Orientalist horror figures were containers for white anxieties about race and desire

Evidence

Female Muslim monsters, like their male counterparts, were symbols of fear. Anxieties surrounding race, sexual desire, and identity found a place for expression in these characters, even the ones who were human-like. Take, for example, Jane Eyre’s Bertha, the West Indian wife of Rochester: “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal; but it was covered with clothing; and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a man, hid its head and face.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 417

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s core thesis: the monster is a container for what the West cannot face in itself. Bertha in Jane Eyre is a cross-domain echo of the reader’s project. — connects to: Orientalist paintings fused titillation with disgust to justify Western rescue missions; Orientalism operates like the creation of Blackness as projected white-American fear — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 217
• BMF: Bertha Rochester’s monstrous dehumanization evokes Jane Eyre directly, which is in the reader’s library — the passage recontextualizes a novel they know through the Orientalist-monster lens.
• QUESTION: Is Bertha’s “West Indian” origin positioning her within the Orientalist imaginary or a separate colonial one — and does Arjana’s grouping imply a single manufactured monster logic?