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.