Jean-Leon Gerome, The Snake Charmer, oil on canvas, 33 x 48 inches, 1879
After reading Said, what are some of the specific parts of Gerome’s The Snake Charmer that you might call “orientalist”? What sort of depiction of life in the near east does it offer?
At first glance, I completely agree with the idea that this painting depicts the Oriental world as something that it is not (or at least not completely). Agreeing with Dylan, the painting shows the form of entertainment to be “primitive and inferior” to the American/European world.
As I looked at the painting more though, I came to a possible interpretation of the painting. It is notable that the audience cannot actually see the performance since we are watching from behind. On the other hand, the Oriental crowd of onlookers can truly enjoy their own culture. In this sense, the audience represents the Occidental attempting to capture the true essence of Oriental culture. But it is impossible because the Occident is NOT part of the Orient itself (the vantage point of the audience can be representative of the Occident’s vantage point on Oriental culture, whereas the onlookers in the painting represent the Orient’s own people). This can be seen to support Said’s idea that Orientalism is based off altered and skewed interpretations of true Oriental lifestyle. It is not possible to appreciate and enjoy another’s culture without actually being a part of it.
Said’s third definition of Orientalism as a “ Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” is well represented in Gerome’s “The Snake Charmer”. Like Colleen previously mentioned, the naked boy elicits a pre-civilized and exotic understanding of Eastern spirituality and culture that—in the eyes of a western audience—comes across as primitive and inferior to western conceptions of religion and social normality. Further, Gerome’s decision to depict the men in the background holding spears has a subtle, but certainly present, political undertone, which is that the Orient is dangerous and aggressive, perhaps even a threat to western life. Much like Said suggests in the introduction to Orientalism, Gerome’s painting, clouded by political and cultural bias, depicts an idea of the Orient that fails to capture the full reality of Eastern life.
After reading Said, the orientalist characteristics of Gerome’s “The Snake Charmer” were brought to my previously uninformed eye. According to Said, the West has developed a split between the reality of the East and the romanticized abstract concept of the Orient. He describes Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western Experience.” He believes that Orientalism is a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” In Gerome’s “The Snake Charmer,” a young child is depicted in nude, with only a large, exquisitely patterned snake wrapped around his torso. There is a crowd of men clothed in what the Europeans presumably pictured Oriental men’s garb to be. There is ornate patterns and designs on the wall, all in foreign symbols that play up the exoticism of the scene. The rug upon which the young child stands is a typical depiction of an Oriental rug, still similar to the rugs produced under that category today. The painting depicts life in the East as exotic, wild, and extremely different in both the lifestyles and social structures of the West.