Mapping Arabs and Their Culture in Gertrude Bell’s Syria: The Desert and the Sown

Resumo

This article fleshes out the representation of Arabs and their culture in Gertrude Bell’s Syria: The Desert and the Sown (1907). Even though this travel book has already been examined, the nuanced ways in which Bell employs the narrative space to express her views and her varied responses to the different customs and manners she encounters during her travels have not been thoroughly explored. We argue that Bell’s uncertain subject position while travelling in Syria has offered her a productive third space where she provides a multilayered mapping of the cultural differences she has encountered. The findings suggest that there are times when Bell’s representation of difference is fed by and feeds into the Orientalist paradigm of her time. Yet, there are other times when she throws doubt on and even refutes Western hierarchical evaluative standards regarding the other. Syria presents a narrative rich in its various and at times opposing voices embodied in the forms of self-exoticism, self-reflection and self-fashioning.