Escaping to and from Orientalism: Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and its adaptations

The aim of this article is to investigate how Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) employs elements of Mediterranean culture to shape Edmond Dantes’s identity. Through making him into an avid Orient-ethusiast, the book explains his morally gray actions and allows him to exact his revenge without labeling him as a villain. His alter ego, “Sinbad the Sailor”, based on 1001Arabian Nights, gives him freedom to do good things through illegal and morally wrong means. The oriental subplot in the book also introduces characters such as Ali and Haydee, who both reinforce Dantes’s own belief that he is, in fact, a good man. Interestingly, both characters are absent from American movie adaptation of the novel, and from the musical Der Graf der Monte Cristo (2009), showing that Orientalism has morphed from an idea to which one can escape to, into a trope that the authors escape from, trying to shape Dumas’s character into a purely European vigilante, instead of a morally ambiguous character who abandons his French nationality.