Though Monte Cristo is of French origin, the novel often depicts him as “Oriental,” an identity he both performs and that other characters project onto him. The most notable instance is his unseen, fictional alias as Sinbad the Sailor, a reference to a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, a series of Middle Eastern folk narratives first introduced to Europe in the 18th century with Antoine Galland’s French translation: Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-1717). 

In Dumas’s era, many French readers would have a working knowledge of the Nights and the “Orientalist” system of representation (or misrepresentation) that made up the 18th- and 19th-century Western European colonialist understanding of the “Near” and “Far East,” including the Middle East, North Africa, Southwest Asia, East Asia, etc. Colonialist ideology depicted these areas and their occupants as dangerous, regressive, and irrational but also seductive—often quite literally, as the perceived exoticism of these regions often veered into eroticization, but also figuratively, in their imaginative power over Westerners. 20th-century scholar Edward Said, in his work Orientalism, highlights the constructed nature of the “Orient” as a hegemonic European invention rather than an accurate depiction of places and people, who, under colonialism, often lacked self-representation. Said points to novels like Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 Salammbô, which unfolds in ancient Carthage, as examples of this trend, but the tendency appears even in works set in Western Europe—for instance, in the character of Safie in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, a beautiful woman fleeing patriarchal oppression in her native Turkey. Orientalism also inflected other forms of art, from music (e.g., Guiseppe Verdi’s 1871 Aida or Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 Madame Butterfly) to painting (e.g., Eugène Delacroix’s 1825 Odalisque or Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1879 The Snake Charmer).

Dumas uses many “Orientalist” tropes throughout the novel, notably with the characters of Haydée and Ali, both of whom lack agency and voice. Indeed, Ali literally has no tongue, mirroring the effective silencing of the non-Western characters in the novel. While these stereotypes reflect the biases of Dumas’s time and the problematic system of Othering that Orientalism involves, Orientalism’s constructed nature also adds to the novel’s layers of fabrication. This is evident in the fictional nature of Monte Cristo’s Sinbad the Sailor alias from One Thousand and One Nights, which is itself a compilation of stories about performance and storytelling. The novel’s Orientalism thus intersects with the theme of Rebirth and Reinvention, in which identity is explored, in part, as performative.