The Mysteriousness of The Cultural Space in Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh

Abstract

Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh (1953) places itself as one of the eminent Western travel narratives where the cultural space is constructed through a set of implications that glorify Western Orientalist ideology towards the Orient. Western travel narratives on this region of the world have always been loaded with tremendous representations where the constructed exotic plays a focal role. In his turn, Mayne declares his loyalty to this Western tradition given that his construction of the cultural space in Morocco is totally based on a strand of mysterious and exotic images. Therefore, this paper aims to locate the sites where the cultural space is mysteriously constructed within A Year in Marrakesh providing reasonable interpretations of such embodiment of the exotic. The main question here revolves around the assumption that the cultural space is taken by Mayne as one of the props on which the cultural otherness is contextualized for the sake of constructing the mysteriousness of Morocco. The qualitative methodology is used in this study as long as the ultimate aim is to deeply assess the extent to which the concept of Orientalism appears as a paradigm by which such construction takes place in the novel. The results of this paper highlight an Orientalist manipulation within A Year in Marrakesh by which Peter Mayne misrepresents the cultural privacy of spaces in terms of Hammam and Jamaa el-Fnaa.