Grace Aguilar, the Jealous Man, and Imperialism’s ‘Pleasure’

Reading Grace Aguilar on the law of the jealous man (Num. 5:11–31) against Edward Said’s putative anatomy of psychological satisfaction respecting nineteenth-century (Western) depictions of non-European faces and spaces (in Culture and Imperialism) is the interest of this article. Aguilar’s interpretation fits, largely, Said’s paradigm of sclerosed racial differences, cultural interpenetration within contested spaces, and a recovery of a Western perspective in the last. But her conformity to the pattern in the work is troubled by her commitment to a marginal Anglo-Jewish apologetic grounded in the religious ruminations of an ancient Eastern people and literature. Charting a course for her brand of Jewish piety to the center of Victorian religious culture with its moorings in Euro-supremacy, Aguilar remains tethered to her Near Eastern patrimony. She is, in the end, a reluctant imperialist.