From Dream to Reality: The Magical Role of the Princess in Empire Expansion in King of Tars

For the dream of a “global future” in the wake of the Crusades—which expanded in later periods into Christian/white colonialist fantasies—the idea of an “exotic ally,” as articulated by Sierra Lomuto as occurring in “The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars (c. 1330),” served as a necessary step in that journey. To move from dream to reality is to venture out from the simplistic binaries in the mind into the world, and into “enemy” territory quite literally; moving from figurative to literal conquering was envisioned and is encapsulated, in the imaginative and didactic mode of romances such as King of Tars. This quality extends from the romance to its inheritor, the more “realistic” novel, in the eighteenth, that most colonial of centuries. 

If what it “means” to be white “or” black shift according to the needs for the power structure to keep stabilized—as Geraldine Heng has articulated—then a figure that occupies the status of both white and black simultaneously, bridges the divide between white and black, thus enabling the “conversion fantasy” to happen. To convert an ally requires an ambassador; in King of Tars, that ambassador/bridge between the masculine realms occupied by the King of Tars and the Sultan is clearly the king’s daughter, the princess, women being a primary token exchanged by men to facilitate peace through the marriage market/trade. While the mind prefers to keep binaries such as white and black separate, occasionally, reality is messier than that, and who better to clean up the messy world than a woman? The princess moves from Christian into (outward) Muslim “status” back to (outward) Christian again (remaining Christian on the “inside” the entire time), taking anyone who would come to Christendom with her, and moving the Sultan’s “inherent” violence from foe to ally status. Whitaker writes that “the King of Tars should be situated within a milieu of texts meant to teach readers about salvation” (179). The princess, an “exotic ally” with whom the text begins and ends, is “meant to teach readers,” through the Sultan, about salvation. The genocidal fantasy that ensues after her work is done is taken on by the Sultan, the Sultan’s “wild boar” like rage the text describes being put to use for Christian international domination. The whitewashing of the princess may seem to give her power, yet it enables a nefarious purpose and ultimately this power is transferred back to the white, Christian power structure. 

Heng’s “working minimum hypothesis of race” as “one of the primary names we have … that is attached to a repeating tendency … to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental, in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups” (Heng 3). The “tendency … to demarcate human beings” occurs in the wake of the Crusades and it reoccurs in later periods of Christian/white colonialist fantasies, specifically when those fantasies are striving to become, and stay reality. While the categories are “selective,” and the human groups receive power “differentially,” the “tendency” race “names” “repeats” because the same will to “power” remains. While the idea of race remains a constant because it is attached a “repeating tendency,” what changes is where and to whom it distributes, or seeks to distribute, power. Therefore, power transfers to the literary figure of the “Mongol Princess of Tars” when it is time to derive power from “the performative accoutrements of Mongol terror” (Lomuto 171).  

A Diversion

I found Heng’s Empire of Magic available as an ebook through the Wayne State library. From the way in which it has been cited, by Miyashiro and Whitaker (in “Race-ing the Dragon), it seems it will be a key “ambassador” text bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and the long eighteenth century, between the medieval romance and the novel that is its inheritor and that thus receives its sediment, the “sins of fathers being visited on their children” biblically and through cultural artifacts. Heng’s Empire of Magic spans the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries by examining the romance “to see how cultural fantasy responds to changing crises, pressures, and demands in a number of different ways,” according to its summary. I realize that in this metaphor, Empire of Magic is fulfilling the role of the princess-as-ambassador and that the medieval time period is the “exotic” land, for me, that this exotic ally will help me to venture into. However, I am not seeking to conquer the middle ages, so perhaps this connection does not quite “work.” Hence the messy reality of metaphor alluded to above. To understand the novel, and its preoccupation with the female reforming the rake and with the prominence attached to the marriage market in it, it is necessary to understand the romance, such as the King of Tars, which preceded it. Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote satires the colonial Don Quixote by imagining a female Quixote who would conquer through Quixotism. This female must operate through confusion, and through chivalric memory, by being stereotypically absorbed in the romance genre, often ridiculed as too “feminine” and too “French” for the contemporaneous British taste. For a female to bridge the gap between romance and the novel, a male doctor is necessary at the end to diagnose Arabella and tell her the “proper” way to read novels. At the end of the King of Tars, a male priest is necessary to assist the princess, however “empowered” a figure she may be in the conversion narrative/fantasy of Tars. The novel itself is called colonialist in some articles I quickly located last night, which might align Lennox and her character Arabella with the colonial and “exotic” ally of the princess of tars. This I am hoping to think about more in-depth in a future project. 

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. “Response Essay: Race as sedimented history.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, 2015, pp. 94-97.

Heng, Geraldine. “Beginnings: Racial Worlds, Medieval Worlds: Why This Book, and How to Read a Book on Medieval Race.” The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 1-14.

Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic. 2003. 

King of Tars. Translated by Hilary E. Fox, 2020. 

Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote. 1752. 

Lomuto, Sierra. “The Mongol Princess of Tars: Global Relations and Racial Formation in The King of Tars (c. 1330).” Exemplaria, 2019, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 171-192. 

Mack, Ruthe. “Quixotic Ethnography: Charlotte Lennox and the Dilemma of Cultural Observation.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 38, no. 2, 2005, pp. 193-213. 

Miyashiro, Adam. “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics.” Literature Compass, 2019, pp. 1-11.

Whitaker, Cord. “Black Metaphors in the King of Tars.”