William Beckford's Vathek A Call for Reassessment

Abstract

Since its first publication in 1786, Vathek brought fame to William Beckford. It has attracted critical attention on many levels. It soon has become the inspiration of poets and novelist during and after Beckford’s age. George Gordon, Lord Byron is said to have cited Vathek as a source for his poem, “The Giaour”. Other Romantic poets used oriental settings in their works. The list includes writers such as Robert Southey, Thomas Moore and John Keats. For a long period of time it was cited to exemplify the Gothic trend in fiction given its emphasis on the supernatural, ghosts, and spirits, as well as the terror it tries to induce in the reader. Critics placed it in the first rank of early Gothic fiction. Other historians of the fantasy genre disagreed. Les Daniels states Vathek was "a unique and delightful book". Daniels argues that the novel had little in common with the other "Gothic" novels; "Beckford's luxuriant imagery and sly humour create a mood totally antithetical to that suggested by the grey castles and black deeds of medieval Europe" (1975, 15). Franz Rottensteiner calls the novel "a marvellous story, the creation of an erratic but powerful imagination, which brilliantly evokes the mystery and wonder associated with the Orient"(1978, 21), and Brian Stableford has praised the work as “a feverish and gleefully perverse decadent/Arabian fantasy". (2005, 40).Several other important studies were conducted to examine the autobiographical elements in the work. Consciously or not Beckford included autobiographical material in the novel, as his contemporaries recognized. In the late twentieth century it was read as an example of the projection of sodomy and homosexuality. The novel is studied as an example of queer literature. Beckford's sexuality has been a key concern of critics looking for the inner explanation of Vathek's opposites.Little, however, is done to show how Beckford’s works reflects the first attempt to construct “orient of the mind” and therefore constitutes an earlier attempt in the now long tradition of orientalist discourse. This paper tries to reassess the reading of the novel from this perspective.

Keywords: Beckford, Vathek, oriental tale, orientalism