Acting as “the right hand … of God”: Christianized Egyptian Women and Religious Devotion as Emancipation in Florence Nightingale’s Fictionalized Treatises

Abstract

As described in the introduction to this book, Florence Nightingale’s letter to her family as she approached Alexandria, Egypt, by sea in November 1849 highlights the imperialist tendency to separate East from West but also recognizes the intermingling of cultures across the Mediterranean, especially when Victorian travelers looked at these cultures as ancient civilizations that provided the foundations for contemporary British society. Similar to the travelers to Greece and Italy described by Jenkyns and Vance, who could not help but feel as though they were “travel[ling] backwards in time” as they encountered Mediterranean cultures (Jenkyns 44), Nightingale saw in Egypt the opportunity to gain greater understanding of the foundations of her own culture, and just as she had compared and contrasted Greece and Egypt on her way to Egypt, she would compare and contrast these countries on her return home in April 1850, when she spent nearly two months in Athens before heading to Italy for a short stay and then going back to England. Setting forth a number of contrasts between the two cultures in letters written to her family, Nightingale characterizes the Peloponnesian women she meets in Greece as a stark contrast to the women she had seen in Egypt: “dwarfs” compared to “the gigantic Egyptian race,” but their “excessive cleanliness and attention to dress … is wonderful after Egypt” (McDonald, Florence Nightingale’s European Travels 368).