Spies of Empire/Empire of Spies

Reviewing my blog posts, I can trace a gradual shift in the way I approached questions of narrative power, authorship, and the ethics of representation. What began as close reading of individual writers steadily developed into a broader philosophical investigation: How does a narrative assert authority? What kinds of knowledge and what kinds of erasure does it produce? And what does responsible reading look like when the texts themselves emerge from imperial contexts?

My first post on Isabelle Eberhardt started from a sense of discomfort with her conflicting origin stories. At first, I treated these contradictions as unusual biographical details, but the more I examined them, the more they pointed toward a deeper issue: the deliberate construction of the self as a form of power. Her shifting accounts were not evidence of confusion but a method of controlling access to herself and shaping the responses of others. Writing that post pushed me to consider narrative instability not as failure, but as strategy.

By the second post on the Balfour Declaration, my focus moved from individuals to the political force of language itself. The distinction between “a national home” and “the national home” revealed how grammatical choices can carry enormous ethical consequences, allowing ambiguity to mask responsibility and justify domination. As I analyzed the document, I became increasingly aware that my frustration with its wording reflected a larger concern about how vagueness operates as an instrument of power. Language in these contexts helps construct reality, and sometimes erase it.

The playlist response to Freya Stark allowed me to approach her writing from a different angle. Her observational precision is impressive, yet I found myself more attuned to what her narrative style consistently avoided: emotional involvement, reciprocity, or genuine recognition of the people she wrote about. Using music to frame my critique helped me articulate the tension between aesthetic appreciation and ethical engagement. It made me think seriously about the limits of empathy in travel writing and about how beauty can sometimes obscure the violence embedded in a narrative stance.

By the time I reached T. E. Lawrence, I was more attuned to the rhetorical habits that run through many of these writers. Lawrence’s early admission of his own bias, rather than destabilizing his authority, effectively strengthens it. His self-awareness allows him to preempt critique and maintain control over the narrative. This led me to consider how a text constructs epistemic authority not only through what it includes, but through the way it anticipates and absorbs objections. Confession becomes another technique of consolidation rather than a gesture of vulnerability.

Across all four posts, I see my writing shifting from description to analysis of the underlying logics that shape these texts: imperial frameworks, narrative ownership, aesthetic distance, and the subtle but consequential operations of grammar. I hope to study more explicitly how empires produce and regulate knowledge, and how marginalized voices challenge or reconfigure those epistemic structures. I am especially drawn to the question of when storytelling becomes an ethical practice and when it becomes a form of harm.

Over the semester, my blogposts evolved from a close reading to a gradual thematic overview of understanding espionage, identity, and travel writing and my own theological frameworks.

My writing overall became a culmination of the myths our historical figures have curated for themselves:

• In Bell: the myth of the courtier, the civilizing advisor, the indispensable “Major Miss Bell.”
• In Stark: the myth of the benign imperial wanderer, redeemed by feminine service.
• In Eberhardt: the myth of the vagabond outsider, a bird of perpetual flight
• In Lawrence: the myth of martyrdom and self-inflicted purification.

My earliest post on T. E. Lawrence centered on self-punishment and self-erasure. At first, I focused on Lawrence as a singular figure: a man fragmented by trauma, trying to remake himself through suffering. But even in that last piece, I began reaching beyond biography, linking his self-discipline to modern forms of identity pressure, even comparing it to the lives of university students. By the time I wrote about Stark and Bell, I was no longer treating personal contradictions as isolated oddities. As the course progressed, that reflex, to trace connections outward, became more intentional and structured. I learned to use individual cases to diagnose broader phenomena about empire, loyalty, narration, and gender. In the Stark playlist, I tried to think about the moral world Stark believed she was living in and what world she actually created. The musical curation forced me to think about tone, the environment, the emotional cadence and how these shape our perspectives in understanding a historical figure. In finding an image for Eberhardt, birds represented her well in her relentless freedom and seeing her as multiple pieces of a whole person brought internal reflection forward.

Some of my favorite ideas that have emerged have been feminine ethics of observation and the use of gender in diplomacy, birds as metaphors for fragmentation, spying as someone suspended between truth and myth, self-invention.

I would like to know more about the ethics of travel writing such as what responsibilities do figures have when representing cultures and when does it cross boundaries and what do those boundaries look like? What suffices? How would modern day spying shift conversations of gender, mobility, and sexuality working within political spheres?

Overall, this class made me go deep into the inner workings of state-building, helping recognize the ins and outs of political entities, but also letting me challege and questions the different stigmas, social work, and politics in play.

In class, we often discussed to what extent Lawrence truly despised his fame. It seemed that our class’s  general consensuses was that Lawrence likely enjoyed the notoriety that he received from his exploits. As time passed, though, he came to have a great distain for said fame. This resentment likely coming from a place of shame over his inability to secure Arab independence. However, I disagree with the general consensuses. I believe that Lawrence likely always had, at least, some aversion to any sort of stardom. My opinion is largely based in the writing of Lowell Thomas. This may come off as surprising, because Lowell is know for saying that Lawrence “had a genius for backing into the limelight.” At first, this quote might seem to imply that Lawrence always unintentionally found himself in the spotlight. Describing this tendency as a genius, however, implies that to some degree it was intentional. I find this assertion to directly contradict statements Lowell made in the Foreword and Chapter 1 of this book With Lawrence of Arabia. In the Foreword Lowell states:

“During the time that Mr. Chase and I were in Arabia, I found it impossible to extract much information from Lawrence himself regarding his own achievements. He insisted on giving the entire credit to Emir Feisal and other Arab leaders, and to his fellow-adventurers, Colonel Wilson, of the Sudan, Newcombe, Joyce, Dawney, Bassett, Vickery, Cornwallis, Hogarth, Stirling, etc., all of whom did magnificent work in Arabia.”

Additionally in Chapter 1, Lowell comments:

“Even concerning his connection with the Arabian army he would say nothing, except to give the credit for everything that happened in the desert campaign to the Arab leaders, or to Newcombe, Joyce, Cornwallis, Dawney, Marshall, Stirling, Hornby, and his other British associates.”

From these quotes it is evident that, even while in Arabia, Lawrence did not desire to receive any credit. At this time, Lawrence still likely believed that he could secure Arab self-determination. In fact, he was likely aware that his level of influence was directly correlated to his notoriety. Yet, he still kept fame at an arms distance.

Despite these dismals, Lowell would still go on to make the aforementioned comment on Lawrence’s genius for backing into the spotlight.  Why would he do this? I think Lowell’s words likely stemmed from circumstance. Lawrence criticized Lowell for apparently exploiting his image in the latter’s films. So, in order to abstain himself,  Lowell likely played into the idea of Lawrence covertly finding the limelight.

I was struck, especially in our more recent classes, about how much of Lawrence’s life has been dedicated to ordering and “making right” various events, actions, memories, etc., and failing to do so. He tried to reorder his sexuality to align with the British male heterosexual ideal and failed; there’s evidence that he pursued relationships with boys like Dahoum, along with those first lines from Seven Pillars. He tried to do right by the Arabs into whose political life he had inserted himself unsolicited but refused to abandon British imperial interests, and so failed, since he could not do right by every standard, all of the time. He tried to order and control thoroughly his own body by testing its limits, and failed, and his testing devolved into the erotic, masochistic flagellations he inflicted on himself. 

If I had to guess, I would locate the origin of this impulse in his childhood and the strictness of his upbringing, interrupted by bursts of chaos or violence, like when he discovered his parents’ scandal and when his mother beat him. Perhaps he inherited the impulse to make things right from his mother, who some of the scholars we’ve read postulate brought her children up so strictly and religiously to compensate for the nonconformity of her marriage.

To me, Lawrence’s impulse toward ordering also makes Mousa’s clarifications about the holes in his accounts of his time in the Middle East more interesting. What purpose did it serve for him to invent, at least in some respect, these incidences of violence and nonconformity, such as the events of Deraa, or to take credit for more work in the Revolt than he actually deserved? He could have, as some scholars wrote, been inventing these episodes as a means of self-punishment and self-revelation—i.e., he knew there was something nonconformist about him, or he recognized internally some homosexual impulse, and so felt the need to invent Deraa so that he could order himself in the world. He felt the need to punish his own nonconformity by exaggerating/falsifying it and projecting it to the world, so that people would understand where he lay in the order of the world.

He might have taken more credit than he deserved for the Arab and British efforts in the Middle East because of his guilt over his failure to safeguard the rights he had promised the Arabs. By making it appear as though he had done more than he had, Lawrence could right his place in history; his misdeeds could be outweighed by revolutionary action.

If I had more time/space, I would have tried to understand Lawrence’s upbringing through a psychoanalytic framework, which I believe would help in understanding some of his choices, especially those that seem contradictory. Altogether, I believe that Lawrence, despite appearances, was unsure of who he was, what he wanted to be, or even what he was doing as he did it. He was passionate, but frequently irresponsible, not dissimilarly from Isabelle Eberhardt. His impulse to order the world to his vision is more Bell-like, and the fluidness of his identity was in some ways like Freya Stark’s. I’m glad we saved Lawrence for last—I’ve liked being able to compare him to our previous spies.

Looking back over my portfolio, I can see a clear progression in the way I think and write about travel literature, empire, and the figures we studied. My earliest post, the Yasmina playlist, was driven by empathy and atmosphere. My initial approach was to look for feeling and emotional resonance. As the semester continued, I began to shift my writing to focus more on examining power, especially with Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark. At the end, with Lawrence, I was more intrigued about the psychology of the spies we were studying.

One of my favorite ideas I developed this semester was presented in my “Bystander” blog post. Reframing Lawrence’s torture writing helped me confront something that his narrative often avoids: the uncomfortable representation of performance, trauma, and discipline that is embedded in his demeanor. I explored how the heroic silence was simply a form of survival strategy that could be linked to his internalized need for punishment and also just trauma from the past. I liked this idea because it helped me do a more complicated and human reading of Lawrence.

An important thing I was able to do through these blog posts and the midterm was experiment between analytic and creative writing. Creative writing, like Bystander, the Yasmina Playlist, and the play I wrote, allowed me to look at the spies’s travel writing as performative. They were constantly staging themselves after all, whether as experts, wanderers, diplomats, or heroes. I was able to question why these authors chose to present themselves in the way they did, which I have never done before in a class. Through analytic reading and writing, I was able to learn to read these texts with a specific lens in mind. Looking at the writing with all of these factors, like political structure and alliances, helped reframe it.

Going forward, I would love to know more about how people actually affected by these spies remembered these figures. A lot of what we read came from the Western world. But I would like to know how, say the local people of the past saw Gertrude Bell. I am also a sucker for psychoanalytic analysis, so I would love to see what psychologists think about some of these spies. Something else that would be interesting is to think about what these narratives would look like if they written today. How would Lawrence write about himself today?