Gendering Orientalism

Reina Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136164750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In contrast to most cultural histories of imperialism, which analyse Orientalist images of rather than by women, Gendering Orientalism focuses on the contributions of women themselves. Drawing on the little-known work of Henriette Browne, other `lost' women Orientlist artists and the literary works of George Eliot, Reina Lewis challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze.
Gendering Orientalism argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implicitly nale position of western superiority, Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. It is this different, and often less degrading, gaze on the Orientalized `Other' that is analysed in this book. By revealing the extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism and highlighting the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Browne, Eliot and Charlotte Bronte, reina Lewis uncovers women's roles in imperial culture and discourse.
Gendering Orientalism will appeal to students, lecturers and researchers in cultural studies, literature, art history, women's studies and anthropology.

Chapter 1

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Race — femininity — representation

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This book examines the work of Henriette Browne and George Eliot in order to trace how their gendered agency as cultural producers contributed to and drew on the imperial project. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which their images and texts created or reconceptualized the spaces in which a series of imperial identities for both artists and writers and their readers could be articulated. I shall argue not only that discourses of gender (by which were produced identities as masculine or feminine) were racialized and that discourses of race (by which were produced racialized and national identities) were gendered, but that the very premise on which culture was produced and interpreted in nineteenth-century France and Britain was based on the construction and exclusion of a racialized and, in this instance, Orientalized other.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of unprecedented colonial expansion (involving the direct conquest and domination of other countries) and increasingly imperialist foreign policy (dedicated to the extension of European influence over the globe, but without necessarily direct administrative or military intervention), in which Britain and France were established world leaders. Although the age of high imperialism is usually associated with the ‘scramble for Africa’ of the 1870s and 1880s, Britain and France were already by the early nineteenth century expanding their influence in those parts of the globe that were to become the imperial theatre of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ This means that unlike the late nineteenth-century view of imperialism, which tended to paint imperial ideology as a phenomenon arising late in the century (notably in the 1860s and 1870s when it became clear that trade interests would necessitate political control of colonized lands), we can see pervasive structures of imperial ideology from the early part of and throughout the nineteenth century.² The mid-nineteenth century saw a change in the nature of imperial relations as the style of the earlier mercantile period, in which a degree of acculturation by European officials and traders was encouraged, gave way to the increased political and social intervention alongside an emphasis on European separation from ‘native’ populations, whose Eurocentric legacy we see today. This book does not attempt a study of imperialism per se. I am concerned to explore how, in certain and distinct moments, the interaction between culture and imperialism was played out in connection to gender. This investigation is organized by a recognition of culture's central role in the processes by which European values and interests were represented to Europe and extended to the colonized world.³ As Edward Said explains, culture was ‘the vital, informing, and invigorating counterpart to the economic and political machinery that … stands at the centre of imperialism’.⁴

It is not so much that ‘imperial culture’ developed to promote imperialism, but that, as a pervasive economic, social, political and cultural formation, the imperial project could not but influence how people thought, behaved and created. As Benedict Anderson has persuasively argued in his analysis of the development of vernacular print culture, visual and literary culture played a crucial role in the construction of the ‘imagined’ national communities in Europe that underpinned the imperial ideologies and administrations of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵ Said is clear that, whilst not attaching blame to the particular author or artist, culture in the age marked by imperialism and postcolonialism generally served to normalize imperial power relations.⁶ Although colonialism and imperialism had their opponents (for reasons ranging from the moral to the economic), the question of empire had an impact on all levels of British and French domestic life, with imperialist values frequently structuring even the terms of those who opposed it.⁷ Just as the world-wide recession of the 1990s permeates discussions about everything from education to fashion without any of those discussions necessarily being ‘about’ economics, imperialism in the nineteenth century was discussed, debated and contested as an issue of the day, present in everyday activities and diverse forms of cultural production — not just those that were ‘obviously’ imperialist. As Daniel Bivona argues, breaking down modal boundaries (between the political and the literary) can reveal a wider domain which has the structure of both a ‘culture-wide “debate” on the value and cause of imperial expansion and a cultural meta-narrative or mythology which subsumes even many of the critics of empire’.⁸ Given the enormous impact of imperialism on Victorian life it is — or as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak advocates, should be — impossible to consider any text (by man or woman) without taking imperialism into account.

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious ‘facts’ continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.⁹

These approaches mean, in relation to women's cultural activity, that rather than simply find the few arch-imperialist texts by women, we can analyse imperialism's role in structuring all their creative output. I am going to look at visual and literary representations of the Orient and the Orientalized other; a popular area of imagery that encapsulates the attitudes of Europe not just to its colonies but to the whole question of racial difference and which has, accordingly, been the focus of many twentieth-century critiques of imperialism. By attending to one set of representations that is obviously Orientalist (Browne's harem scenes) and another that, whilst clearly of an imperial moment, is rarely discussed as Orientalist (the representation of Jews and the division of Palestine in Daniel Deronda),¹⁰ I will show the pervasiveness of women's take-up of colonial ideology and their various mediations of it.

By focusing on women as cultural producers in a field of representation generally seen as male I shall demonstrate the pervasive effects of imperial ideologies on female subjects and their particular, gendered, interpellation into imperial discourse. This does not mean that white European women were either bad racists or good revolutionaries (driven by proto-feminism to empathize with their ‘sisters under the skin’).¹¹ Instead, it allows an examination of how, as individuals growing up in an age of unprecedented imperial expansion, they were affected by and involved in colonial ideology and imperial relations. If we take the categories of race, class and gender as neither opposing oppressions nor as metaphors for each other but, as Cora Kaplan puts it, as ‘reciprocally constituting each other through a kind of narrative invocation, a set of associative terms in a chain of meaning’,¹² we can transform our understanding of each term by analysing its articulation with and through the other. In other words, we never only experience ourselves as female/male but also and already as Black/white -even if the whiteness of a white subject is so normative that it is often experienced as a non-event unless activated by comparison with a Black subject.¹³ Thus, we can explore how discourses of femininity constrained women's access to positions of power and participation in colonialism and culture even whilst that very limitation, couched and understood in terms of gender, was also animated by imperial ideology — the gender specificities that accrued to women qua women were always built on their difference as white women.

Applying a perspective of race, class and gender to historical inquiry should effectively transform interpretations based on race and class or class and gender.¹⁴

I shall argue that, in a period marked by heightened imperial activity and increasing female participation in the cultural sphere, the interaction of the identificatory relational terms of race and gender could produce positions from which to enunciate alternative representations of racial difference. Exploring the gender-specific discursive pressures on the production and reception of women's representation of the Orient will allow us to undercut the mastery that usually accrued to the Western viewer's position and use the tensions in women's colonial utterances to highlight the tensions in imperial subjectivity as a whole, thereby allowing a reconceptualization of the workings of power and knowledge in the domain of gender.

SAID'S ORIENTALISM AND HIS CRITICS

In 1978 Edward Said's influential book Orientalism offered a new way to conceptualize the history of relations between what we might commonsensically call the West and the East, or the Occident and the Orient. Rather than accept the term as one that designates an area of neutral scholarly expertise (be it Oriental languages, literature or customs), Said argues that Orientalism was and is a discourse in which the West's knowledges about the Orient are inextricably bound up with its domination over it. Using Michel Foucault's proposition that all forms of knowledge are productive of power (constituting someone/thing as an object of knowledge is to assume power over it), Said assesses the implications of the Western construction of the Orient as an object of knowledge during the period of colonial expansion. Because he refuses to accept the innocence of knowledges about, and representations of, the Orient Said is able to consider how Orientalism's classification of the East as different and inferior legitimized Western intervention and rule.

For Said, therefore, representations of the Orient produced by Orientalism are never simple reflections of a true anterior reality, but composite images which came to define the nature of the Orient and the Oriental as irredeemably different and always inferior to the West. Orientalism establishes a set of polarities in which the Orient is characterized as irrational, exotic, erotic, despotic and heathen, thereby securing the West in contrast as rational, familiar, moral, just and Christian. Not only do these Orientalist stereotypes ‘misrepresent’ the Orient, they also misrepresent the Occident — obscuring in their flattering vision of European superiority the tensions along the lines of gender, class and ethnicity that ruptured the domestic scene.¹⁵

Eventually, Orientalism as a body of knowledge about the East produced by and for the West came to bypass Oriental sources altogether in a self-referential process of legitimation that endlessly asserted the power of the West to know, speak for and regulate the Orient better than the Orient itself.

As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist and on the Western ‘consumer’ of Orientalism … the Orient (‘out there’ to the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, ‘our’ world; the Orient is thus ‘Orientalized’; a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codification … as the true Orient. Truth, in short, b...