![]() Yet such an application takes its cue from the generative interrelationship between Orientalism as an ethnographic practice (“which,” as Edward Said writes, “until the early nineteenth century had really only meant India and the Bible lands” (4)) and Orientalism as the ideological Some might object to applying the term “Orientalism” to a field diverse enough to include not just India and the Levant but geographic and ethnographic outliers-such as Russian or Brazilian artifacts, or Jewish or Scottish characters. More generally, Orientalism hovers over the entire book in the guise of compulsive collection and theft as well as acute anxieties over the integrity of empire and the authenticity of one’s collection of objets. “The Adventure of the Auk’s Egg” exemplifies the Orientalist precept that hegemony does not (always) require positivist veracity, that discursive control need not be rooted in (and sometimes may even be hindered) by objective knowledge of the Other. The acquisitiveness of collecting here enacts Orientalism’s attempt to manage an exotic, destabilizing, sometimes threatening Other.( 1) For the Victorian Orientalist, collecting is about knowing-a purportedly scientific brand of knowledge production that seeks to legitimate cultural appropriation of the Other, typically for less than grandiose purposes such as controlling empire and stabilizing Western self-identity. As a whole, the collection repeatedly interrogates unstable dialectics between the supernatural and the scientific, the bestial and the human, the working and the upper classes, the homoerotic and the homosocial, the other and the self-between possessions and being possessed, between the consumer and what he consumes. ![]() In some of these tales-“The Adventure of the Pipe” and “The Adventure of the Ikon”-collection and coercion delineate Marsh’s persistent anxiety about empire’s control over and recurrent erasure by the nonnormative forces it seeks to harness. The stories in Richard Marsh’s Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898) are framed by the relationship of Pugh and Tress, two life-long friends bonded by a mutual obsession for collecting. Harris, Shippensburg UniversityĪnd Dawn Vernooy, Shippensburg University ![]() Homosocial Possession and Camp Recoding of the Orientalist Object in Richard Marsh By W. ![]()
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