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Consuming Egypt: Appropriation and the Cultural Modalities of Romantic Luxury

The traditional figuration of Egypt as a geography of abundance bordering on excess was the theme for a 15-minute sonnet-writing competition between Keats, Shelley and Leigh Hunt on 4 February 1818. The resulting texts focus on different aspects and may be variously assessed from an aesthetic point of view. Interestingly, however, one shared feature is their concentration on the Nile’s lifegiving abundance and its regular, dangerous sliding into unmanageable excess. Keats, for instance, questions such fertilizing powers: “Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile/Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,/Rest for a space ’twixt Cairo and Decan?” (lines 6–8, Keats 484). Leigh Hunt, in what is perhaps the most carefully structured of the three poems, conjures up a landscape of past glories, present-day emptiness and silence, and intimations of the end of history that are in striking contrast with “the fruitful stream lapsing along” (line 12, Poetical Works 248). Excessive natural luxuriance and the double-edged fertility of the Nile emerge in Shelley’s sonnet, which concentrates on the gathering of waters at the source of the river and its periodic floods, highlighting the destructive as well as creative powers of the “great flood”: “soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil/And fruits and poisons spring where’er thou flowest” (lines 11–12, Shelley 552). Despite their expressive compression, these texts deploy a series of associations around the Nile and Egypt—“old hushed Egypt and its sands” writes Hunt (line 1)— weaving fertility and abundance together with the fall of civilizations and the natural sublime. The theme of nurturing drifts towards images of excess and is focused upon from a historical–cultural perspective so that, in a wider sense, the sonnets of 1818 may be seen to encapsulate the ambivalence of Egypt as an imaginary geography in Romantic culture. In addition, such textual slippages of abundance into deleterious excess or unmanageable superabundance also provide a useful approach to other figurations or embodiments of Egypt during a cultural period swept by a wide-ranging interest in this land, its present history and its antiquities, as well as an Egyptian consumer craze. Images of Egyptian excess therefore migrate from considerations on history, nature and humankind to the more circumscribed, though no less culturally relevant, areas of “consumer orientalism” and luxury, offering an intriguing link between literary discourse and the representation of practices of consumption in Romantic-period culture.