Washington Irving's treatment of the theme of the ruin in his travelogue, The Alhambra, (1832) effectively helped to construct Spain as mysterious, irrational, anti-progress, and premodern. Irving deployed his construction to secure through contrast Anglo America's superiority and to define America's sense of self as a rational, technology-oriented, and progress-oriented state. The Alhambra became, I will argue, an early Anglo American expression of Orientalism, with Spain defined by Anglo Americans as its Orientalist Other exactly at the time Anglo America was moving aggressively into Spanish-acculturated territories to its south and west.
Edward Said and others argue that Orientalism is a discourse in which the West's knowledge about the Orient is inextricably tied to its domination over it. Representations of "the Orient" produced by Orientalism never reflect a true reality but are, instead, composites defining the Orient and the Oriental as different and inferior to the West and the Westerner.
Irving relied heavily on the theme of the ruin to define and implicitly to denigrate Spain as part of an Orientalist discourse. There are two types of ruin in his text. The first is the ruin of Moorish Spain, which served for Irving a subtly aggressive function as a measure of Spain's lost, ancient, "classical" past, perhaps a better past. The second, juxtaposed level of ruin was that of imperialist, colonizing Spain. Irving seems to judge the most recent ruin as belonging to the most defective culture, and this is no surprise since it is precisely this culture that posed the greatest threat to upstart imperialists like the Americans.
Irving sharpened the contrast between Moorish and imperial Spain in such vignettes as "The Palace of the Alhambra," in which his most delicate and sensual romantic stories are set in a Moorish past. This aspect of Spain's past is thus rehabilitated. But Irving pointedly observes that it was not the Spanish but the French, temporarily occupying Granada during the Peninsular War, who repaired the Alhambra before it collapsed completely. This signaled to him a contemporary Spanish indifference to its ancient history.
If Irving perceived the Moorish past with some sentimentality, his imperial Spain is largely unredeemed. In the Renaissance palace of the Marquis of Gandul, a grandee whose title dated to the Reconquest and who Irving links with imperial rather than Moorish Spain, the author set no romances. Rather, all had gone to decay, with the additional sign of corruption and ruin a fat curate who lived there as its sole occupant. The Hall of the Lions in the Alhambra, where Ferdinand and Isabella first met Columbus, is waste and desolate, the roost of owls and bats and another emblem to Irving of how the mighty had fallen. In an important passage, Irving described the Italianate room of Philip V, the eighteenth century king and a Spanish rather than Moorish figure, as especially decayed. It is a telling self-assignment of the American Irving to the role of new conqueror, a better successor to a failed, imperialist Spain, that Irving chose to renovate and occupy this apartment for his own quarters during his stay at the Alhambra and the Hall of the Ambassadors, formerly Ferdinand and Isabella's throne room, as his office.
An important part of Irving's dialogue of ruin in The Alhambra, I will conclude, is his feminizing of Spanish men, through which he disempowers the Spanish male in an unavoidably political way. This practice also serves to construct Anglo American character via the juxtaposition of Anglo industriousness, reason, assertiveness, and organization--characteristics that are perceived as virtuous and normal--with the depraved, passive, and childlike "different" qualities of the Spaniard. From Philip V, described as a miserable hypocondriac given to neurotic comas, to old Spanish grandees with glorious ancestries now waging pop-gun wars on swallows, to the marginally efficient Mateo Ximenes, Irving's valet in The Alhambra, to the cast of charming indolents he uses as supporting players, Irving makes the contrast clear, underscoring Spain's, and, by extension, Spanish America's vulnerability to Anglo conquest.
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