The Oriental woman functions as a mute occasion for the Western male imagination.
Evidence
The Oriental woman is an occasion and an opportunity for Flaubert’s musings; he is entranced by her self-sufficiency, by her emotional carelessness, and also by what, lying next to him, she allows him to think. Less a woman than a display of impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity, Kuchuk is the prototype of Flaubert’s Salammbô and Salomé, as well as of all the versions of carnal female temptation to which his Saint Anthony is subject. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 483
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The inexpressive, silenced Oriental woman prefigures the figure of the colonized/subaltern subject denied voice — a throughline the reader will trace into later Islamophobia readings about who speaks for whom.
Related
- Orientalist scholarship and travel writing feminized the Orient as a submissive sexual fantasy (similarity 0.84)
- Representation of the Other is an act of domination without consent (similarity 0.82)
- Orientalist writers framed Muslim women as commodified sexual objects to be acquired (similarity 0.81)
- Orientalists invented the Orient as a masculine adventure fantasy (similarity 0.80)
- Orientalist writers framed Muslim women’s bodies as commodities to be classified and acquired. (similarity 0.80)
- Nerval’s Orient was constructed as a dream-filled realm of hidden female sexuality (similarity 0.79)
- The Orientalist’s scholarly work is essentially an act of interpretation from outside, not participation (similarity 0.79)
- Latent Orientalism produced a gendered, patriarchal framing of the Orient (similarity 0.79)
- Orientalist paintings of Muslim women reveal European male fantasy more than real conditions. (similarity 0.79)
- The Romantic Agony’s aesthetic stock-in-trade supplied the eroticized female types of the Orientalist imagination (similarity 0.78)