South Pacific and Muslim fantasy women functioned as identical 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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful; Romantic fiction made Polynesian and Muslim women interchangeable objects of desire — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 370; Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy (+5 more)

Related

• Romantic fiction made Polynesian and Muslim women interchangeable objects of desire (similarity 0.97)
• European men invented two opposite images of the same Oriental woman (similarity 0.93)
• Orientalist paintings of Muslim women reveal European male fantasy more than real conditions. (similarity 0.82)
• Romantic Orientalism shaped how Muslims were imagined even in positive portrayals (similarity 0.81)
• Romantic environmental determinism denied Arabs the noble savage trope given to Polynesians (similarity 0.79)
• Romantic Orientalism’s rare positive Arab portrayals were overwhelmed by negative depictions (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Romantic fiction made Polynesian and Muslim women interchangeable objects of desire #corroborates (0.90) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 370
• European men invented two opposite images of the same Oriental woman #expands (0.70)
• Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy #expands (0.60)
• Muslim women were pornographically depicted to commodity the Orient #corroborates (0.60)
• Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women #epitomizes (0.60)
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity #expands (0.55) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394
• Colonial feminism used saving Muslim women to justify imperialism #expands (0.50)