The Romantic Agony’s aesthetic stock-in-trade supplied the eroticized female types of the Orientalist imagination

Evidence

Nerval and Flaubert belonged to that community of thought and feeling described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, a community for which the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes (what Praz calls algolagnia), a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism, all combined to enable literary work of the sort produced by Gautier (himself fascinated by the Orient), Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. For Nerval and Flaubert, such female figures as Cleopatra, Salomé, and Isis have a special significance; and it was by no means accidental that in their work on the Orient, as well as in their visits to it, they pre-eminently valorized and enhanced female types of this legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 459

Categorization

• XREF: Anticipates the gendering of the Orient as feminized and eroticized that later Islamophobia criticism builds on. — connects to: Orientalist depictions eroticized the torture and death of Eastern women
• DEFINE: Introduces algolagnia (sadomasochistic taste) as a formative element of the Orientalist aesthetic.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 459