The Exhibitionary Narrative

This chapter considers the relationship between stadial capitalism, natural history, and the concept of ‘national character’ – a set of essential characteristics and values attributed to specific nationalities or ethnic groups. Women’s descriptions of museums and private collections in Egypt, Persia, and Japan offer a direct insight into the way that the Victorians created and understood visual rhetoric as a means of communicating human and cultural development; accounts from different decades further illustrate how ideologies of racial and cultural diversity overlapped and competed with the theories of universal stadial progress that pervaded Victorian thought. Expanding on the relationship between women, commerce, and political economy introduced in the previous chapter, I will consider how women’s accounts of transactions with Eastern merchants apply a visual rhetoric of stadial progress to interrogate both romanticised and pejorative Oriental stereotypes. In keeping with nationalistic initiatives to index global cultures according to their cultural and economic achievements, female travellers read merchants and merchandise in the Eastern bazaar using the same visual rhetoric used to describe displays in Eastern museums in a literary trope that I have termed the ‘exhibitionary narrative.’