Colonialism and Gender in the East: Representations of the Harem in the Writings of Women Travellers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Edward Said's analysis of the Orientalist discourse constructs a position of enunciation more questionable when the Western observer is female. Women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects. They accessed the Orient from a differently gendered perspective. Following Reina Lewis and Billie Melman, who suggest how female writers contested or subverted Orientalist discourse, this paper seeks to show that European women's texts, though shaped by race and class, could offer a counter-hegemonic viewpoint. Their writings about the Middle East and the harem challenge the dominant textual codes. Their empathy and receptivity co-exist with Eurocentricity. ********** Edward Said's well-known discussion of Orientalist discourse centres on the idea of the Other, 'a collective notion identifying us Europeans as against all those non-Europeans [...] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European people and cultures'. (1) The traveller/observer accesses the alien or unfamiliar through various strategies contingent upon an imperialist position of Western supremacy, defining the foreign in terms of opposition (which often means negation or abstraction). Said's theories are dependent on two assumptions: first, that the sense of self against which the Other is positioned embodies the age's cultural hegemony, thus representing the dominant voice; and second, that the 'self' exists as a trope of positive function and value against which an alternative 'not-self' can be measured. As many feminist critics have pointed out, however, these theories construct the position of enunciation in colonialist or Orientalist discourse as essentially male, based on an East/West oppositional relationship as one of 'power, of domination', governed by 'a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections' and expressing 'a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different [...] world' (Said, pp. 5, 8, 12). Furthermore, Said argues that the Orient itself has a principally feminine cultural resonance, signifying a sexuality which is both desired and feared in the Western (male) imagination; Flaubert's representation of his Egyptian courtesan, possessed and voiceless, becomes a model here. Said's Orientalism clearly becomes questionable when the Western observer is female. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women were generally recipients of, rather than active participants in, colonialist projects and their accompanying ideologies. Moreover, while female travellers, as much as their male counterparts, may already have 'received' the East as a region of exoticism and promiscuous sexuality, through literary and pictorial representation as well as from ethnographic studies such as Edward Lane's An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), it was not available to them as a site of heterosexual desire. At the same time, their gendered sense of selfhood, conditioned by factors such as the position of Western women within marriage and the nature of European domestic life, impacted upon their responses to the foreign Other. Said himself has acknowledged this skewing within his thesis. In a later revisionary article, he admits that Orientalism is not a monolithic and autonomous praxis, but relates to a larger enterprise or critique that includes feminism and women's studies. He also raises the question of 'how knowledge that is non-dominative and non-coercive can be produced in a setting that is deeply inscribed with the politics, the considerations, the positions and the strategies of power'. (2) This raises further questions. Do women, as much as men, render the Orient as Other? Are they empowered to speak with an alternative voice free from or subversive of the dominant (male) discourse? Or, to put it another way, are they more likely to establish a dialogic relation with the Other, in a way that erodes, instead of erecting, difference? …