What Does Leda Symbolize In The Purple Cloud

Despite Leda’s position as simply the lesser woman, in Adam’s eyes, her race is still something that must be considered when discussing the orientalist discourse within The Purple Cloud. Adam speculates that she ‘was of Circassian blood, or, at least, origin; her skin whitey-brown, or old ivory white’ (p. 187). Circassian being something that was linked to beauty, racial purity, and superiority. Many of Shiel’s contemporaries would have believed in the theory that the Circassian woman was the ‘whitest, racially “purest” specimen of human woman found on Earth’, and one of those contemporaries was the notable nineteenth century German anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Blumenbach speculated that Circassians were the ancestors of Caucasians,