The Origins of the Damask Rose 

An advertisement for Damask rose perfume at the end of book six of Middlemarch may seem inauspicious, however, the history of the Damask rose adds an integral layer to the reading of the novel in the context of imperialism and colonialism. The origins of the Damask rose (scientific name: rosa damascena) are unclear and widely debated. Some sources claim that it originated in Damascus, Syria (its namesake) and was brought to Europe as a result of the Crusades; other sources claim that it was brought to England from Damascus by the Romans (Labban et al 33). Others claim that the rose is native to Iran, since it is a hybrid rose that was bred from parent roses: rosa gallica, rosa moschata, and rosa fedtschenkoana, all of which can be found in Iran (Harkness 120). Some sources even dispute this parentage and claim that the rosa phoenicia was a parent rose (Dugan 47). The Damask rose was widely used in perfumes due to its sweet scent. Therefore, regardless of its origins, the Damask rose quickly became “conflated with English roses, English pleasure gardens and English perfumes…” partially since the canker rose, which is native to England, is scentless (Dugan 47). Furthermore, not only did the Damask rose embody the iconographic role of an English identity, it also began to be adopted into English literature. In Shakespeare’s sonnet 54, the speaker marvels at the scent of a rose and “wonders how olfaction intensifies visual aesthetic pleasure in beauty, metaphorically linking rose perfume with a lover’s essence.” (Dugan 47). As a result, the Damask rose became the most common rose all over Europe and England, and thus replaced native English roses in its physical and metaphorical roles—the question of its Middle Eastern origins soon forgotten.

         Throughout the novel, Eliot makes several references to roses when describing some of her female characters—namely Dorothea and Mary. In Dorothea’s case, the roses are referred to in the context of Doroethea’s boudoir in Lowick manor as part of the description of the evening rather than in her description: “the evening laden with roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoir where Dorothea chose oftenest to sit” (Eliot 430). Dorothea’s beauty is not directly being compared to roses, yet the mere suggestion of roses in her favourite room immediately draws connections between the icon of the rose and her beauty. Similarly, in Mary’s case, the roses are passive participants in her act of picking them in the garden, yet it is her physical adjacence to the roses that creates a romantic image of the epithet of an English rose in a rose garden which is in turn associated with the image of Mary picking roses in her own garden (Eliot 415). Therefore, though Eliot does not explicitly draw comparisons between the beauty of her female characters and roses, those connections are implicitly made regardless simply because of the suggestion of a nearby rose. The strength and permanence of the Damask rose as an iconographic image is wildly dichotomous with its imperialistic and colonial origins. Therefore, despite the fact that the Damask rose has become deeply ingrained in English culture, its foreign origins constantly undermine its ‘Englishness’. Resultingly, no matter how implicit and indirect, Eliot’s imagery using the Damask rose is underlined by its colonial origins. The erasure of the origins of the Damask rose despite its iconographic importance in English culture symbolizes the erasure of colonial influences on both Victorian literature and culture. This erasure is exacerbated by the personal accounts based on the intellectual ‘expertise’ of historians like Besant, Palmer, Zincke, and Palgrave, which ultimately translate onto even our fictional Casaubon.

Jerusalem As Told by Besant and Palmer 

Walter Besant’s and Edward Henry Palmer’s book Jerusalem: The City of Herod and Saladin is advertised in book one of Middlemarch titled “Miss Brooke.” The book, like Middlemarch, was also published in 1871. Besant was a British novelist while Palmer was a British linguist and Cambridge University’s professor of Arabic from 1871-81. Their book explores the history of Jerusalem, focusing particularly on the events preceding and following the Islamic conquest of the city. In the Preface to the book, Besant explains that the source material used to write the book consisted of both Latin chronicles of the Crusades as well as material from Arab historians. He also states that because of this unique pool of source material, the information provided in the book “has the great advantage of being entirely new, and now for the first time introduced to English readers” (Besant et al 7). Furthermore, the authors attempt to portray this provision of information as empirical and objective with no attempt to reconcile “discrepancies in the narrative” whilst simultaneously making biased observations such as “The Christians in the East were as the Christians in the West, certainly never better, more often worse” all before the first chapter begins (Besant et al 7). Interestingly, however, when describing conflicts in the history of Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims, a bias towards the Christians is shown, thus establishing a clear hierarchy leaving Muslims at the bottom. This bias against Muslims can be seen throughout the book, especially in the selection of verbs in the sections about Saladin where he is said to be “ravaging the country of the Crusaders” on his way to Damascus and “harass[ing]…neighborhoods…causing much loss to the Christians” (Besant et al 190).

Prejudice against Muslims in Jerusalem is then further solidified in the authors’ portrayal of modern Jerusalem in the final chapter and its natives: “They are, for the most part, Orientals of the conventional type, leading lazy, useless lives, and dividing their time between smoking, praying, bargaining, and cursing” (Besant et al 241). Meanwhile, the Christian natives are:

“…a fine athletic race, much fairer than the Muslim peasantry, and exhibiting unmistakable traces of an admixture of European blood, dating back, no doubt, from the Crusading times. The women are sometimes exceedingly pretty, and their costume very picturesque…They do a large trade in rosaries…and olive wood fancy articles, and are a quiet and industrious people” (Besant et al 241).

This lengthy praise of the Christian natives as opposed to the brief account of the Muslim natives highlights the authors’ favouritism towards the Christians as they consistently paint them in a more favourable light within their personal observations. It is this skewed, hostile view of Muslims in particular that rationalized the colonization of Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries and effectively silenced Muslim voices while erasing their history.

Egypt As Told by Zincke 

Much like the previous advertisement of the book on Jerusalem, Foster Barham Zincke’s book Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedive was advertised in book one of Middlemarch. Foster Barham Zincke was a traveller born in Jamaica. He visited Egypt in 1871 and in 1873 he published this book on the history of Egypt. Unlike Besant and Palmers’ book, however, Zincke’s is much more expansive. His book covers the history of Egypt from before the time of the ancient pyramids until ‘modern’ Egypt of his time. The book’s most prominent similarity with Besant and Palmers’ book is its description of the natives or “Orientals”. In a chapter entitled “Are all Orientals Mad?”, Zincke analyzes the psyche of the Egyptian natives and declares that they are all mad in some way due to the fact that “their way of looking at, and estimating things, and feeling about them, is different from ours” (Zincke 341). He then goes on to describe the differences between his religion (Christianity) and the native religion (Islam): namely that Christianity operates on liberty in that it liberates its believers by allowing them to “construct their own theology”, while Islam is the exact opposite as it traps its believers by forcing them to conform to “the ideas of the Arab barbarians of twelve centuries ago” (Zincke 342). Moreover, he observes the intelligence of the natives, stating that “They never think” and that: “There is in them a softness of expression which could not co-exist with activity, and firmness, and largeness of brain. Child-like, they believe anything and everything…this is not the stuff that makes men…” (Zincke 343). Finally, he concludes the chapter by expressing his surprise at the early age of maturity in children (around 11), and rather than consider that perhaps these children mature faster than children in the West, he assumes that their “mental culture and growth end[s] at that age” thus dooming them to a life of ignorance (Zincke 343). Zincke’s take on this aspect of Egyptian culture is also an act of erasure as he offers a superficial judgement rather than immersing himself in the culture and the people before arriving at an educated conclusion.

         In a previous chapter entitled “Caste”, Zincke explains the stratification of Egyptian native society, focusing primarily on slavery:

“But the most widely spread form of the institution was that which now appears to us the most hideous of all human institutions, that of slavery…They appear to belong to early and transitional stages of society, and not, if there be, or ever is to be, such a state, to its maturity.” (Zincke 333-4).

The fact that this book was published in 1873, only eight years after slavery was abolished in 1865, makes these particular claims beyond comical. His attempt to paint an image of a savage Egyptian society that is centuries behind a more sophisticated, more superior Western society, when really the difference in this case is merely eight years, tears a gaping hole of elephantine proportions in his depiction of the country and its people. Unfortunately, it is this depiction and others like it that shaped public perceptions of the Middle East.

Palgrave's Western Middle East 

Unlike the two previous books, Hermann Agha: An Eastern Narrative by Gifford Palgrave is not a history book, it is a novel. This book was advertised in book three of Middlemarch. Palgrave was an English traveller and Arabist (much like E. H. Palmer and F. B. Zincke) who became a spy for Napoleon III and was sent to Syria to travel across Arabia and learn all that he could about it in order to aid France’s imperialistic plans for the Middle East. He posed as a Syrian physician and after completing his travels, he published the details of his journey in the narrative form (Freeth et al 210). In the preface to his novel Hermann Agha: An Eastern Narrative, Palgrave criticizes previous literature on the East and claims to portray the East more accurately and legibly. He states that this legibility will be attributed to “the light thrown by the reflex or subjective European intellect on the more spontaneous and objective ways and habits of Asia” (Palgrave iv). The main character of this narrative, Hermann Agha or Hermann Wolff is a European, originally from Romania; he was kidnapped to be a slave by Turkish marauders and somehow became “an officer of high trust” as an adult. His inclusion in the narrative serves as the physical manifestation of the Western lens through which the East is explored (Palgrave v).

         The form of the text being a narrative allows for greater accessibility in terms of readership since a novel is easier to read and less dense than historical texts. Moreover, the fact that Palgrave spoke Arabic and lived amongst Arabs for almost two years gives him credibility as an author and makes him more qualified to make observations on the Arabs as he lived amongst them. As a result, his account of the Arabs and Arabia as a whole is much more forgiving, and more indulgent in the customs and culture of the Arabs, especially the Muslims. It is difficult to predict the influence this novel had on public perceptions of the Middle East; however, it may be safe to assume that due to the extreme popularity of his earlier books when published, his accounts of the Middle East as an exotic, strange yet curious place were likely to be quite influential. While comparatively speaking, his account of the Middle East is not as harmful as the works of Besant, Palmer, and Zincke, it is easy to identify the seeds of Edward Said’s Orientalism being planted in this novel through the way it contributes to harmful stereotypes of the Middle East as a place of oppressive wealth. Moreover, the narrative form contributes to the erasure of Middle Eastern culture as the illusion Palgrave creates in his story substitutes real facts about what the Middle East was actually like at the time. Therefore, the more Palgrave Westernizes and Orientalizes his story, the more Middle Eastern culture is erased.