Romantic fiction made Polynesian and Muslim women interchangeable objects of desire

Evidence

Like Oceania, the Orient was represented as a place of dreams and nightmares, which were often expressed along gender lines. Miscegenation, an anxiety rather pronounced when it came to many exotic locales, is often absent in Polynesian romances, which frequently include a white man romancing a Tahitian, Hawaiian, or other Polynesian maiden. The fantasies associated with the South Pacific influenced some of the ways in which Muslims were represented, especially in Romantic fiction, such as the novellas penned by Pierre Loti. Loti wrote himself into many love stories with foreign, nubile, young women, including both Polynesian and Muslim maidens. In The Marriage of Loti, he falls in love with a Tahitian named Rarahu, and in Aziyade, with a Turkish girl. These two excerpts, which describe the two characters, demonstrate how Polynesian and Muslim females functioned as almost identical objects of desire in Romantic fiction: Rarahu had tawny black eyes, full of exotic languor, of wheedling softness, like those of kittens when one strokes them. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 370

Categorization

• XREF: This shows the monster-making imaginary imported ready-made templates across regions — the Orient borrowing the South Pacific’s fantasy grammar, reinforcing the reader’s claim that the image precedes and transcends any actual Muslim. — connects to: Orientalist paintings of Muslim women reveal European male fantasy more than real conditions. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 199; South Pacific and Muslim fantasy women functioned as identical objects of desire; Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy (+7 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 370

Broader Connections

• The Muslim woman functions as a fixed stereotype absorbing cross-discourse readings #expands (0.80)
• Muslim women were pornographically depicted to commodity the Orient #expands (0.75)
• Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy #expands (0.70)
• Romanticism projected an exotic Orientalist fantasy rather than accurate knowledge #expands (0.65) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 89
• History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful #expands (0.60)
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity #exemplifies (0.60) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394
• White Saracen women in medieval texts encoded male desire, not realistic portrayal #qualifies (0.55)