‘The Fiery Imagination’: Charlotte Brontë, the Arabian Nights and Byron’s Turkish Tales

Abstract

Although the influence of the Arabian Nights on Charlotte Brontë’s imaginative and artistic development is well known, this influence is generally considered in relation to her earlier writings. This study explores how references to the Nights in Charlotte Brontë’s adult fiction function complexly as symbols of both an imaginative liberation that takes on a heightened importance for women within their confined sphere and, conversely, of the sexual danger (and allure) with which Charlotte Brontë associates the Orient through Byron’s Turkish Tales. As for many contemporary writers, Charlotte Brontë’s life-long struggle with the danger and allure of imagination itself — the godlike act of artistic creation — is transposed on to an Orientalist fantasy beyond the borders of English identity.