바이런과 이슬람 : “동양의 이야기” 연구, 타자 재현의 담론

Byron and Islam: A Study of "Oriental Tales", Discourse of Representation of the Other―Focusing on The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos

This article aims to interpret the representation of the Other in The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos, which provide rich elements with Islamic society and cultures. “Giaour” is the Turkish word for an infidel, who are no Muslims, with particular reference to Christians. The title role, Giaour, is a Western man coming to the East and destroying its order by causing Leila’s death and killing Hassan. The beautiful Zuleika in The Bride of Abydos, the daughter of the Pacha Giaffir, is forced to marry the rich, elderly Osman Sultan whom she have never seen. Her beloved brother Selim is also a Christian in the Islamic world. Their love is a variation of the incest theme to which Byron was frequently drawn. Giaour in The Giaour, whose character is allegorical, represents as the West, Christians, and Subjectivity. So does Selim in The Bride of Abydos. The Others represented in two poems are inseparable from the cultural and historical settings of Byron’s own time. The issues of culture, religion, race, gender are significantly represented in suggesting the narrative structures, thematic concerns, and especially the sociocultural ideologies of the work. This study further reveals the complex layers of the Other, Orient, femininity in Islamic society. Thus, not only does this article project investigate the sexual bodies and subversive desires of the Other that challenge the established boundaries of race, religion, gender ideologies on which the Western society has built itself, but it also focuses on the various cultural signs in the representation of the Other whose bodies are the site of Western cultural nexus of racial sexual typification and oppression. This article, inquiring critically into the significations of the Other, demonstrates how Byron criticizes the culture resolutely reasserting its traditional value system and expose the inadequacy of the Christian Western.