The female-gendered Orient was framed as awaiting European male conquest.

Evidence

In colonial-era literature, Muslim characters are presented as greedy, untrustworthy, backward, and violent—the “key menacing figure” in the Oriental milieu—a product of the desert’s wild and petrified nature. Descriptions of Egypt often refer to barbarity and cruelty, both reflected in depictions of the men of the region. In a review of the novel Sethos, Egypt is “that nation of sages, and of savages; the source of philosophic illumination, and the sink of barbarous ignorance; the mistress of the mightiest and the tributary of the meanest; earth’s palace of splendor, and her hospital of wretchedness.” The use of “mistress” is not accidental. The Orient was envisioned as a place awaiting European conquest, and European men traveling to Oriental shores often referred to it as “a voyage towards Woman.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 408

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s third guiding question: what do the monster’s makers avoid seeing about themselves. The gendering of conquered lands as female (‘a voyage towards Woman’) is a projection of masculine conquest fantasy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘voyage towards Woman’ formulation condenses the entire gendered-colonization thesis: conquest of the Orient as sexualized penetration, making the ‘monster’ narrative a screen for masculine imperial desire.
• STORYSTEM: The internal contradiction of Egypt as simultaneously ‘sages and savages,’ ‘palace of splendor, and hospital of wretchedness’ is a rich tension for fiction — a character or society holding profound wisdom and profound barbarism at once.
• SEED: The ‘mistress’ reading — Orient as woman awaiting conquest — is a strong angle for an essay on how imperial conquest was eroticized and justified through gender.