ORIENTALISMO

Orientalismo

Ciò che emerge dall’opera Madama Butterfly è quello che viene definito “Orientalismo”, ovvero un atteggiamento caratterizzato da una forte ammirazione e interesse per la civiltà e la cultura dell’Oriente. L’interesse formale e contenutistico rivolto, dalla letteratura e dalle arti figurative europee, alla cultura e agli usi orientali, rientra nell’ambito dell’esotismo, ossia una forte corrente di gusto iniziata nei primi anni del XVIII secolo in Francia.

L’Oriente fu evocato come luogo di studi scientifici, viaggi, suggestive rovine, meraviglie ed esotiche bizzarrie; ma assunse importanza come movimento artistico e letterario solo in epoca romantica, dove i temi e interessi emersero nell’opera dei maggiori scrittori europei, dal Romanticismo al Decadentismo. In ambito letterario, ad aver adottato questo atteggiamento, è  lo scrittore Rupert Kipling.

Rupert Kipling (1865 - 1936)

A little bit of his life:

He was an author born in Bombay (India) on the 30th of December 1865, into an Anglo-Indian middle class family in 1865 at the time of the British Empire in India. He returned to England when he was 6 years old to receive a good education; here he felt miserable because of the strict rules at home and school. He came back to India when he was 16 years old and he started working as a journalist and writer.  At 21 years old he published his first poems and six short stories about India. After that he began to travel all over the world until he suffered for a nervous breakdown, and recovered. One year later he got married and settled down in USA with his wife, where  he produced a great part of his most famous works: one example is The jungle book. He received the Nobel prize for literature in 1907. He came back to England only after the First World War; here he became lord rector at St. Andrews University (Scotland). He died in London on the 18th of January 1936.

He is an important author to connect to orientalism because he was born in India, so he was interested in the local culture. He was also an imperialist and a  supporter of British colonialism, because he thought that colonization was a way to spread civilization across the world and to export English values (= "The white man's burden"). It’s important to remember that he didn’t support the worst form of colonialism. 

He created a new genre: the colonial novel. In his works, differently from other authors, he sometimes offers the Indian point of vIew because India was his home. Of India he loved the colors and the exoticism, that were represented in his works because of his strong interest in them. 

One example of his oriental attitude is represented in the short story Lispeth (1886-1888), that deals with the story of an Indian girl (Lispeth) who lived with English people (Chaplain and Chaplain’s wife) in an Indian Village.