Mapping Persia and the Persians in Freya Stark’s the Valley of Assassins and Robert Byron’s the Road to Oxiana

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores representations of Persia and the Persians in Freya Stark’s The Valley of Assassins (1934) and Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937). Although these two travel accounts have been the subject of a few studies, the focus has been mostly on their architectural and stylistic aspects. Drawing on Orientalism, travel and gender theories, this article aims to offer a comparative look at Byron’s and Stark’s travel books in unravelling the ways they are informed by Orientalist attitudes in representing Persia and the Persians. Further, it aims to offer a nuanced reading of the role of a traveller’s gender on the textual construction of the self and the other and his/her relationship to the hegemonic Orientalist tradition. It will be argued that while Stark adopts an ambivalent attitude toward the encountered differences in Persia and her travel book is informed with self-exoticism and self-fashioning rhetoric, Byron deploys an authoritative Orientalist lens and his travel account is permeated with instances of feminizing the country he is travelling in and the men he encounters.