Diverse nineteenth-century Western writers shared one latent image of the passive feminine Orient

Evidence

In the nineteenth-century writers I analyzed in Chapter Two, the differences in their ideas about the Orient can be characterized as exclusively manifest differences, differences in form and personal style, rarely in basic content. Every one of them kept intact the separateness of the Orient, its eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability; this is why every writer on the Orient, from Renan to Marx (ideologically speaking), or from the most rigorous scholars (Lane and Sacy) to the most powerful imaginations (Flaubert and Nerval), saw the Orient as a locale requiring Western attention, reconstruction, even redemption. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 514

Categorization

• XREF: The fixed feminized, penetrable Orient connects to the later Islamophobia literature on the gendered construction of the Muslim other.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the list ‘Renan to Marx’ — how does Marx fit the latent Orientalist core? Said gestures at this tension elsewhere.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 514