Orientalism and Sex

Edward Said's Orientalism, Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures, Part IV: Pilgrims and Pilgrimmages, British and French, p. 190:

In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy. Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau pine for what in their drab (or harried) bourgeois lives they do not have, and what they realize they want to comes easily to their daydreams packed inside Oriental Cliches: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on. The repertoire is familiar, not so much because it reminds us of Flaubert's own voyages in and obsession with the Orient, but because, once again, the association is made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as "free" sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions—quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe—were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the Orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, "Dirty Dick" Burton, and Lane are only the most notable. In the twentieth century one thinks of Gide, Conrad, Maugham, and dozens of others. What they looked for often—correctly, I think—was a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt ridden; but even that quest, if repeated by enough people, could (and did) become as regulated and uniform as learning itself.

It is frequently said that stereotypes are based on some aspect of reality. In many cases, however, the reality that stereotypes are based upon reflect less on the stereotyped subject and more on the person who holds this stereotype. The notion of the Orient as a real alternative to 'our' sexually-repressive systems seems to reflect deeply-held desires rather than empirically-based generalizations.

Perhaps the European Orientalist and modern Western Asiaphile hope to find in Asia a socially-acceptable escape from social obligation.

Orientalism and Women

In Orientalism, Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures, Section IV: Pilgrims and Pilgrimmages, British and French, p. 180, Edward Said writes of Orientalists Nerval and Flaubert:

More important, however, is the fact that both writers (Nerval in 1842-1843 and Flaubert in 1849-1850) had greater personal and aesthetic uses for their visits to the Orient than any other nineteenth-century travelers. It is not inconsequential that both were geniuses to begin with, and that both were thoroughly steeped in aspects of European culture that encouraged a sympathetic, if perverse, vision of the Orient. 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 of 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, Salome, and Isis have a special significance; and it was by no means accidental that in their work on the Orient, as well as their visits to it, they pre-eminently valorized and enhanced female types of this legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort.

Even within contemporary mass media images, the East is stereotyped as an exotic and strange world, an alternative to the structure and mundanity of the West. It is interesting that in addition to the alluring yet dangerous themes of sadomasochism, death, secrecy, and occultism, exoticism of the East and exoticism in general are often associated with femininity and female sensuality. Literary archetypes like the Femme Fatale and the more recent Dragon Lady intrigue the imagination through both attraction and repulsion, but this script becomes coherent only when the observer is assumed to be a heterosexual male. Similarly, the allure of the East is very much connected to the perception and possibility of the Oriental female. Oriental males, on the other hand, are rarely featured in inviting portrayals of the exotic East.