In his article “The Romantics’ Added Dimension,” Naji B. Oueijan writes that Romantic Orientalism emerged from the Romantic movement’s resistance to neoclassical constraints. He argues that this mode of orientalism emphasizes emotional identification and intimacy. These qualities appear to contrast the bureaucratic rationality of imperial administration, and thus ignore Romantic Orientalism’s capacity to cause harm. Yet, as we can see in the case of Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, two of the most prominent British travel writers of the 20th century, it is precisely these qualities that, when incorporated into imperial structures, become mechanisms for domination. Bell and Stark’s work reveals that Romantic Orientalism’s influence does not stem from insincerity but from its functionality, as its sincerity itself is frequently a means to imperial ends. By adopting Romantic conventions which emphasize identification and intimacy—and are implicitly feminine—British women travel writers enacted a distinctive form of colonial power. This power operates through aestheticization rather than overt force, especially because, as women, they were not expected to express physical dominion over the colonized. Women could not claim mastery as easily as men, but this limitation produced a different yet no less effective mode of imperial authority. Romantic Orientalism furnished formal resources through which women could exercise power while appearing only to appreciate the Orient around them.
Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures is an impassioned series of sketches from her 1892 stay in Persia, chronicling what would turn out to be the start of her prolific life in the Middle East, where she served as a writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist—and became a master of both languages and politics, ultimately being given the title “Queen of the Desert.” Persian Pictures, however, also exemplifies how Romantic Orientalism produces epistemic authority. This text was written before her formal administrative involvement with the British government in Arabia, but still establishes the emotional and aesthetic credibility that later legitimizes her political role. In Tehran, Bell adopts a pastoral gaze that renders the city simultaneously real and (seemingly) unoccupied: “The modern capital of Persia lies in a plain ringed half-way round by mountains…a land of dust and stones—waste and desolate.” The phrase “waste and desolate” conveys not just barrenness but an implicit narrative of incapacity, framing the landscape as lacking vitality and political potential. Bell’s subsequent observation of “a certain fine simplicity” transforms this emptiness into a site of potential order, suggesting that meaning and refinement can only be perceived (and perhaps realized) through her interpretive vision. Bell depicts Persia as “a great room cleared for the reception of some splendid company,” intentionally erasing or refusing to acknowledge its contemporary inhabitants and temporal realities. In the process, Bell frames Persia as a space designed for imperial intervention—an “empty space” upon which Europe can freely exercise its will.
Another important aspect of Bell’s time in the East is how well it oriented her attention to social perception as a tool of the Romantic orientalist line of imperial authority. Upon her first arrival in Iran, she writes in Persian Pictures that:
“There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion…In the East these difficulties are ten times greater…so it was that evening. At first it seemed to us that we were looking upon people plunged into the blackest depths of grief, but presently it dawned upon us that we were grossly exaggerating the value of their tears and groans…seeing this, we were tempted to swing back to the opposite extreme, and to conclude that this show of grief was a mere formality, signifying nothing – a view which was probably as erroneous as the other.”
Bell positions herself as the interpreter not merely of events but of emotional authenticity, claiming authority over how grief is perceived and understood. Her vacillation between extremes constructs a framework in which she alone can calibrate and adjudicate meaning, as she alone describes this moment in the text. This analytical self-positioning establishes Bell’s voice as central, with colonized subjects functioning as interpretable, readable objects rather than autonomous agents. Her sensitivity, which plays on Romantic notions of emotional knowing and positions herself as an authority regarding the meaning ascribed to the East, is thus transformed into a mechanism of governance where emotional fluency implicitly becomes political leverage.
Freya Stark, who was, like Bell, a successful female travel writer in the Middle East, operated through a different but complementary mode, in which she shapes perception of the East back home. Unlike Bell, she was never a direct colonial administrator for any European nation, and she instead took to the Middle East after intensive study of Arabic and Persian in London. Her time in the Middle East was spent travelling, writing, and running from job to job. In fact, Stark stands in sharp contrast to Bell, as she more frequently engaged with natives on more equal terms—or at least, appeared to, in comparison to Bell’s explicit involvement in the political and archaeological machinations of the British Empire in the Middle East. There have been whispers regarding Stark’s potential involvement with European governments as a spy, but instead, her power and role in the imperial system largely lay in the circulation and reach of her work, which became some of the most popular travel writing of her day. At the time, her writing naturalized British presence through its fascination and detailing of aestheticized encounters with the people of the Near East. For example, in Letters from Syria, she observes:
“The whole place is a most amusing mixture of Europe smeared thin on a whole depth of primitive life below. Even the landscape is like this with the perfect barbaric glory of its sunsets and its grand lines not laid out for peaceful friendly life, and then the neat villages built as tidily as toys. And you admire the little square houses and ask why so many of them are allowed to stand roofless and windowless, and are told that these belonged to people who died of hunger during the war.”
Stark’s language juxtaposes “perfect barbaric glory” with orderly European-style villages, aestheticizing poverty and social suffering. She diminishes local agency within local spaces, compressing complex social realities into readable surfaces for the gaze of Stark’s Western audience. The “roofless and windowless” houses, attributed to famine, are still described as picturesque, turning suffering into a form of narrative texture rather than a moral catastrophe with urgency. Romantic Orientalism permits Stark to maintain a fascination with the exotic while codifying social hierarchies between the East and West. Her aesthetic sensibilities naturalize inequality and reinforce imperial power through perception, rather than making appeals toward administrative action.
A later episode in which she describes her encounter with local men in a house in Damascus provides an even clearer illustration of this form of aestheticized domination, which haunts Stark’s interactions with the East. Upon stumbling into a secret bathhouse in which Syrian men surround her, Stark photographs them while simultaneously rejecting their invitation for her to join them — later declaring that she is thankful there was an easy route of escape, implying them to be predatory. Even in her description of the image-making process itself, the crowd is described as “villainous”, the space itself “empty” yet awaiting European documentation (Stark, 76), as if the place does not truly exist until it has been documented by outsiders—more specifically, by colonists. Stark’s technical focus and cultivated detachment establish an asymmetrical agency in which she observes and frames the colonized subject. Her cultivated apolitical literary persona, resultant of both the public perception of women’s travel writing and her own public distance from colonial administrators, enables imperial ideology to circulate under the guise of casual observation, demonstrating how gendered expectations around women’s writing—namely that it remain nonviolent, passive, and descriptive—can be mobilized to reinforce hegemonic power. Together, Bell and Stark illuminate complementary modes of imperial authority. Where Bell’s work helps to establish coercive norms of governance, Stark manufactures consent more implicitly through media-based aestheticization—as her work’s popularity shapes common Western understandings of the East by creating aesthetic familiarity at the cost of natives’ own humanity. However, their shared reliance on Romantic orientalism is still linked to the political function of literary form where aesthetic sensitivity and emotional engagement operate, not in opposition to domination, but rather as mechanisms of its reproduction.
These mechanisms cannot solely be combatted through “exposing” their nefarious ends, intentional or not, but rather through paying attention to form itself. It demands attention to literary forms used by authors and institutions themselves. In line with this concept, Romantic orientalism organizes perception so that domination appears aesthetically legible and politically invisible. Craft naturalizes colonial inequality at the level of syntax, affect, and narrative authority, ensuring that imperial violence is seen as understanding rather than coercion in the eyes of many.
Thus, if one reads Bell’s “fine simplicity of death” or Stark’s bathhouse episode as merely a flawed representation, which failed to live up to the ideals of Romantic Orientalism, they would miss how successfully Craft functions within them. In both women’s texts, Romantic conventions produce truth-effects that ensure the Western observer is positioned as the sole bearer of interiority, reducing colonized peoples to atmospheric presence. The political work of Empire operates beneath the surface of this description, embedded in pronominal economies and affective alignments that center the traveler’s consciousness. One realizes that Craft cannot be reformed from within, but that instead readers must read against the grain, against convention, and against inherited literary conventions to expose how form renders colonial violence unimagined and unprobed. Bell and Stark do actively reproduce colonial power by making the empire they belong to appear humane and inevitable in their depictions of it in relation to the colonized East. Their kind of writing demonstrates that Empire operates most efficiently when it does not announce itself as a power at all. Ultimately, writing imbued with emotional knowing of the Colonized other is not a counterweight to colonial violence. Instead, it frequently is or becomes a reliable vehicle for it. Bell and Stark’s approaches to travel writing show that traits socially coded as feminine, such as passivity and emotional sensitivity, can still serve as tools of dominance rather than resistance under the corrosive force of Empire. As such, their work complicates conventional assessments of women’s writing as feminist and postcolonial approaches frequently elevate women’s subjectivity as intrinsically subversive. While acknowledging these two women’s imperial contributions does not diminish their literary or intellectual achievements, it does, or at least should, change the way we think about agency, as influence does not always translate into emancipation, and moral intent does not ensure that structural power will be disrupted. In other words, even though it seems revelatory, women’s authorship during this time can reinforce inequalities in the colonial paradigm.
As a result, decolonial criticism, then, must grapple with form as well as content. Craft offers a methodology for exposing domination embedded in literary techniques, narrative voice, and stylistic choices, which are elements that traditional historical or moral critique might overlook. Bell and Stark both show us that Empire can never be boxed into one form of coercion as it relies as much on persuasion as it does on force, and understanding these dynamics allows for a more sophisticated critique of colonial literature, one that engages with power on structural terms and not just moral ones. Perhaps then, our histories and collective imagination of the Middle East may come to understand it on its own terms, rather than as a simple tool for aesthetic cultivation.
Ayanna Uppal is a contributing writer for the Nassau Weekly.