Even eyewitness contact rarely corrected Westerners’ romanticized images

Evidence

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans and Americans who visited Egypt, the Holy Land, or elsewhere in the region often experienced the chasm between their reality and fiction, while clinging to some part of the imaginaire about the East. During his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land in 1836, American traveler John Lloyd Stephens wrote, One by one I had seen the many illusions of my waking dreams fade away; the gorgeous pictures of Oriental scenes melt into nothing; but I still clung to the primitive simplicity and purity of the children of the desert; their temperament and abstinence, their contented poverty and contempt for luxuries, as approaching the true nobility of man’s nature and sustaining the poetry of the “land of the East.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 45

Categorization

• QUESTION: Stephens describes clinging to the romantic image even as his factual observations contradicted it — evidence that fantasy survives contact. Worth tracing how the 19th-century American traveler genre fed later imagery.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article: the romanticization of desert simplicity parallels how observers project virtue or vice onto exotic dress and custom.