Research Information System
The 4th International Social Research and Behavioral Sciences Symposium, Antalya, Turkey, 19 - 21 October 2019, vol.1, no.1, pp.262-266
Mangan's poetry includes various women from the Middle East, each portrayed by an admirer who respectfully writes about these women. Unlike his contemporaries who tended to portray women of their times in terms of physical qualities, Mangan's Middle Eastern are depicted as pure and beautiful beings. In this paper, Mangan's Middle Eastern women are studied by analyzing his poems written in the years of 1838-1844. It is suggested that Mangan's Middle Eastern women appear as sources of beauty, admiration and respect unlike those women depicted by other poets of the West who perceived women as sources of carnal pleasure and at times as sources of danger. It is concluded that Mangan's Middle Eastern women are depicted in non-hierarchical terms which point at the originality of the poet. James Clarence Mangan differs from his contemporaries in the way he depicts the Oriental women in his poetry. His Oriental women are neither femme fatale nor supernatural beings as in the works of the other Oriental Renaissance poets. He tries to give a realistic depiction of them or he tries to depict them by following some Eastern literary traditions. Rather than establishing a hierarchy between himself and these women, he usually looks up to them with respect or they appear as objects of desire and are usually put on a pedestal. This paper aims to look at the depiction of Oriental women in his poems written between 1838 and 1844 and to underline how he departs from the cliché Western perceptions about the Oriental women.