The Representation of the East in Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo

The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable rise in Europe’s interest in the East. The reading of the recently translated stories of The Arabian Nights and other Oriental tales as well as the allegedly true journals and memoirs of numerous travelers to the East created a picture of the Orient in the minds of the Western people which was at once barbarous and glamorous. On the one hand, Europeans did not harbor the slightest doubt about the cultural backwardness and inferiority of the Oriental natives; on the other hand, they envied those natives’ affirmation of life, i.e. their hearty acceptance of life and taking the maximum possible pleasure out of it. This ambivalent attitude toward the East is one of the salient features of a major corpus of the literary works written by Europeans in the nineteenth century. Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo is one of these works. Dumas, in this novel, has exhibited a profound infatuation with the exotic East for the sundry pleasures it offers and the adventurous way of life it promises. At the same time, with his many references to the cruelty, superstitiousness, imbecility, and natural servility of Oriental subjects, he has demonstrated his contempt for the backward East and tacitly justified the colonialist attitude adopted by the West toward it. The present study deals with the analysis of these two versions of the East in the aforementioned novel based on the views of postcolonial critics.

Keywords:

representation , East , Orientalism , Alexandre Dumas , The Count of Monte Cristo