Richard Francis Burton: The Outsider

Abstract

Burton`s wanderings were not prompted merely by a desire to conquer and “discover” new lands. Underlying his desire to be a conquering hero was the sense of homelessness and exile. Ultimately, his assimilation to Arab mores and customs during his Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah combined with his imperial cultural heritage leaves him trapped between two cultures, two worldviews. Like T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), the other famous Englishman who assumed the Arab garb, he became “the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments,” and he had “dropped one form [the English] and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed`s coffin in our legend [believed to be suspended in mid-air], with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life” (T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom 32). In a sense, Burton`s journey to Meccah and Madinah was a metaphoric pilgrimage into himself, a pilgrimage that revealed that he was always “out of place.”