Nerval’s Orient was constructed as a dream-filled realm of hidden female sexuality

Evidence

In the Voyage en Orient the narrative consciousness is a constantly energetic voice, moving through the labyrinths of Oriental existence armed—Nerval tells us—with two Arabic words, tayeb, the word for assent, and mafisch, the word for rejection. These two words enable him selectively to confront the antithetical Oriental world, to confront it and draw out from it its secret principles. He is predisposed to recognize that the Orient is “le pays des rêves et de l’illusion,” which, like the veils he sees everywhere in Cairo, conceal a deep, rich fund of female sexuality. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 465

Categorization

• XREF: The veiled Orient concealing female sexuality connects directly to the author’s prior piece on moral panics over immodest dress as identity and political signaling.
• SEED: The two-word vocabulary (assent/rejection) as a tool for navigating a whole culture is a provocative essay angle on how travelers reduce entire civilizations to binary keywords.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 465