Richard Francis Burton Character Analysis

Richard Francis Burton was a 19th-century British explorer, adventurer, and writer, and military officer. Although he studied Arabic formally, Burton was a perpetual outsider who was expelled from university as a disciplinary action before he could graduate. Despite this early severing of ties with academic Orientalism, Burton’s life and work—particularly his travel narrative, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah—show the extent to which Orientalist discourse steeped the worldviews of 19th century Europeans. Burton deploys the usual Orientalist tropes in his narrative, including a sharp division between the West and the Orient; attributing both exoticism and backwardness to Oriental subjects; and a sense of Western superiority and potential geopolitical power.