Tracing stereotypical patterns in the perception of foreign otherness: the poetic representation of the Portuguese other in some Victorian poems

Abstract

The global circulation of people, commodities and ideas that occurred in the nineteenth century – through travel, settlement and empire – created certain cultural patterns connected with nation and identity that would lead, in turn, to the formation of several racial and national stereotypes. Literally ‘a picture in our head’ (Lippmann, 1922), a stereotype is a change-resistant generalization about a group of people, regardless of variation among its members (Aronson, 2005); even if frequently negative or prejudiced, stereotypes are still fundamental human patterns, providing formulaic communication aids (Beller, 2007) when dealing with difference or the Other. For this reason, the ‘foreign’ has become a cultural trope or fiction – as a figure of ‘otherness’, he could be turned either into an ‘inferior race’ or a ‘noble savage’, through utilitarian or exoticizing discourses (Kohl, 1986). Like other societies or periods, the Victorians generated their own specific figures of the foreign, according to their perceptions, constructions and articulations; consequently, repressed desires and apprehensions, fantasies and idealizations were thus projected upon foreign peoples (Erdheim, 1988). The strong affirmation of Englishness as a prevailing self-image in the period, through Anglo-Saxon revivalism, Protestant individualism and colonial domination, invited extensive comparison with Continental Europe and, in particular, with Southern Catholic countries and their peoples – resulting in a mixture of fascination and disgust. This paper suggests that, in the more specific context of the English poetry of the period (from Hemans to the Brownings, including Tonna and the Brontës), the Portuguese emerge mostly as passive victims of history, prisoners of their past, dreamy and effeminate (as opposed to their counterparts, the Spaniards, who tend to be viewed in more masculine terms), constructing a discursive and poetic tradition which thematised Portugal either as backward or else as a terrestrial paradise.