The East as the “Other” in The Snake Charmer (1879)
In the context of social categorization, people, on the basis of distinct features such as race and ethnicity, may be tagged, labeled, and/or branded as the “other” — relative to the position of who defines who. The “othered” — being irrationally feared, even hated, is downplayed to a general stereotype (Rohleder 2014); in a similar manner that the people of “the Orient” are being referred in history and depicted through literary and arts as “backward, exotic, mysterious, etc”. In reference to the context of the “other”, Jean Léon Gérome’s the Snake Charmer (1879), embodies both the “pernicious and exploitative fantasy” and the “sleazy imperialist vision” of the West in ‘the Orient’ (Jones 2012).
Painted in about 1879, the 32.4 x 48 inches oil on canvas, presents the distinctions of the East through an implication of methodical pictorial devices that “blur the line between reality and imagination” as it engages the audience into a space of those within the enterprise of Orientalism. The painting structurally portrays a group of men sitting on the floor of what appears to be a temple, while watching a nude boy and his act of charming a slithering phallic python. Pictorial devices as implicated in the painting, to mention — the degrading architecture, ambiguous characters and context, antiquated weaponry, and phallic image — suggest moral and material analysis on the portrayal of the Islamic world in the eyes of the West (Deep Thought 2020). The chipped tiled walls, slightly exposed wooden foundations, and cracked floorings, as well the displayed worn and rusting weaponry on the wall, suggest an imagery of antiquity that implies the material instability of Eastern architecture and society.
What was more intriguing and fairly disturbing was the sexualized image of the snake charmer exploited by the slumped audience in the picture for the purpose of entertainment. The nude child in the foreground and the men and women sitting in the background suggests the eroded morality of “the Orient”. In a way that structural degradation in the painting insinuates the Oriental society’s moral weakness, so does the image of the nude boy be morally questioned for the impudence to occur in such a “holy space”.
In the eyes of an orientalist, The Snake Charmer (1879) is a visual representation of the Islamic world as the “other” — barbaric, primitive, uncivilized, passive — and that it needs to be saved. It caters to a discourse of European imagination on the premise of the latter’s dominance and superiority and its justification of colonialism in the west Asian scholarship and history (Ansari 2011, 79). The treatment of the oriental as a subjugated “other”, distinct from the “occident” but subordinate (as implied in Gérome’s masterpiece), manifests Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” — being “a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 3).
References
Ansari, K. Humayun. 2011. The Muslim World in British Historical Imaginations: “Re-thinking Orientalism”? British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 38(1), 73–93. doi:10.1080/13530194.2011.559003
Deep Thought. 2020. “The Snake Charmer & Orientalism.”. https://adeepthought.com/2020/06/08/the-snake-charmer-orientalism/.
Gérome, Jean Léon. 1879. The Snake Charmer.. The Clark Institute. https://www.clarkart.edu/artpiece/detail/snake charmer
Jones, Jonathan. 2012. “Jean-Léon Gérôme: Orientalist Fantasy Among the Impressionists.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/jul/03/jean-leon-gerome-orientalism-impressionists.
Rohleder, Poul. 2014. Othering. In: Teo T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_414
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
