摘要：As a Romantic orientalist text, book IV of Keats’s Endymion is a “semi-mythical construct”. This paper is an attempt to examine the cultural pressure of what Edward Said has called “orientalist discourse” on Keats, a marginal figure during his lifetime. The focus will be on the “Janus-faced ambivalence”, in Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, characteristic of the margins of a nation’s space. Written in the post-Waterlooian period, Endymion is an archetypal quest for identity and self-recognition. The other is represented in the figure of the sorrowful Indian maid who is both the feminine and the oriental Other for the English masculine Self. Associated with exotic beauty, subjected to the “oriental scrutiny” and masculine gaze, the Indian maid is transformed and possessed to confirm the poet’s masculine self. However, it is argued, issues such as mythologically significant figures, unheimlich images in the poetic space, orientalist assumptions, digressive passages, vacillating tone of the poem, partial cancelation of the recognized selves, control of the point of view, aestheticizing and spiritualizing of the love for the Indian maid and finally the dreamy quality of the poem complicate the issue of orientalism in the poem. Surveying such complexities, the study seeks to account for what has usually been considered poetic immaturity in Keats’s Endymion. It is suggested that the artistic drawbacks of the poem are in part the result of the disturbing presence of an oriental Other figuring as a surrogate for a love Keats felt he could not have.
