include certain stories that aren’t included in other versions. The translators make their own choices. All of the stories are rich in poetry.
The Arabian Nights is bigger and more influential in the West than in the Arab world, where it is not considered a classic or a very important work. However, for Charlotte Brontë and her contemporaries, it was very influential indeed.
The frame story to the tales goes something like this: Due to his wife’s infidelity, King Shahriyar bitterly decides to marry a succession of women and then kill them the morning after the wedding night. One such chosen bride, Scheherazade (or Shahrazad), gets her little sister to ask her to tell a story before bedtime, making sure not to give the ending that night. The King, wanting to hear the end of the tale, puts off her execution until the next day, when she again starts a new, unfinished story. This goes on for 1,001 nights, and sees the birth of a number of children; at that point the King decides to give up the plan to kill his wife.
In 1704 we see the first complete translation of the tales from Arabic into French by Antoine Galland. The first English translation directly from Arabic was published in the 1840s, however there had been numerous versions translated from Galland’s French text circulating in the meantime. Richard Burton’s famous edition was later published in the 1880s.
These are some of the Western works influenced by the Tales: Montesquieu – Lettres Persanes (1721); Voltaire – Zadig (1747); Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – Turkish Embassy Letters (written c. 1718, published 1763), which gives a fascinating glimpse into life in Ottoman Turkey through the eyes of the British Ambassador’s wife in the early 18th century; James Ridley – Tales of the Genii (1764) – definitely read by the Brontës; William Beckford – Vathek (1786) – medieval gothic; Robert Southey – Thalaba the Destroyer (1801); Thomas Moore – Lalla Rookh (1817) – quoted in Jane Eyre and Villette, mentioned in Trollope’s Doctor Thorne; Edgar Allan Poe – The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade (1844) – not one of his greatest works. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, there is also a reference to the story of Prince Camaralzaman (Qamar al-Zaman) and Princess Badoura.
Interestingly, tales popular and well-known in the West, such as Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin and the Lamp and Sinbad the Sailor, only appear in the first French translation in the early 18th century. One explanation for this could be that they had been handed down orally. The 19th century saw many of these stories turned into plays, which proved very popular.
Influences on the Brontës’ work
James Ridley’s Tales of the Genii (1764) was definitely read by the young Brontës and had an influence on the juvenilia. In the Glasstown stories, they included versions of themselves as genii – Brannii, Tallii, Emmii and Annii – with Charlotte, for reasons unknown to us now, called Tallii. Anne’s Alexander and Zenobia (Gondal) (1838) and Charlotte’s The Foundling (Angria) include other references to the Nights. Notably, Queen Zenobia was a third-century Roman ruler of Syria and the namesake of Lady Hester Stanhope, the eccentric unmarried niece of William Pitt who moved to the Middle East in the early 19th century, settling in Lebanon, and who was a pioneer in archaeology and known as “Queen Zenobia.” In 1826, John Carne, who was a distant relative of the Brontës, described her in a book of his travels, so this may have been a source for the Brontë children.
Paul wrapped up his talk by outlining some of the influences of the Arabian tales on the Charlotte’s later works. In Chapter 24 of Jane Eyre, Rochester claims: “I would not exchange this one little English girl for the grand Turk's whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!” And his horse, Mesrour, is possibly named after Caliph Harun al-Rashid’s bodyguard. Another example is Blanche Ingram expressing interest in corsairs, saying that she “dotes” on them (chapter 17). In Villette, Lucy Snowe, recovering from her fainting episode in chapter 16, compares herself to Bedreddin Hassan transported in his sleep from Cairo to Damascus by a genie.
Georgette Cutajar
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