1

SIDI MOHAMED BEN ABDLLAH UNIVERSITYSIDI MOHAMED BEN ABDLLAH UNIVERSITYSIDI MOHAMED BEN ABDLLAH UNIVERSITYSIDI MOHAMED BEN ABDLLAH UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMAN SCIENCESFACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMAN SCIENCESFACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMAN SCIENCESFACULTY OF ARTS AND HUMAN SCIENCES SAISSAISSAISSAIS————FESFESFESFES

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISHDEPARTMENT OF ENGLISHDEPARTMENT OF ENGLISHDEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH "Literary, Cultural, Gender & Media Studies" LAB."Literary, Cultural, Gender & Media Studies" LAB."Literary, Cultural, Gender & Media Studies" LAB."Literary, Cultural, Gender & Media Studies" LAB.

MASTER: CROSSMASTER: CROSSMASTER: CROSSMASTER: CROSS----CULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIESCULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIESCULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIESCULTURAL AND LITERARY STUDIES

Gender, Space, and Race in Sheikh Desert popular Romances: Never Marry in Morocco, The Veiled Web, and Lord of the Desert as case studies

A thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the

Requirements for the Master Degree

Prepared by: Supervised by:

Mohamed OUKAAI Pr. Khadija LOUMMOU CNE:2422959055

Academic Year

2008-2009

2

To My beloved parents, I dedicate this work.To My beloved parents, I dedicate this work.To My beloved parents, I dedicate this work.To My beloved parents, I dedicate this work.

3

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the help and

support of many people, to whom I am very indebted. Special thanks

go first to my supervisor Professor Khadija LOUMMOU who has been of

great help in conducting this research. I deem it necessary to express my

gratitude for her guidance, advice, patience, and encouragement. Of

great help also is Professor Hamid MOUNTASSIR who provided me

with different reading materials, especially with the corpus I worked on

in this research. I am also obliged to all my professors from whom we

have benefited a lot for two years of study in “Cross-Cultural and

Literary Studies Master Program”. For their proofreading of my

research paper, I am grateful to teachers Abdelwahd OULGOUT and

MOUNSSEF Aziza. Finally, my thanks also go to all my classmates and

friends who have helped me with their reading materials, their advice,

and their encouragement.

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Abstract It is within the general framework of cultural studies that this research has undertaken to investigate a little-explored area of research in postcolonial criticism, which is that of ‘Sheik Desert Popular Romances’. This research embarks upon analysing the orientalist/colonial discourse in terms of the (mis)representation of gender, space, and race in popular romance. It aims at unveiling how popular romance can be engaged in reinforcing orientalist/colonial ideas and stereotypes which have been constructed about the orient since long time ago. This dissertation contends that despite popular romance’s being a popular form of literature, being written by women and being based on mass market, it constitutes a space wherein orientalist/colonial stereotypes are diffused on mass level. Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco (1996), Catherine Assaro’s The Veiled Web (1999) and Diana Palmer’s Lord of the Desert (2000) have been selected as case studies in the light of which gender, space, and race are going to be read from a postcolonial perspective. It is through this analysis of these novels that this dissertation, hopefully, aims at showing the significance of studying popular romance from a postcolonial perspective. Key concepts: Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Criticism, Sheik Desert Popular Romances, Orientalist/Colonial Discourse, Gender, Space, Race.

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موجز البحث

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�! وراء . ، �- �,+�ر �� ��� ا�����������) ا���ا��� (��* ا�(وا)�ت ا�'�#�� ��وا��ا�0 ا/

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: وا��(ق؛ وذ�D ا�:�7F �- ا�(وا)�ت ا�(و������ ا���4���� Never �� ا����ب �اأ� �و

Marry in Morocco (1996) �# The Veiled Web ا����� ا������ ،S)�,�� دC(ڤ ����

.(��V3 �ـ د)��� Lord of the Desert (2000) أ��� ا����اء و �ـ آ� ()- أ��رو، (1999)

، ) ا���ا��� ( '�#��ا�(وا)�ت ا� ��� �� ��� ا�����������، ا��را��ت ا������� ، :كلمات المفتاح��، ا���Lء، ا�;:�ب ا8�4'(ا7! وا���3�4ري،�,Oا��(قا�.

6

Table of contents

Dedication Acknowledgements Abstract(s)……………………………………………………………………...1 Table of contents…………………………………………………………...…..3 General introduction ………………………………………………………….5 Part one: Popular Culture and Postcolonial Criticism …………….……..9

Introduction:………………………………………………………………....9

1.Popular culture in context……………………………………………….9

1.1 Definitions of culture and /in Cultural Studies……………………10 1.2 Conceptualizing popular culture…………………………………..14 1.3 On popular romance and mass culture…………………………….20

2.Post/colonial discourse and popular culture/romance ………………...26

2.1 The Orientalist discourse in American popular culture…………...26 2.2 Popular romance in postcolonial discourse……………………….30 2.3 Instancing orientalist/colonial discourse in popular romance…….35

3.Gender, Space, race, and popular romance…………………………….38

3.1 The involvement of ‘western women’ in the imperial project……39 3.2 The politics/poetics of space representation………………………45 3.3 The trope of race in colonial discourse……………………………51

Conclusion:…………………………………………………………………57

Part two: A Postcolonial reading of : Never Marry in Morocco, The Veiled Web, and Lord of the Desert…………58

Introduction:..………………………………………………………………58

1.Gender and the representation of ‘native women’…………………….60

1.1 ‘Muslim women’ under western female gaze…………………….62 1.1.1 Never Marry in Morocco: Patriarchy and the ‘oppression’ of women .....................................62 1.1.2 Lord of the Desert: ‘Harem’ representation .............................68 1.1.3 The Veiled Web: The trope of ‘veil’ ....................................... 75

1.2 The ‘western’/ ‘Oriental woman’: Signs of differences……….…81

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1.2.1 Lord of the Desert: The allegory of impotence ………………82

2. Space and the construction of ‘imaginative geography’……………...88

2.1 The (mis)representation of the ‘Oriental space’…………………...88

2.1.1 Lord of the Desert: ‘Qawi’as an imaginary space ……..…..…88 2.1.2 Never Marry in Morocco: The representation of postcolonial space…………………………...93

2.2 The Veiled web: On aesthetics of surveillance …………..……....99 2.2.1 Gendering space: The representation of Morocco as a patriarchal space ………………………………………………..106

3. The (mis)representation of race……………………………………...110

3.1 Never Marry in Morocco: The politics of race………………….110 3.2 Lord of the Desert: Eurocentrism and the discourse of ‘primitivisation’/ ‘modernization’………..…….116 3.3 The Veiled Web: the construction of cultural/racial differences .... 121

Conclusion: ................................................................................................. 128

General Conclusion ........................................................................................130 Bibliography....................................................................................................133 Webliography..................................................................................................138 Appendix …………………………………………………………………...139

8

General introduction

This research is concerned with the analysis of the orientalist/colonial

discourse in terms of the (mis)representation of gender, space, and race in

popular romance. Certainly, a great deal has been said and written about this

issue of orientalist/colonial representations in imperial narratives. Still, the

impulse behind working on such representations in popular romance derives its

significance and relevance from the fact that, unlike ‘canonical literature’, a

little attention has been paid to the study of those representations in popular

romance.1 Given that popular romance is part and parcel of popular culture, the

choice of this topic is also due to the belief that it is on the level of popular

culture that the orientalist discourse can be more influential by means of its

being disseminated on mass level. Hence, the main objective of this research

paper by and large is to try to disclose how popular romance has been engaged

in reviving, prolonging, and buttressing old stereotypes constructed about the

‘orient’ in general.

In saying this, it can be noticed that there is a sort of shift from the study of

‘canonical’ literature to the study of ‘popular literature’. This shift is

principally owed to the emergence of cultural studies. Before its emergence,

culture and literature used to be conceived of more in terms of ‘elitism’ and

‘literariness’, meaning that it was only ‘high’ literature and culture that were

regarded as worthy of academic investigation, and that literature was to be

analysed intrinsically, away from any consideration of some historical,

political and ideological factors that can affect its production and consumption.

Such assumptions have indeed been revolutionised by cultural critics. I.e.

they no longer make distinction between cultural/literary forms, ‘high’ or

1 By popular romance, this dissertation does not mean those novels which are perceived in the west as mere novels of romance and sex. In this research, popular romance will be used to refer to those novels described as “sheik desert romance” or “imperial popular romance”, in which a western heroine travels or is kidnapped to an oriental setting, where she meets an Arab sheik with whom she madly falls in love. In such kind of romance, there is clear focus on the representation of the orient as an ‘exotic’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘erotic’ space. Thus the interest in studying such genre is to delve into its different forms of representation. Henceforth, popular romance will be used interchangeably with ‘sheik desert popular romance’ or ‘imperial popular romance’ so as to distinguish it from other romance genres.

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‘low’, calling for considering all such texts as being worthy of study within

academic framework. Significantly, literature has been conceived of less in

terms of ‘literariness’ or aestheticism, but more in terms of its being a cultural

product, within which hegemonic and ideological practices are played out. This

is to say that cultural studies has sought to get rid of all forms of ‘elitism’,

showing special concern to popular cultural/literary forms. Thus, it is within

this fundamental move of cultural studies towards studying popular

culture/literature that this dissertation has endeavoured to investigate an area of

research which has been widely ignored in postcolonial studies, which is

‘imperial popular romance’.

For the sake of exploring some manifestations of orientalist/colonial

discourse in popular romance, three romance novels have been chosen as case

studies: Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco (1996), Catherine Assaro’s

The Veiled Web (1999), and Diana Palmer’s Lord of the Desert (2000). That

this romance genre is mostly governed by specific generic forms/formulas

might not pose any difficulty in selecting one or another novel to approach it

from a postcolonial perspective, since most of them tend to have similar

structures of representing the ‘Other’. That is, their main plot revolves around

the geographical and cultural displacement of a western heroine, either

willingly (e.g. travel) or unwillingly (e.g. kidnap), from her western space to an

oriental space, where cultural/civilizational contact between the ‘West’

(represented by the heroine) and ‘East’ ( represented mainly by a hybrid or

westernised Arab hero, plus natives) takes place. And it is throughout this

contact that issues of representation and stereotyping take place on different

levels.

Nevertheless, the choice of the above corpus is very much motivated by

means of location in the sense that most of the novels are set in Morocco; and

by means of their setting the ground to tackle the main concepts this research is

going to examine, which are gender, space and race. Accordingly, this

dissertation will cope with these three concepts from a postcolonial

perspective, with the intention to highlight how they are constructed and

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represented in the light of each case study. In terms of gender, there will be

focus on how Arab Muslim women are represented as being ‘oppressed’ under

their religion and cultural milieu, showing at the same time how such

representations of Muslim women are meant to create a kind of antithesis

between them and western women. Concerning space, an attempt will be made

to illustrate how it is used as a means to construct a kind of “imaginative

geography”, to use Edward Said’s phrase, between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’.

Finally, throughout race, attention will be addressed to reveal how the myth of

racial differences is dramatised in terms of representing the western race as

‘civilized’, ‘modern’, and ‘developed’, whereas the oriental race as being

‘uncivilised’, ‘primitive’, and ‘inferior’.

Having said that, this dissertation argues that regardless of popular

romance’s being a popular genre of literature, being written by women, and

governed by mass market, it constitutes a space wherein orientalist, colonial

and cultural discourses are conveyed to a large number of readers all over the

world, thus playing the same role of other imperial narratives. It will be also

argued that given the fact that most popular romance novels are written by

American writers, these novels herald the burgeoning American imperial

tendencies, after the collapse of the two great empires: Britain and France.

As far as the structure is concerned, this dissertation is split into two major

parts: one is theoretical, which is about popular culture and postcolonial

criticism, and the other is practical, which is about a postcolonial reading of the

three novels in question. The first part is meant, firstly, to contextualize

popular culture and romance within cultural studies framework, showing how

the emergence of cultural studies has given importance to the study of popular

cultural forms. Secondly, there will be an attempt to approach popular

culture/romance from a post colonial perspective for the sake of showing how

some popular forms can be embedded with orientalist ideologies. Finally, in

relation to popular romance, gender, space, and race will be examined from a

postcolonial perspective in order to pave the way for discussing them in the

practical part. Afterwards, the second part will capitalise on some postcolonial

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concepts and theories in an endeavour to highlight how gender, space, and race

are (mis)represented in Never Marry in Morocco, The Veiled We, and in Lord

of the Desert. In this part, gender, space, and race will be separately discussed

in terms of how they are represented in each novel, thus devoting one section

to each concept. As far as the approach of this dissertation is concerned, it will

be a postcolonial one, using postcolonial reading as a method of analysis. It is

through this approach and method of reading that this dissertation can

demonstrate how popular romance is embedded with orientalist/colonial

ideologies.

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Part one: Popular Culture and Postcolonial Criticism

Introduction: What is popular culture? How does it work? What is its function in

society? What is its status within academic framework? To what extent the

conception of popular culture has changed with the emergence of cultural

studies? How is popular romance a part of popular culture? Can popular

culture/romance be embedded with orientalist/colonial discourse? If yes, how

does postcolonial criticism react to such discourse in popular forms? To what

extent postcolonial criticism is or is not ‘elitist’ in terms of approaching

imperial popular forms? How does postcolonialism deal with women’s

imperial writings? Do women’s imperial writings have similar function and

authority as male’s ones? How gender, space, and race are capitalized on in

imperial narratives to voice out certain orientalist/colonial ideologies? These

are some questions, among others, that this part will try to answer.

In dealing with popular romance from a postcolonial perspective, it seems

imperative to contextualize it within both popular culture and postcolonial

criticism frameworks. Unlike other imperial narratives, popular romance, as a

phenomenon of popular culture, is governed by many factors, such as mass

market, formulas, commodification and consumerism, which indeed make

difference in terms of how orientalist/colonial discourse is conveyed.

Henceforth, this part will be divided into three main sections, and all these

sections will try together to contextualize and relate popular romance to

popular culture as well as to colonial/postcolonial criticism, trying, meanwhile,

to answer some of the above questions.

1. Popular culture in context

This section seeks to contextualize popular culture/romance within the

framework of cultural studies. It is split into three sub-sections. The first

describes the fact that it is thanks to cultural studies’ interruption of ‘elitist’

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definitions of culture that new areas of research, like popular culture/romance,

have stirred the eager of many scholars. The second tries to define the nature of

popular culture in terms of whether it is a construct from within or from

without. The last exhibits how popular romance, as part and parcel of popular

culture, is determined by mass culture, formulas, commodification, production

and consumerism. In general, this section tries to justify the choice of working

on popular culture/romance, and to show some of the main factors that have

led to scholars’ turn to the study of popular cultural forms.

1.1 Definitions of culture and /in Cultural Studies

The objects of study typical of Birmingham cultural Studies include such popular, low, and mass cultural forms as advertisements, everyday architectural, spaces, cartoons, conversations, product designs, fashions, youth subcultures, popular literary genres ( romances, thrillers, science fiction), magazines, movies, rock musics, performance arts, photos, postcards, radio, television, and video. 2 (Vincent B. Leitch)

The relationship between culture and cultural studies is so intricate and

close that one of the major preoccupations of cultural critics resides in how to

define culture. In broad terms, cultural studies can be described as the study of

culture; yet, the question which raises itself is which culture should be studied?

In order to elaborate on this question, this section will attempt to account for

the relationship between culture and cultural studies, showing at the same time

how some shifts in defining culture have revolutionized humanities and led to

the emergence of cultural studies.

Cultural studies by and large has emerged as one of the most intriguing

academic fields of research during the last quarter of the 20th century,

especially in the last decade; and as an interdisciplinary field it has its separate

courses and departments in every continent, which makes it a global

discipline.3 One of the defining features of cultural studies is its being a

politically oriented field in terms of its adoption of Marxist, non Marxist, and 2 Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsructuralism (New York: Colombia university press, 1992)146. 3 Indebted to: Millner, Andrew, and Browit Jeff, Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction (New York: Routledge. 2002) 1.

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post-Marxist leftist traditions.4 How ideology and hegemony manifest in

cultural practices and products can be regarded as one of the main questions

cultural studies aims to investigate. In other words, cultural studies seeks to

investigate the materialization of hegemonic and ideological practices in the

daily cultural practices.

Concerning the historical development of cultural studies, Stuart Hall has

indicated many times that it is difficult to trace the origins of cultural studies,

or to define the nature of its development for it has witnessed many shifts and

interruptions from other disciplines since its emergence.5 In his article “The

Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of Humanities”, Hall elucidates

that the origins of cultural studies in its modern manifestations emanate from

the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies. Still, he states that this does not

mean that Birmingham is the only way to do cultural studies as “Cultural

Studies was then, and has been ever since, an adaptation to its terrain; it has

always developed from a different matrix of interdisciplinary studies and

disciplines”. 6 Put differently, cultural studies is a context-bound field that to

each context its variables according to which it can be studied. For instance,

doing cultural studies in Morocco will of course differ from doing it in a

western society because of the incompatibility of variables or premises

between the two contexts.

Over and above, cultural studies is a recent field of study that owes its

emergence to the important changes which have occurred on the level of

defining culture. Before the appearance of cultural studies, it was only

‘Culture’ with capital ‘C’ that was considered as ‘worthy’ to be studied

‘academically’, the fact that results in ignoring and excluding many cultural

4 Indebted to: B. Leitch, Vincent. Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsructuralism (New York: Colombia university press, 1992) x. 5 For more details about the origins of cultural studies, see for example: Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some problematic and Problems”, Culture, Media and Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. Ed. Stuart Hall, et al. (London: Routledge, 1980) 15-47. Explaining the difficulty of tracing the origins of cultural studies, Hall says that “cultural studies is a discursive formation, in Foucault sense. It has no simple origins.” Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996) 263. 6 Stuart Hall, “the emergence of Cultural Studiesand the Crisis of Humanities”, JSTOR Journal, vol. 53(summer, 1990), p.11-23. (http://www.jstor.org/), p.11

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forms, which are regarded as belonging to ‘low’/‘popular’ culture.7 For

example, Ian Chambers argues that

until quite recently popular culture has lacked a ‘serious’ discourse. It was invariably disassociated from intellectual life, usually considered its demonic antithesis, and so was completely underrepresented in theory, except by negation; in other words, it was not ‘culture. 8

Nevertheless, such elitist divisions between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture

have been revolutionized with Raymond Williams’s approach of the concept of

culture. According to him, culture is among those few words which have got

new meanings during eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; he sums up

those meanings as follows:

It came to mean, first, ‘a general state or habit of the mind’, having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean ‘the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole’. Third, it came to mean ‘the general body of arts’. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’. 9

In this quotation, Williams describes how the meaning of culture has

developed throughout time, getting new meanings. For him, the fourth

meaning of culture is the one which has actually revolutionized previous

definitions of culture for it breaks out with all forms of elitist definitions of

culture. And in relation to cultural studies, it is also this fourth meaning of

culture as “a whole way of life” that gets cultural critics’ interest. The

importance of this meaning lies in its implication that culture is no longer that

one which is associated with the elite or considered in the “Arnoldian sense as

perfection, sweetness and light, the best that has been thought and said”.10

Rather, it has come to include all human cultural practices and products in their

7 Indebted to: Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsructuralism (New York: Colombia university press, 1992) 169-170. 8 Iain Chambers, “Waiting on the end of the world”. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 204. 9 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Penguin Books, 1963) 16. 10 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) 34.

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whole way of life. Thus, for cultural critics, what used to be considered

‘frivolous’, ‘popular’, or ‘non-canonical’ can be studied academically and be

of great help to interpret certain social, political as well as cultural issues.

Importantly enough, Robert Young contends that Leavisism has also

contributed directly or indirectly to the emergence of cultural studies.11 Robert

Young explains that by its emphasis on “high culture works” and its tendency

to preserve them as being valid through time and space, Leavisism gave birth

to new voices calling for abolishing any kind of barriers that set limits between

cultural literary forms. In other words, Leavisism was based on strict attitudes

towards the definition of culture, and literary works to be engaged in

educational syllabi in the sense that only the ‘best’ and ‘high’ literary works

are to be taught and analyzed. So, criticizing such ‘elitist’ judgments and

attitudes towards culture and its products falls in the heart of the cultural

studies project, which comes to unmask how those qualitative judgments of

culture are subjective, elitist and ideologically oriented.

Such criticisms of Leavisism, elitism and the call for studying “every day

culture” have resulted in a kind of hostility between cultural studies and

humanities. Stuart Hall argues that “at the birth of cultural studies, the

humanities were relentlessly hostile to its appearance, deeply suspicious of it,

and anxious to strangle, as it were, the cuckoo that had appeared in its nest”.12

That is, cultural studies has developed new paradigms of analysis which have

challenged the ones of literary studies. In cultural studies, literature has been

considered as one among many other cultural products that can be subject to

cultural analysis. With the emergence of Cultural Studies and poststructuralist

cultural criticism, those evaluative and judgmental attitudes cease to exist since

cultural criticism, as Vincent Leitch argues, focuses on the whole spectrum of

the so-called “non-canonical and “non-aesthetic” artifacts, phenomena, and

11 Simon During, Introduction, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993) 1-25. 12 Stuart Hall, “The Emergence of Cultural Studiesand the Crisis of Humanities” JSTOR Journal, vol. 53 (summer, 1990), p.12. [17, 07 2005] (http://www.jstor.org/).

17

discourses”13 and, on the other hand, “renounces literary discourse and

literary theory as narrow and privileged”. 14

Therefore, it is thanks to such shift of interest from focus on ‘literariness’

and ‘high brow’ forms of literature to focus on the daily culture that cultural

critic’s concern is addressed to mass cultural forms like “advertisements,

cartoons, fashions, youth subcultures, popular literary genres (romances,

thrillers, science fiction), magazines, movies, arts, photos, postcards, radio,

television, and video”.15 In fact, such turn to such areas of research is to be

considered as an unprecedented move in humanities which heralds the

deterioration of classical topics and studies which regard ‘literariness’ and

‘canon’ as the basis of conducting any study. Henceforth, it is within the spirit

of this move that the coming issues are going to be approached.

1.2 Conceptualizing popular culture As indicated in the last section, cultural studies has been able to bring into

light many areas of research, like popular/mass culture, after their being

excluded for long time from academic spheres. In fact, there are some who

would reduce the whole field of cultural studies into “the study of mass or

popular culture”.16 And this is true since most issues tackled in cultural studies

are part and parcel of popular culture. If so, two main questions need to be

answered: what does this popular culture mean? And who are the makers of

this culture?

Broadly speaking, there are two main contradictory answers to the above

questions. The first would define popular culture as that culture which

emanates from people and expresses their interests and daily life; the second

one, however, would define it as a culture which is imposed on people from

13 B. Leitch, Vincent. Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsructuralism (New York: Colombia university press, 1992) 2. 14 Leitch, xiv. 15 See the first quotation this section starts with: Vincent. B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Postsructuralism. New York: Colombia university press, 1992, 146. 16 John Hartley, “Culture from Arnold to Schwarzenegger”, A Short History of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2003) 31.

18

above, and does not serve their interest. These two contrasting definitions of

popular culture are succinctly put by John Fisk as follows:

“Popular culture in industrial societies is contradictory

to its core. On the one hand it is industrialized- its commodities produced and distributed by a profit-motivated industry that follows only its own economic interests. But, on the other hand, it is of the people, and the people’s interests are not those of the industry.” 17

To delve into this contradiction, attention will be addressed to two main

opposing theories about popular culture. The first has to do with the ideology

of mass culture, presented by “mass culture theory”, and Adorno and

Horkhiemer in their conceptualization of Culture Industry; and the second one

has to do with the populist attitude towards popular culture, which will be

represented by John Fiske.

First and foremost, the attitude of “mass culture theory” towards

mass/popular culture is negative in the sense that it defines mass culture as

“popular culture which is produced by mass production industrial techniques

and is marketed for profit to a mass public of consumers.”18 Historically, the

emergence of this mass culture has been due to many factors, such as the rise

of large scale and mechanized types of industrial production, the growth of

populated cities, the disappearance of agrarian based work tied to the land, the

on-going increase of communal sense, and the secularization of cities.19 In

other words, mass culture can be described as an offshoot of capitalism, whose

sole goal is materialistic gains.

Therefore, human relations in mass society, Straniti argues, are no longer

characterized by that communal, spiritual, and moral sense; rather, people

relate to each other like atoms in a physical or chemical compound, being ruled

17 John Fiske, “Commodities and Culture”, Understanding Popular Culture ( New York: Routledge 1989) 23. 18 Domenic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995)10. Henceforth, all the main ideas about “mass culture theory” will be cited in the light of Dominic Straniti’s analysis of this theory in this book. 19 Indebted to: Straniti 6.

19

by “commodity fetishism”.20 Put differently, such deterioration of human

mores and the dominance of materialist ones have come as a result of the on-

going rise of capitalist thinking, in which human values, principles and ethics

are no longer considered, but can be sold for the sake of making money.

Moreover, in “mass culture theory”, the consumer or the audience is

conceived of as being helpless, passive, and unable to resist mass culture

temptations, which are exemplified chiefly in the myriad advertisements

consumers are bombarded with. Actually, the success in subjugating and

‘slaving’ consumers resides in the ability of the producer to formulate products

in standardized formulas which can appeal to different consumers. To say the

least, Dominic succinctly argues that popular culture is:

a standardized, formulaic, repetitive and superficial culture, which celebrates trivial, sentimental, immediate and false pleasures at the expense of serious, intellectual, time honored and authentic values.21

Hence, this argument displays that popular culture is a culture of formulas,

based on satisfying trivial or false needs on the account of real needs. And this

culture is primarily oriented by criteria of marketability and profitability, being

blind to the interest or benefits of consumers. Most mass market products are

meant to push consumers to buy more and more, though they can be of less use

for consumers. Interestingly, culture, art, and literature are the most cultural

products that are negatively influenced as a consequence of these mass culture

trends. Literature, for instance, has become as any commercial product based,

not on creativity or art, but on formulas and marketability. Popular romance is

an example of such literature, which has been commercialized and emptied of

any sense of artistic or creative aspects. In sum, mass culture, as argued by

“mass culture theory”, can not be a culture of people, but an imposed culture

which go against interests of masses.

20 “Commodity Fetishism” is a concept coined by Karl Marx to refer to the domination of material relations or commodity exchange on human interrelations. That is, commodities or objects come to govern producers’ and consumers’ thinking and behaviours, the fact that gives value to objects over human relations. See: Dino Felluga , “Definition: Commodity Fetishism”, accessed on July 2009, [http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/marxism/terms/commodity.html] 21 Straniti 14.

20

Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer’s definition of popular culture is

somewhat like the above one. Their conceptualization of popular/mass culture

is to be summed up in their concept of “culture industry”. Still, Adorno argues

that mass culture should not be used interchangeably with culture industry,

arguing that

the term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art.22

In saying this, Adorno tries to display that culture industry does not

emanate from masses, but it is imposed from above because this culture does

not come “spontaneously from the masses themselves”. For him, mass/popular

culture is supposed to be produced by masses. However, he argues that this is

not possible since it is culture industry that does fabricate cultural forms and

commodities in specific ways so that they can manipulate and shape the

culture of masses.

In “Culture Industry as Mass Deception”, both Adorno and Horkheimer

argue that culture industry is mainly about creating uniformity both in terms of

commodities and consumers so that there can be an identical relation between

the two.23 And to attain this uniformity, culture industry relies on the

technology of standardization, pseudo-individualization and mass production.

It is by so doing that the power of culture industry appears in terms of its

ability to master the differences of masses. There might be slight differences

between commodities, like in the case of popular romance novels which are

simply based on repetitive formulas with slight differences, but such

differences are illusionary or, as described by Adorno and Horkeimer, pseudo-

22 Theodor Adorno, “Culture industry reconsidered”, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) 98. 23 Indepted to : Theodor, Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Culture industry as mass deception”, The Cultural Studies Reader, Ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993) 29-44.

21

individual and reside in “exchange value”, not in the “use value”.24 Such

pseudo-differences are used simply as a means to excite consumers to consume

more and more. Thereby, culture industry becomes a means to enslave, and

exploit masses, leaving them with no choice-making, but to consume.

Such above attitudes of Adorno and Horkheimer can be regarded as being

very pessimistic and defeating. In fact, we can not deny the power of “culture

industry” in shaping tastes and needs of masses; but this again does not mean

that people are completely vulnerable, and helpless in front of this “monster”

of culture industry. Masses can make choices and are free to select what to

buy and what not. Also, not all products of culture industry are useless for

masses; they can be of great help in facilitating their lifestyle. Still, what can be

considered as dangerous is when a consumer is governed not by consumption

but by consumerism. Consumption is to consume as much as one is in need of

while consumerism is to consume more than what is needed.

Furthermore, in “Culture Industry Reconsidered”, Adorno comes, with the

same gloomy tone, to reiterate the same ideas he discussed with Horkheimer in

their previous work about Culture Industry. What is important in this last essay

is Adorno’s emphasis on how culture industry contributes to the objectification

of the masses. Adorno contends that

in all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan ... The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years … Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.25 (Added emphasis)

24 ‘Exchange value’ stands for the material value of a commodity in the market while ‘use value’ stands for the usefulness and practicality of the commodity for the consumer. And in industrial society, as Marx and Adorno explained, it is the ‘exchange value’ that dominates ‘use value’. See: Domenic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) 57. 25 Theodor Adorno, “Culture industry reconsidered”, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 1991) 103.

22

In this passage, Adorno lays bare how the masses are framed and

conceived of in the system of culture industry. Before a consumer knows what

to buy, culture industry draws plans and formulas, through which it anticipates

what consumers want or need. Consumers become powerless and passive since

they are not free to buy what they want, but what culture industry has produced

for them. In this sense, it is culture industry that shapes tastes and preferences

of the masses, the fact which justifies Adorno’s idea that culture industry

“ intentionally integrates its consumers from above”. In a word, Adorno’s

conception of popular culture is that this culture is an imposed one, and does

not express peoples’ culture. Rather, people are exploited, manipulated and

enslaved by this culture.

Surprisingly enough, John Fiske’s conceptualisation of popular culture is

totally the opposite of what is mentioned above. Fiske is one among those who

argue for the idea that popular culture is of the people, and can not be imposed

on them because “culture is a living, active process: it can be developed only

from within, it can not be imposed from without or above.” 26 In saying this,

Fiske tries to refute Adorno’s theory of “culture industry”, which implies that

popular culture is imposed on the masses from above. Supporting this idea,

Fisk argues that

Popular culture is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life. Popular culture is made by the people, not imposed on them; it stems from within, from bellow, not from the above. 27

In this manner, Fiske represents popular culture in terms of populism,

meaning that popular culture can not be understood as a culture which is

imposed upon the thoughts and actions of people, but as an expression of

people’s voices.28 To sum up, where mass culture theory and culture industry

26 John Fiske, “Commodities and Culture,” Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989) 23. 27 Fiske 25. 28 Indebted to: Domenic Strinati, An introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995) 255.

23

theory regard popular/mass culture as being negative, derogatory, and being

imposed from the above, the populist trend puts high premium on individual’s

freedom, their right of choice making, and their role of making their culture

from within.

In making a comparison between the two above conceptualizations of

popular culture, it is observed that both attitudes tend to be extreme in the

sense that they either consider popular culture as ‘bad’, ‘negative’, and “being

imposed from above”, or as a culture of the people, made from within, and

express their needs and interests. Actually, it should be argued that the two

above forms of popular culture do exist at the same time, but with varying

degrees. There is culture that comes from within masses, and expresses their

whole life; and at the same time, there is culture which comes from above,

being imposed on masses. Hence, taking an in-between position between the

two above opposing attitudes might be a less extreme, and moderate attitude.

In the coming section, popular romance, as one main form of popular culture,

will be discussed in relation to mass market, trying to see whether popular

romance expresses people’s needs, or it is a cultural product imposed on them.

1.3 On popular romance and mass culture Popular romance is unarguably one of the main types of mass produced

popular fiction, whose primary function is wish fulfilment, and in which love

and fantasy themes are the dominant ones.29 Basically, popular romance is

written by women, addressed primarily to women and tackles feminine

occupations, preoccupations and aspirations, focussing on the heroine’s quest

for love.30 The modern romance has developed through three main stages,

moving from the domestic novel, based on how women deal with their houses,

and their husbands, to the working girl novel, in which women are seen to have

access to factories, and offices; and lastly the happy novel, similar to the

second one, but distinguished by its being less religious, and its focus on 29 Scott McCracken, “Popular Romance”, Pulp: Reading popular fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 75. 30 George Paizis, “The Romantic Novel and its critics”, Love and the Novel: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Fiction (Houndsmill : Macmillan, 1998) 29.

24

women’s reliance on the self.31 This happy novel is also much about fantasy

and ‘away’, giving rise to Edith Hull’s The Sheik (1921), a prominent novel

which itself has led to the rise of novels described as ‘sheik desert’ or the

‘away’ romance.32

Like other popular genres, it is not surprising that popular romance novels

have been subject to exclusion and denigration, being considered as inferior,

badly written, and archaic in comparison to ‘highbrow literature’. Scott

McCracken argues that popular romance’s poor reception in modern era is

mainly due to two factors:

first, an association from the 1930s onwards of popular romantic fiction with mass market formula publishing; and second, the identification of that market with women readers and their supposed concerns- love, desire, fantasy, and imagination.”33

In saying this, McCracken stresses on elitism and gender politics as two main

factors for excluding these romance novels. I.e. most romance novels are

written not out of creativity and talent, but out of a commercial drive to sell as

many novels as possible. This fact, among others, exempts them from being

‘canonized’. And that these novels are written mainly by women, whose

writings in general have been for long time ill-received, is another reason for

that exclusion.

Significantly, given the fact that popular romance is part and parcel of

popular fiction, the latter has been defined as being less “serious” and less

valuable in comparison to literary fiction. In her review of Ken

Gelder’s Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of the Literary Field,

Anne Galligan highlights some of the opposing characteristics made by Pierre

Bourdieu between popular literary fiction and high fiction.34 I.e., where literary

31 Paizis 29. 32 It is this genre of romance that will be the centre of our focus in this research. This romance genre revolves around a love story between a western heroine and a sheikh from the orient; and it is though this love relationship that questions of mis/representation, orientalisation and stereotyping take place. 33 Scott McCracken, “Popular Romance”, Pulp: Reading popular fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 74. 34Anne Galligan , A Review of Ken Gelder's Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of the Literary Field , 15 April 2006 , Issue 39 - 40, September 2006, Australian Human reviews,

25

fiction is considered to be autonomous, a form of high cultural product, written

by authors, based on creativity and complexity, and expressed in language of

art; popular fiction, however, is deemed to be heterogeneous, a form of low

cultural production, written by writers (not authors), based on industry (not

creativity) and simplicity, and expressed in language of industry.35 These are

some defining features which make difference between literary fiction and

popular fiction, and which exhibit the ‘highness’ of the first over the latter. In

effect, it is this nature of popular fiction as being a kind of commercial

commodity, based on industry and profit making that makes of it target to

criticism and exclusion.

Still, with the emergence of cultural studies, such forms of ‘low brow’

literature are devoted a great importance in terms of their being useful to

explore some social, political, and even ideological factors that are played out

in their production as well as consumption. Like it is the case in this

dissertation, regardless of the commercial or ‘cheap’ nature of popular

romance, the latter is going to be approached from a post colonial perspective

so as to consider how it contributes to the construction of stereotypes about the

orient in general. Thus, in studying such popular literary forms, it is their

ideological discourse which will be of great importance, rather than their

artistic or literary features.

Moreover, “the development of contemporary romance is part of the wider

phenomenon of mass culture, itself a product of the industrial revolution.”36

And since popular romance is a mass market commodity par excellence,

romance publisher and writers rely on specific repetitive formulas which are

based on the demands, needs, and tastes of the masses for the sake of

increasing their selling opportunities. In popular romance, as indicated by

George Paizis, the participation of the readership as a group is very essential,

and it is also so perhaps to the functioning of all products of mass culture. In

this respect, to understand the logics of popular romance writing, we should [ http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/galligan.html] 35 Ibid. 36 George Paizis, “The Romantic Novel and its Critics”, Love and the Novel: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Fiction (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1998) 27.

26

distinguish between mainstream literature and category literature. The

difference between the two is explained by George Paizis as follows:

A working distinction between mainstream and category literature could be that in the former case the author writes a book, offers it to a publisher who in turn offers it to the reader. In the last case of category literature, the process is reversed. The reader demands something of the publisher who in turn finds an author capable or willing to supply it.37

In the light of this difference between mainstream and category literature,

popular romance is to be included within the latter type since romance writers

are quintessentially subject to the demands of publishers, who themselves are

subject to the mass market demands. To say it another way, it is the reader’s

expectations and demands that determine what romance publishers should

publish. This fact displays the decadence of art, creativity, and talent, and the

domination of materialistic values in writing literature. This fact also displays

how capitalism leaves no area of human life intact; it makes no distinction

between what is cultural or artistic and what is material or commercial. The

sole goal of capitalists is to make as much money as possible irrespective of

what humanity can lose out of such capitalist way of thinking.

Most importantly, regardless of the absence of any ‘literary’, ‘artistic’, or

creative drive in popular romance novels, it is these novels that sell well than

any other mass paperback. Statistically speaking, annual sales of these

romances exceed 180 million copies internationally per year.38 And Carol

Ricker-Wilson states that

a startling 48.6 percent of all mass market paperbacks presently published in North America are popular romances … Danielle Steel has sold over 100 million copies of her novels in North America, grossing an estimated $25 million a year. Two hundred million harlequin novels, available in twenty-three countries, are purchased worldwide annually. 39

37 Paizis 47. 38 Scott McCracken, “Popular Romance”, Pulp: Reading popular fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) 75. 39 Carol Ricker-Wilson “Busting Textual bodices: Gender, Reading, and the Popular Romance”, The English Journal, Vol.8 Jan., 1999, pp. 57-64, Jstor; 03 April 2007.[ htt:wwww.jstor.org]

27

Indeed, such statistics reveal a lot in terms of the large number of

popular romance novels which are consumed all over the world.40 This can

explain the power of mass market or, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s

concept, “culture industry” in terms of its mechanics which can drive people to

buy those mass market novels, though they are in fact of less value for

consumers. Albeit this attitude can be somewhat elitist, it can not be denied

that these mass market novels are empty of any real benefit or pleasure; their

writers and editors seek only material profits, having no intention to enrich

human literary or cultural repertoire. We are in fact fully aware that to each

one his/her tastes and likes, but most of popular romance readers are widely

subject to the impact of culture industry and its capitalist seducing techniques.

In her attempt to explain this increasing demand for popular romance

novels, Janice Radway ascribes the large number of romance readers to two

main reasons:

First, female readers constitute more than the half of the book-reading public… Harlequin now claims that its million-dollar advertising campaign reach one out of every ten women in America and that 40 percent of those reached can usually be converted onto harlequin readers …

Second, romance novels obviously provide a reading experience enjoyable enough for large numbers of women so that they wish to repeat that experience whenever they can. 41

Still, she confirms that such popularity of romance novels is not heavily

related only to women readership, but other factors have also contributed to

that popularity. For her, the technological inventions, organisational changes in

the publishing and book selling industries, and the focus on book production,

distribution, advertising, and marketing techniques have altogether contributed

40 In one of the coming sections, which is about “popular romance in postcolonial discourse”, it will be argued that regardless of such large number of romance copies, especially the ones written about the orient, there have been less interest in the study of the orientalist discourse in such genres from a post colonial perspective. The idea I want to lay emphasis on is that such romances are indeed more influential in terms of mis/representing the “the oriental”, especially because they are mass produced and can have a large influence on a huge number of masses. 41 Janice Radway, “The institutional matrix of Romance”, The Cultural StudiesReader, ed. Simon During, (London: Routledge, 1993) 452-453.

28

to the recent romance’s success.42 In effect, what Radway tries to articulate

here is the fact that the burgeoning mechanics and methods of mass market and

capitalism have heavily contributed to facilitating the tasks of production and

consumption of books, and thus resulting in having access to as many readers

as possible.

Academically speaking, a real interest in popular romance as a genre

coincided with the greater political awareness of the late sixties and seventies,

especially with the emergence of feminist movements.43 At that time, there

were two attitudes towards popular romance. The first accuses such romances

as being a hegemonic means which tries to naturalise “marriage as a natural

and inevitable form of sexual relations and reproduction, and domesticity as

the only and proper space for women”.44 So, popular romance is seen from a

feminist perspective as being complicit with the social norms of women’s

subordination to men, and that it enhances those social and cultural constructs

of femininity and masculinity. The second attitude, pioneered by Janice

Radway, contends that popular romance is highly desirable and beneficial for

women, and that it meets the needs of women which are extremely unfulfilled

in marriage, enabling them to escape from the patriarchal society that confines

and represses them.45 This opposition explains the above contradiction that

exists between proponents and opponents of popular culture.

Hence, given the above two attitudes toward popular romance, it is apparent

that popular romance, like any other popular culture form, also sheds light on

the controversial question of whether popular culture is an expression of

people’s needs and culture, or is it an ideological form of culture imposed from

above. In this sense, some would see popular romance as a means of

expressing people’s needs and interests while others see it as a means of 42 For more details about the main factors and institutions that have made romance a bestselling genre see : Janice Radway , “ The institutional matrix of Romance”, The Cultural Studies Reader; Ed. Simon during (London: Routledge, 1993). 43 George Paizis, “The Romantic Novel and its Critics”, Love and the Novel: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Fiction (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1998) 33. 44 Stuart Hall, et al., Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79 (London: Routledge, 1980) 258-259. 45 Tania Fera-VanGent, “Popular Romance Novels: Seeking out the “Sisterhood””,(Rock University library,2005), 25 may 2009 [http://www.archive.org/stream/popularromanceno00ferauoft/popularromanceno00ferauoft_djvu.txt]

29

oppression and exploitation. Still, in the coming sections, popular romance will

be seen as having another function which is that of stereotyping, ‘Othering’,

and exoticizing the orient, and thus carrying on the same orientalist/colonial

mission.

2. Post/colonial discourse and popular culture/romance

After contextualizing both popular culture and popular romance within

cultural studies frame work, we will now turn to approach such popular forms

from a postcolonial perspective, trying to display how orientalist discourse is

manifested in popular culture/romance. This section, which is divided into

three sub-sections, will attempt to show the materialization of

colonial/orientalist discourse in American popular culture, namely in popular

romance and Hollywood movies. It will be also an endeavour to delineate how

imperial popular romance is underestimated in postcolonial criticism, though it

fundamentally contributes to intensifying and prolonging orientalist/colonial

stereotypes and ideas.

2.1 The Orientalist discourse in American popular culture

Broadly speaking, it is since the emergence of postcolonial studies that

criticism has been largely devoted to criticising western imperial “canon”. But

in recent years, much focus has been devoted to the study of the manifestation

of the colonialist/orientalist discourse in contemporary popular culture. Such

shift from the study of ‘canon’ to the study of popular culture has been made

possible with the emergence of cultural studies, in which focus has been

basically dedicated to the study of the “popular”.

In terms of the colonial/orientalist discourse, popular culture is described as

having a huge capacity to spread stereotypes in large scale since most popular

cultural forms are massively mass consumed. Thus, the power of popular

culture forms resides in their mass influence. Stressing on the mass influence

of popular culture, Ella shohat and Robert Stam argue that

30

although progressive literary intellectuals sometimes disdain the reaches of popular culture, it is precisely at the popular level that Eurocentrism generates its mass base in everyday feeling.46

Interestingly, Edward Said is one among the first ones who have pointed

out to the materialization of the orientalist discourse in popular culture,

especially in the American popular culture. For Said, United States is emerging

as an imperial superpower which comes to replace the old imperial forces,

namely England and France.47 Such imperial emergence of United States is

exemplified chiefly in its international intervention in many global conflicts

and issues. In this relevance, Said confirms that there is a sort of “transference

of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target”.48 Such

transference features in American popular culture, in which Arabs are heavily

subject to (mis)representation and vilification. Describing how Arab Muslims’

image is distorted in American popular culture, Edward Said states that

since the World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in the American popular culture … Cartoons depicting an Arab Sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up consistently … In the films and television the Arab is Associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty. He appears as an oversexed degenerate, capable, it is true of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low. Slave trader, camel driver, and moneychanger, colourful scoundrel: these are some traditional Arab roles in the cinema.49

This passage is taken from the last part of Said’s Orientalsim which is

entitled “Orientalism Now”. After discussing in length how orientalist

discourse features in many spheres of western Knowledge especially in literary

and fictional works, Said ends his book by calling our attention to the fact that

orientalism never ends but embodies in new other forms, namely in popular

culture. Emphasizing this idea, Said argues that “the massive, quasi-material

knowledge stored in the annals of modern European Orientalism … has been 46 Ella shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994) 5. 47 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978) 285. 48 Said 286. 49 Said 284 -287.

31

dissolved and released into new forms. A wide variety of representations of the

orient roams the culture” .50 And popular culture is indeed one of those forms

of this culture in which the orientalist discourse is embodied. Of great

importance is the fact that Said stresses on American popular culture as a

source where these orientalist ideologies are materialised. It is so because

United States is considered nowadays as the last imperial superpower, which

seeks to dominate the world, after the fall of the two great empires: France and

Britain.

In examining the above passage, Said unveils how Arabs have been target

to distortion, misrepresentation in American popular culture especially in

American cinema. And, as explained by Said, the Arab-Israel conflict has been

one of the main factors that have led to the misrepresentation, vilification and

demonization of Arabs in western media, especially in American popular

culture. This can display westerners and Americans’ affiliations with the

Israeli, and their conspiracy against Arabs. Significantly, given the fact that

what Said says about the misrepresentation of Arabs in western media took

place since 1970s, what we are in fact witnessing nowadays, especially after 11

September events, as far as the distortion of the image of Arabs in western

media is not something new, but can be traced back to the early ages.

In a vivid study about this long past of western misrepresentations of Arabs

in popular culture, Jack Sheehan’s polemical book Reel Bad Arabs: How

Hollywood Vilifies a People displays in concrete terms how American popular

culture has been a means of stereotyping and vilifying Arabs in particular.51 In

this book, Shaheen has listed over than 900 films, produced in the last century

by Hollywood, in which Arabs are vilified in an unimaginable way. He

proclaims that

from 1896 until today, filmmakers have collectively indicted all Arabs as Public Enemy # 1- brutal, heartless, uncivilised religious fanatics and money-mad cultural

50 Said 285. 51 Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: how Hollywood Vilifies a people, (New York : Olive Branch Press, 2001).

32

“other” bent on terrorising civilised Westerners, especially Christians and Jews.52

Likewise, Shaheen argues that most films that he has studied represent

Arabs either as terrorists or as sheiks surrounded by ‘harems’, but hardly as

normal individuals living happily with their families and their children. Given

the global trend of Hollywood, Shaheen explains that Hollywood has

succeeded to have a massive influence both on American audiences and on

world viewers in terms of how they should perceive of Arabs via bombarding

them repeatedly with the same negative, biased and dehumanising images

about Arabs. Having said that, it is not surprising to see some westerners or

Americans who hold racist and hateful attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims,

which can sometimes be translated into violent behaviours towards some Arab

Muslims in the west.

Importantly, Shaheen contends that most of the stereotypes made about

Arabs have not come out of the vacuum, but were inherited from those many

stories, tales, and novels written about the orient, in which Arabs are

represented as living in desolate, exotic deserts, and corrupt palaces with loose

harems and beautiful women.53 Thereby, film makers have taken advantage of

that rich literary repertoire to more dramatise and reiterate the same images,

stereotypes, and clichés made about ‘Orientals’.

Put differently, the filmic representation of Arabs is very closely related to

how they are depicted in different fictional and literary forms. This displays a

kind of interlink between the filmic and the literary representations of Arabs.

Explaining this connection between fiction and cinema or media in general,

shohat and Stam argue that

cinema emerged exactly at the point when enthusiasm for imperial project was spreading beyond elites into the popular strata, partly thanks to popular fictions and exhibitions … the cinema adopted the popular fictions of colonialist writers and

52 Shaheen 2. 53 Indebted to : Shaheen 7-8.

33

absorbed popular genres like the “conquest fiction” of the American southwest.54

In saying this, shohat and Stam stress on the essential role of fiction in cinema

making. And also of great significance is that popular romance novels have

also been an important source from which many films are made in Hollywood.

For instance, E.M. Hull’s The Sheik, which is considered as the prototype of

romance novels, has been turned to a film, starred by Valentino. In this respect,

it should be argued that imperial popular romances are also part and parcel of

American popular culture, and these novels, like Hollywood movies, are mass

consumed, and thus contribute to engendering orientalist stereotypes among

the masses in a large scale.

In the coming two sub-sections, an endeavour will be made to discuss the

imperial dimension in popular romance, trying to examine some possible

reasons that have contributed to the downplaying of popular romance in

postcolonial studies.

2.2 Popular romance in postcolonial discourse

The study of imperial popular romance seems to be downplayed in

postcolonial criticism, in which a great deal of attention has been devoted to

the study of ‘canon’. In this sense, the question of elitism raises itself: is it

because popular romance is classified as a ‘low brow literature’ that it has been

neglected? That post colonial critics are elitist in terms of the choice of works

to be criticised is difficult to prove since there have been many marginalised

genres like travel literature and journalism, which have been approached in

postcolonial studies.

As an argument to refute the idea that post colonial criticism is elitist, Bart

Moore- Gilbert argues that postcolonial criticism has helped to

54 Ella shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994) 100.

34

undermine the traditional conception of disciplinary boundaries, focusing on the importance of approaching literature together with history, politics, sociology and other art forms rather than in isolation from the multiple material and intellectual contexts which determine its production and reception.55

That is, the main concern of postcolonial criticism is to account for literature in

relation to history, ideology, and politics, trying to avoid any possible

disciplinary boundaries between areas of knowledge. We can also understand

from the above statement of Gilbert that postcolonial criticism is also

concerned with politics of production and consumption in terms of how certain

forms of knowledge are produced and consumed, and what effect they can

have on consumers. Furthermore, Gilbert stresses on some of the main

important characteristics of postcolonial criticism in terms of displaying that it

has mainly to do with all forms of text, be they ‘high’ or ‘low’. He puts this

idea as follows:

Postcolonial criticism has contributed to the interrogation of received distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture which has been such a feature of cultural criticism more generally in recent decades. For example, a recurrent concern for some postcolonial critics has been to challenge the assumptions governing discriminations between literature and oral narratives, or orature. In postcolonial discourse analysis, meanwhile, there has been a proliferating interest in hitherto marginalized genres such as journalism and travel writing, a project initiated by Said’s Orientalism.56

Of great importance in this quote is Gilbert’s attempt to associate

postcolonial criticism chiefly with the criticism of the marginalised genres.

This association is in fact intended to break that dividing line between ‘high’

and ‘low’ genres as far as postcolonial criticism is concerned. To buttress this

position, Gilbert lists some researches devoted mainly to the study of

marginalised genres such as Dennis porter’s Haunted Journeys: Desire and

Transgression in travel writing, Marry Louis Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, and David

55 Gilbert Bart-Moore. Postcolonial Theory; Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997) 8. 56 Bart-Moore 8-9.

35

Spur’s The rhetoric of empire: colonial discourse in Journalism , to name but a

few.

Taking into consideration Gilbert’s above arguments makes it difficult to

regard postcolonial criticism as being elitist, at least in terms of the choice of

corpus. Still, the question of popular romance has not yet been answered. That

is, regardless of Gilberts’ focus on the idea that postcolonial criticism is

concerned mainly with marginalised genres like travel literature and

journalism, imperial popular romance remains somewhat absent from these

marginalised genres. Such absence is largely concretised in the writings of the

holy trinity: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gyatri Spivack, who are

considered the main founding figures of post colonial criticism.

Therefore, the issue of ‘elitism’ can be still valid as far as the exclusion of

popular romance from postcolonial criticism is concerned. For example, a

sense of elitism can be detected in Edward Said’s writings, particularly in

Orienalism and Culture and Imperialism. Said’s elitism resides both in his

definition of culture and in the corpus he works on in his criticism of western

colonial discourse. In his introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Said gives

two definitions to what he means by culture, and it is in the second definition

where Said appears to hold an elitist definition of culture. In Said’s words,

culture is

a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of the best that has been known and thought, as Mathew Arnold put it in the 1860s. Arnold believed that culture palliates, if it does not altogether neutralize, the ravages of a modern, aggressive, mercantile, and brutalizing urban existence. You read Dante or Shakespeare in order to keep with the best thought and known, and also to see yourself, your people, society, and tradition in their best light.57

According to this definition, we can see that Said is influenced by the

Arnoldian definition of culture, which is essentially an elitist one. Likewise, it

is also on the basis of Arnold’s definition that elitist classification of literature

57 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) xiii.

36

into “canonical” and “non-canonical” takes place. This elitism in terms of

literature is exemplified in Said’s saying “you read Dante or Shakespeare in

order to keep with the best thought and known, and also to see yourself, your

people, society, and tradition in their best light”. This idea is more emphasized

in Said’s following statement:

The novels I consider here I analyse because first of all I find them estimable and admirable works of art and learning, in which I and many other readers take pleasure and from which we derive profit. Second the challenge is to connect them not only with that pleasure and profit but also with the imperial process of which they were manifestly and unconcealed a part…58

Given Said’s above criteria of selecting his corpus (estimable, admirable

works of art and learning, pleasure, and profit), we can see in evident terms

how Said is elitist in doing so. Such elitist criteria in choosing the corpus can

account for the exclusion of popular romance novels from Said’s corpus since

such novels does not meet the above criteria. It can not be denied that most

popular novels lack that sense of ‘literariness’, creativity and originality. They

are mass-produced, based on formula system, and written for making

commercial benefits. Such nature of these romance novels contributes to their

being ill-received among scholars and intellectuals.

Still, since the major goal of postcolonial criticism is to deconstruct and

write back against western colonial/orientalist ideologies and stereotypes, there

should not be, in fact, any distinction between “high brow” or “low brow”

forms of literature as long as they communicate colonialist/orientalist

ideologies and stereotypes. Put differently, So long as there is a cultural or

literary form of stereotyping or ‘Othering’, it is highly demanded that such

forms should be criticised and deconstructed. Otherwise, postcolonial criticism

is going to be governed, not by the duty to write back and criticise western

biased and Eurocentric discourse, but more by criteria of ‘literariness’ and

‘aestheticism’.

58 Said, Culture and Imperialism xiv.

37

More importantly, in addition to the question of elitism, gender can be

considered as another factor which has contributed to the exclusion of imperial

popular romance novels from postcolonial criticism, especially if we know that

these novels are mostly written by women. And women in general have

suffered a kind of exclusion, not only in postcolonial criticism but in many

other disciplines.59 Again, Edward Said has been criticised for his exclusion of

imperialist women writers from his book Orientalism, thus ignoring the role of

gender in empire building. Sara Mills has discussed in Discourses of

Difference some of the constraints that make it difficult for some women travel

writers to be published or read such as accusing women’s writings to be

subjective, inauthentic and autobiographical.60 And given the fact that most

writers who write romance novels are women, there is no doubt that they will

be also exposed, as travel women writers, to the same constraints. Such

exclusion or devaluation of women writers or women in general is succinctly

put as follows:

Women’s travel writing, and in fact women’s writing

about colonial situation as a whole, has been largely ignored, or has been negatively viewed… there is a tradition of reading women’s writing as trivial or as marginal to the mainstream, and this is certainly the attitude to women’s travel writing, which is portrayed as the records of the travels of eccentric and rather strange spinsters.61

It is this tendency to consider women’s writings as trivial, inauthentic, and less

authoritative that have contributed to disregard their long tradition as far as

imperial discourse is concerned. Still, it has recently been proven that western

women have really involved in colonial project, playing a crucial role in the

imperial discourse, especially with women travel writers.

In consequence, we can say that both elitism and gender politics are two

main factors, among others, that can explain the undermining of popular

59 More details about this issue of women’s exclusion are going to be discussed in one of the coming sections, which will be about “the involvement of women in imperial project”. 60 Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1991) 35. 61 Mills 61.

38

romance writers in postcolonial criticism. In the coming section, an attempt

will be made to display the relevance of this genre to the colonial discourse and

the importance of approaching it from a postcolonial perspective.

2.3 Instancing orientalist/colonial discourse in popular romance

In the previous section, it has been argued that a little attention has been

paid to the study of popular romance from a postcolonial perspective. Elitism,

politics of gender, and the commercial nature of popular romance novels are

some of the main factors that have resulted in downplaying to a large extent

this genre in postcolonial criticism. In an attempt to draw attention to this

genre, this section will try to shed light on how colonialist/orientalist discourse

is instanced into imperial popular romance. Regardless of the literary status of

this genre, it will be argued that it is on the level of popular romance (and

popular culture in general) that colonialist/orientalist ideologies and

stereotypes are revived, prolonged and buttressed.

First and foremost, that imperial popular romance is embedded with

colonial/orientalist ideologies can manifest on the level of the formula of its

plot. In this type of romance, a western blond heroine is kidnapped to or travels

to a non-western space, which is mostly an oriental space, where she meets a

hybrid or a westernised Arab hero, and with whom she madly falls in love. It is

through this cultural and spatial move of the heroine to an oriental space where

orientalist stereotypes and biases are implemented. The heroine is represented

as a western representative, who comes to disclose the ‘primitiveness’ and

‘backwardness’ of the natives, and thus being represented as fulfilling the

‘duty’ of ‘ civilizing’ and ‘modernizing’ those natives. In her relation with the

hero and the natives, the heroine is usually represented as more ‘superior’,

‘sophisticated’ and ‘civilised’ than them. Given such a plot, we can see how

this genre is largely based on old imperial tropes such as “the white man’s

burden”, “civilizing mission” and “modernisation”. The main danger of

imperial popular romance resides in its ability to diffuse its ideologies on a

39

mass level. And it is in fact on this level where imperial romance appears to be

of great influence in terms of ‘orientalising’ and stereotyping the orient.

The emergence of such popular forms of romance prove the fact that

imperial ideologies do not die by the end of empire, but develop and take new

forms. Being fully conscious of this issue, Rana Kabani states that “imperial

ideas did not perish with empire. They serve as much of a manipulative

political function today as they did a hundred years ago.” 62 This is true as far

as imperial romance is concerned since this romance has been capitalizing on a

great deal of old orientalist accounts to construct and reconstruct old imperial

stereotypes. As will be discussed in the practical part of this dissertation, an

attempt will be made to disclose some of those stereotypes as far as gender,

space, and race are concerned. In doing so, it will be elucidated that most of

these stereotypes have been derived from an old western constructed orientalist

register, which has been used to stereotype the orient since antiquity.

Importantly, Rana Kabani can be considered as of one of the main

postcolonial critics who have flagrantly alluded to that growing imperialist

popular literature, in which popular romance is to be included. Rana Kabani

illustrates this idea as follows:

Today, the imperial torch has been passed to a new group

of Orientalists, a great many of them American feminists. It has become intellectually fashionable for American women writers – with little or no experience of the Muslim world, with no knowledge of Muslim history- to spew forth, in books and articles, on the ‘pathetic’ state of women under Islam. What is worrying about this growing literature – which is always popular with a Western readership that can never get enough about the ‘horrors’ of Islam- is that it re-establishes the old racial stereotypes at a time when it is quite disastrous to do so, given an already taut situation between the Muslim and the west …63

In such a telling quote, there is no doubt that popular romance writers are to be

added to the list of this “new group of Orientalists” who has taken “the burden”

62 Rana Kabbani, “Preface”, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of Orient (London: Pandora, 1994 1986) ix. 63 Kabani ix.

40

of “the imperial torch”. Put differently, popular romance novelists who write

about the orient are mostly from America, “with little or no experience of the

Muslim world, with no knowledge of the Muslim history”, and “re-establishes

the old racial stereotypes”. Therefore, popular romance can be considered as a

means to instance and revive old imperial stereotypes.

In addition, it should be argued that popular romance is a form of colonial

literature par excellence. Colonialist literature, in broad terms, refers to that

literature produced by westerners, male and female, about non-western people.

In this kind of literature, the colonised people are subject to myriad forms of

misrepresentation, deformation and subjugation while the coloniser is

represented as ‘civilised’, ‘modern’, and ‘sophisticated’. Ellek Bohemer makes

distinction between colonial and colonialist literature; the former refers to

writings concerned with colonial perceptions and experiences, written mainly

by metropolitans, but also by the creoles and indigenous, during colonial times,

and thus it comprises both literature written by colonizing as well as colonized

countries.64 The latter, however, is primarily about colonial expansion, and is

instilled with orientalist and colonialist ideologies. This kind of literature is

illustrated as follows:

Literature written by and for colonizing Europeans about non-European lands dominated by them...colonialist literature was informed by theories concerning the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire. Its distinctive stereotyped language was geared to mediating the White man’s relationship with colonized peoples.65

Given this latter definition, one can deduce that colonialist literature is

about the construction of binary oppositions in which the west’s ‘superiority’,

‘civilization’ and ‘whiteness’ are to be contrasted with the ‘East’, ‘inferiority’,

‘backwardness’ and ‘blackness’. Concerning imperial romance, it is found that

it partakes of all those aforementioned characteristics of colonialist literature.

I.e. popular romance enhances such binary oppositions between the orient and

64 Elleke Bohemer, Colonial and Post Colonial Literature (Oxford: oxford university press, 1996) 2. 65 Bohemer 2-3.

41

the occident via representing a western heroine meeting an Arab sheikh from

the orient, falling in love with each other. It is through such meeting that binary

oppositions are constructed between the West and the East. Probably because

of its lack of a certain authority, political or academic, in comparison to other

orientalist genres such as anthropological and ethnographic accounts or travel

literature that imperial romance’s colonialist/orientalist discourses are

dismissed.

Importantly enough, it is probably true that popular romance lacks a

certain political or ‘academic prestige’ as other imperial genres, but it rightly

functions as a medium to enhance and communicate imperial and orientalist

images and ideas. If the orientalist/colonial discourse produced by academic

disciplines and institutions work from without, the one produced by romance

writers can work from within. That is to say, given the large number of readers

of this romance genre, e.g. millions of copies are sold each years of these

romance novels, this genre necessarily enhances and engraves the

orientalist/colonial stereotypes mainly among the masses, pushing them to hold

Eurocentric attitudes towards non-westerners. Therefore, imperial romance

novels should be regarded as performing the same imperial or orientalist

function as any colonial or imperial narrative.

3. Gender, Space, race and popular romance This section aims at paving the way for the practical part in this research. It

is divided into three sub-sections, and each sub-section will be concerned with

one concept, trying to show the relevance of that concept to popular romance.

The first will elaborate on the concept of gender in terms of showing that

colonialist/orientalist discourse is not only exclusive to men, but also to

women. The second will focus on the concept of space as far as its significance

and function in any colonialist/orientalist discourse. The last sub-section will

try to lay bare some of the orientalist/colonial implications of race, and how

race is used as a pretext for justifying colonialism and exploitation.

42

3.1 The involvement of ‘western women’ in the imperial project Given the fact that imperial romance novels are mostly written by western

women, this section undertakes the investigation of western women’s

relevance to the imperial project. It will try to answer some of the following

questions: to what extent western women are engaged in imperial mission?

How do they contribute to the orientalist/colonial discourse? What is the status

of women’s imperial discourse in comparison to men’s one? Do they differ or

serve the same imperial ideology? How do some postcolonial critics regard

women’s imperial discourse? How is western feminism complicit with

imperial discourse? And finally, what is the reaction of postcolonial feminism

to western feminism?

By and large, the role of gender in imperial discourse was ignored for long

time. I.e., imperial project is mostly interpreted as a white male’s burden, to

use Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase, disregarding any possible role that

women might have played in this project. Regardless of some reservations as

far as Sara Mills’s approach of women’s imperial discourse is concerned66, she

is considered among the first ones to introduce the relevance of gender to

colonial discourse. Arguing that little serious work has been undertaken to

analyse women as agents within the colonial context, Sara Mills claims that

Discourses of Difference is “the first book to set women travellers within the

colonial context.” 67 Women, especially in Victorian age, were regarded as

“ individuals struggling against the social conventions of the Victorian period,

who were exceptional in managing to escape the system of chaperonage.”68

Such attitudes towards Victorian women contributed to their being excluded

from imperial project, and from being acknowledged as imperial agents.

According to Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, the discourse of femininity,

which regards women as mothers, housewives, passive and emotional, is the

major constraint that contributes to the exclusion of women in areas of life, and

66 This reservation will be explained while discussing some of Sara Mills’ ideas. 67 Sara Mills, Discourse of Difference: An analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 1991) 2-3. 68 Mills 3.

43

from having access to professional life. This discourse regards women as

lacking an authentic voice, unable to adopt imperial discourse in their writings.

Women’s writings, Sara Mills argues, “are more tentative than male’s

discourse, less able to assert truths of British rule”.69 Thus, given all these

constraints, there has been lack of acknowledgment or consideration of

women’s engagement in the imperial project.

In her book Discourses of Difference, Sara Mills has tried to display how

western women writers have engaged in the imperial project, giving some of

the writings of Alexendra David-Neel, Mary Kingsley, and Mana Mazuchelli

as examples of that engagement. Still, Sara Mills arguments should not be

taken for granted. Her major concern is not to criticise those western women as

far as their colonial discourse is concerned, but to bring into light the role of

western women, and not only men, in the imperial project. Given that she is a

feminist, it is the issue of women, not the colonised people, which concerns her

most in that book. Put differently, she has tried in that book to attack those

patriarchal attitudes which deny women’s abilities to be colonial agents.

Hence, she can not be classified as a postcolonial writer who intends to

disclose and deconstruct colonial ideologies, but might be considered as

engaged in endorsing some colonial ideologies.

Over and above, it is also noticed that with the emergence of postcolonial

criticism, a great deal of attention has been devoted to attack western imperial

male agents, thus ignoring to a large extent the role of western women in the

imperial project. One of the main postcolonial critics who argue for western

women’s engagement in colonial discourse is Elleke Boher saying that

women were not absent from colonial activity, either as travellers and settlers or as writers, though they have not been canonized in the same way as male adventure writers. Women travellers like Mary Kingsly, Florence Dixie, Emily Eden, Lucie Duff Gordon ... Shared colonialist attitudes (most obviously, stereotypical responses to indigenous peoples). 70

69 Mills 3. 70 Elleke Bohemer, Colonial and Post Colonial Literature, (Oxford: oxford university press, 1996) 224.

44

In postcolonial criticism, it is Edward Said who has been the main target

of criticism for his downplaying the issue of gender in his landmark book

Orientalism (1978). Reina Lewis argues that Said’s dealing with women is

limited to the representation of negative images of women or as “the metaphor

for the negative characterisation of the Orientalized Other as ‘feminine’.71 That

is, the woman in Said’s Orientalism is mostly represented as being subject of

desire or as being exploited by the colonizers, but he does not refer to women

as agents of orientalism. Said clearly states this idea as follows:

Orientalism was an exclusively male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it viewed itself and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially evident in the writing of travellers and novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy. They express unlimited sensuality, they are more or less stupid, and above all they are willing.72

In this way, it appears that Said’s concern with women has not to do with their

involvement in orientalism or in producing colonial discourse, since such

things are in Said’s terms part of “male province’. His main concern lies in

depicting the negative image the colonized women were associated with, and

in showing how they were treated by colonizers, giving Flaubert’s Kuchuk

Hanem as an example of the way the colonised women are treated.

Commenting on Said’s exclusion of western women as imperial agents,

Alison Blunt argues that “it is notable that women are perceived as colonized

rather than potential colonizers, and by extension, neglected as readers of

imperial literature”. 73 She also adds as far as Said’s book Culture and

Imperialism is concerned that “Said cites women novelists throughout his

account but neglects the significance of constructions of gender for both

authorship and imperialism”. 74 That is, though Said attempts in Culture and

Imperialism to give voice to women, he again neglects tackling how these

women have contributed to empire building.

71 Bohemer 18. 72 Edward W. Said. Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978) 207. 73 Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994) 27. 74 Blunt 27.

45

And in her attempt to reform Edward Said’s theory, Rena Lewis calls

for considering the issue of gender, arguing that

attention to women’s writers and artists, therefore, does not just add but actively reforms Said’s original version: it disallows a conceptualization of discourse as intentionalist and unified by highlighting the structural role of sexual as well as racial difference in the formation of colonial subject position…it insists on the impact of imperialism on the lives of women and men ( colonizers and colonized); and, by so doing, disrupts the masculinism found in accounts and critics of imperialism.75

In this quotation, Lewis tries to put high premium on the essential relationship

between gender and imperialism, and calls for paying attention to the status of

women, coloniser and colonised, within imperialism. She also emphasizes the

heterogeneity of the imperial discourse, which is constructed both by

masculine and feminine discourses.

Additionally, and as argued by Alison Blunt, it is undeniable that

imperialism has provided opportunities for some western women to get rid of

those Victorian shackles that limited women’s freedom within their houses.

Alison Blunt maintains that

imperial expansion provided unprecedented opportunities for white, and at least middle-class, women to travel, with motives including wifely duty to husbands who were offices or officials, missionary zeal, the desire for adventure, and professional, interests such as scientific research.76

In saying this, Alison Blunt stresses the main factors that have allowed

western women to have experience in the orient and to write about it.

Relevantly, by western women’s move to the colonised land their social status

witnesses a kind of change, moving from an inferior status in their societies to

75 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996) 20. 76 Blunt Alison, “ Mapping Authorship and authority: Reading Mary Kingsley’s Landscape Descriptions”, Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Post Colonial Geographies, Alison Blunt and Gillian (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994)52.

46

a superior status in the colonised countries. To elaborate on this point, Cheryl

McEWAN contends that British women, for instance,

…were empowered by the fact that within the empire, status was determined by race as well as by gender. Notions of gender were closely linked to notions of race; Africa as a continent and the African people themselves were commonly feminized by the literature of empire; women and African were both “othered”…however, British women often became “honorary men,” were treated no differently by the Africans than were British men, and were often referred to as “ Sir.”77

This sense of superiority that western women show in relation to the natives is

clear especially in their writings about the orient. For instance, in imperial

romance novels, it is noticed that with the absence of the western man in the

imperial romance narratives, the western woman, being fully conscious of the

superiority of her race, is represented as being superior both to the Eastern man

and women, with the intention to ‘civilize’ and ‘enlighten’ the natives. In this

sense, it can be argued that the invisibility of western women “becomes visible

at the expanse of colonized women, perpetuating an exclusionary, ethnocentric

discourse”.78 Thus, in comparison to western women, the colonized women

are doubly colonized suffering from both patriarchy and colonialism or, as

Kabani puts it, they are “doubly inferior, being women and Easterners”.79

Interestingly, that unequal relationship between western woman and

Eastern woman does also feature in western feminist discourse in the sense that

western feminism is accused of being entangled of holding imperial and

Eurocentric attitudes towards women of colour. This has broken out a counter-

discourse, launched by postcolonial feminists who have excluded themselves

from western feminism and coined new concepts to distinguish themselves

from western feminism, such as womanism, coined by Alice Walker, or

77 Cheryl McEWAN , “Encounters with West African Women : Textual Representations of Difference by White Women Abroad” ”, in Alison Blunt and Gillian (Eds). Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Post Colonial Geographies (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994) 88. 78 Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley and West Africa (New York: Guilford Press, 1994) 6. 79 Rana Kabbani, Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of Orient (London: Pandora, 1986) 51.

47

postcolonial feminism. Here, Elleke Bohemer explains some of the aspects of

marginality and exclusion in western feminist discourse:

up to the late 1970s, feminist analyses of power placed emphasis on a common experience of oppression, to the extent that important cultural differences, and differential experiences of powerlessness, were often ignored. Agency and rights were, for example, defined from a White American or European point of view with stress on the individual. An unfortunate result of that was that stereotypes of the third world as less liberated, less advanced, or mired in tradition and superstition, often resurfaced.80

In this respect, among the most important articles which uncover the

contamination or the entanglement of western feminist discourse in the

colonial discourse is Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes:

Feminist Scholarship and colonial discourses”.81 In this article, Mohanty

argues that colonialism has not only to do with economic exploitation, but it

can be used to refer to the production of a particular cultural discourse about

what is called “third world”.82 For instance, the way “third world women” are

conceived of and represented by western feminism as one entity is a form of

colonial discourse. Concerning how western feminist discourse constructs that

difference of third world women, Mohanty assumes that “it is in the

production of this third world difference that western feminisms appropriate

and colonize the constitutive complexities which characterise the lives women

in these countries.”83 In other words, western feminism tends to produce a

reductive discourse which tries to envelop all third world women under one

category.

In terms of this reductive discourse, Mohanty argues that western feminism

tends to produce a hegemonic and monolithic discourse which constructs

‘third world women’ as “a homogeneous powerless group often located as

80 Elleke Bohemer, Colonial and Post Colonial Literature (Oxford: oxford university press, 1996) 225. 81 Chandra Talpade Mohanty. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and colonial discourses”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 1993)196-220. 82 Indebted to : Mohanty 196. 83 Mohanty 198.

48

implicit victims of particular cultural and socioeconomic systems”.84

Significantly enough, in her arguments about the reductive and colonial

discourse produced by western feminist discourse about ‘third world women’,

Mohanty lists some of the main stereotypes or clichés used to refer to all

women in the third world; namely, they are referred to as being victims of

traditions and male violence, being as an identifiable group known by their

shared dependencies and passivity, being victims of the colonial process, the

familial system or patriarchy, being subject to subjugation by some religious

ideologies, and being similar in terms of their needs and problems.85 What is

striking in such representations is the homogenizing view that makes no

difference between the different varieties of women in the ‘third world’.

Women are represented as being in a timeless and stable state in terms that

they do not change and do not develop, which is absolutely wrong. Women in

many countries in the third world are engaged in all different spheres of life

and have proved to be competent and successful both at their homes and

abroad as well. Thus, western women’s representation of women of colour is

no more than a hegemonic and monolithic discourse which is part and parcel of

western imperial discourse.

In the light of what has been said above, one can conclude that there has

been indeed a concrete engagement of some western women in the imperial

project, though such entanglement was for long time ignored. In the practical

part of this research, an attempt will be made to display that sort of

engagement, especially in the case of women writers of popular romance.

3.2 The politics/poetics of space representation One of the most defining features of imperial popular romance is the

construction of an exotic, alien space in which the western reader is called to

exoticize himself/herself. This space is intended to construct spatial, historical,

and cultural divisions between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. In fact, such space

division in these romance novels starts from the very beginning of the story 84 Mohanty 200 85 Mohanty 200-208.

49

when the heroine travels to or is kidnapped to a non-western space. It is in this

very shift from the heroine’s space to the ‘exotic’ space that the representation

of the Other’s space starts taking place. Actually, these are some of the issues

that will be investigated in the second part of this paper. In this section, an

attempt will be made to investigate the very concept of space and how it is

theorized especially in the postcolonial discourse.

Actually, space is amongst those hard concepts to be easily defined

because of the myriad definitions that can be ascribed to it. It can be associated

with place, territory, geography, geometry or to refer to what is cultural,

historical or metaphorical. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin

highlight the interrelation between space/place and language, history and

identity formation. They argue that

the concepts of place and displacement demonstrate the very complex interaction of language, history and environment in the experience of colonized peoples and the importance of space and location in the process of identity formation. In many cases, ‘place’ does not become an issue in a society’s cultural discourse until colonial intervention radically disrupts the primary modes of its representation by separating ‘space’ from ‘place’. A sense of place may be embedded in cultural history, in legend and language, without becoming a concept of contention and struggle until the profound discursive interference of colonialism.86

In the light of this quotation, it appears that both place and space are not

exclusively associated with what is physical, but they can have cultural as well

as historical meanings in the sense that they can constitute one’s history and

culture. Thus, in depicting a certain space, as the case in popular romance,

there is also a depiction of people’s culture and identity. The significance of

one’s space is made clear once it is disrupted or intervened by foreigner in the

sense that it results in dislocation, displacement and alienation.87 Ultimately,

what is important here is that space does not seem, as defined by some critics,

86 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999) 177. 87 Ashcroft 177-178.

50

as being dead, fixed, and immobile, but it is lively, meaningful, and expresses

social and cultural meanings, being liable to changeability.88

According to Michel Foucault, space and specialization are being

politically oriented especially since the 18th century.89 That is, space is

rationalized and is subject to the interference of different agents, the fact that

can make people subject to their spaces. This displays a sort of interlink

between space and power. Foucault asserts that “space is fundamental in any

exercise of power”,90 in the sense that to control a certain space requires having

a kind of power, especially knowledge power. Indeed, it is this knowledge

power that actually enabled the colonizer to know the colonized space, and

thus to dominate it. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin assume

that

the most formidable ally of economic and political control had long been the business of ‘knowing’ other peoples because this ‘knowing’ underpinned imperial dominance and became the mode by which they were increasingly persuaded to know themselves.91

Hence, knowing the ‘Other’ means primarily knowing and studying the

‘Other’s’ space, be it the geographical, the cultural or the social space. Such

study is not necessarily based on real experiences, but it is mostly based on

imaginative tropes which try to frame the ‘Other’ in a certain frame of thought.

In colonial discourse, imagining or inventing the ‘Other’ is one of the

efficient means to control and know the ‘other’. This ‘Other’, be it people,

culture or space, is imagined and depicted in the way which defines the ‘I’ as

being superior to the ‘Other’, or as its contrasting image, idea, personality,

experience.92

88 Indebted to :Edward Soja, “History: Geography: Modernity’ The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, (London: Routledge, 1993) 136. 89 Michel Foucault, Space, Power and Knowledge, The Cultural StudiesReader, ed. Simon During, (London: Routledge, 1993). 90 Foucault 168. 91Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, eds, The post Colonial Studies Reader, (New York: Routledge, 1995) 1. 92 Indebted to : Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978) 1-2.

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Most significantly, Edward Said elaborates more on those politics of space

imagination or “imaginative geography”, as he refers to it in the first chapter of

his book Orientalism (1978). He argues that “Orientalism is a field with

considerable geographical ambition”93 in the sense that the project of

orientalism has been mainly concerned with the configuration of the oriental

geography or space; which can explain the large studies and travels made by

westerners to the orient for the sake of enlarging their knowledge about the

orient.

As highlighted by Said, the problem with these travellers or orientalists is

their lack of any intention to really discover the real orient as it is in reality, but

they come with intention to prove the validity of those images they had about

the orient, and to show the world the essential disparity between Western

‘civilization’ and Eastern ‘non-civilization’. And what is more at stake is that

this knowledge they come with is a kind of ‘ second order knowledge” based

on the “oriental” tale, the mythology of the mysterious East, or what V.G.

Kiernan called “Europe’s collective day dream”.94

Therefore, the relationship between the West and East is primarily based on

an imaginary classification that tends to associate, in an arbitrary way, certain

attributes with a certain place. On the premise that things in history and history

itself are man-made, Said assumes that objects or places can be assigned roles

and meanings “which acquire objective validity only after the assignments are

made”. This represents a sort of fictionalisation of places in the sense that

places or objects have existence only in the mind, but not in reality.95 Such

fictionalisation and arbitrariness of apace designation are clarified by Said as

follows:

This universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land-barbarian

93 Indebted to: Said 50. 94 Indebted to: Said 52. 95 Indebted to: Said 54.

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land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction, it is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our minds; “they” become they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours”.96

In saying this, Said makes it clear that “imaginative geography” is a form of

arbitrary thinking which sets differences in the mind between the ‘I’ and the

‘Other’; and such differences, which are primarily geographical, create a sort

of distance on the cultural, social, and moral levels between the two poles.

Indeed, the division of the world into the occident and orient is meant as a form

of geographical division that identifies one as ‘superior’ and ‘developed’ while

the ‘Other’ as ‘inferior’ and ‘underdeveloped’.

In order to reveal how space can be fictionalized or assigned different

poetic meanings which might differ from one to another or from time to time,

Said cites a good example given by Gaston Bachelard about poetics of space.

Following Gaston Bachelard, Said explains that

the inside of a house acquire a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or imagined, because of the experiences that come to seem appropriate for it. The objective space of a house - its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms - is far less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted, or homelike, or prison like, or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. 97

Given this example of the poetics of a house, one can conclude that space

means what one makes of it. One place with the same objects can signify

different opposing meanings, depending on how this place is conceived of by

each one. In sum, by referring to imaginative geography and poetics of space,

Said, in fact, tries to falsify the myth of the ‘oriental space’, which is primarily

orientalized on the basis of certain myths and false conceptions of it. Such

96 Said 54. 97 Said 54-55.

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misconceptions of space also result in misconceiving the culture, history, and

people of that space.

Apparently, Said’s above argument delineates how colonial discourse tries

via imaginative geography to construct binary oppositions between the ‘I’ and

the ‘Other’. Said’s focus on such binary oppositions between the West and the

East is criticized by many critics, especially by Homi Bhabha, who prefers to

focus on notions of ambivalence and third space, instead of binary oppositions.

Criticizing Said’s adherence to binary oppositions, Homi Bhabha contends that

where the originality of this account loses its inventiveness,

and for me its usefulness, it is with Said’s refusal to engage with the alterity and ambivalence in the articulation of these two economies which threaten to split the very object of orientalist discourse as a knowledge and the subject positioned therein.98

As an alternative of Said’s binary paradigm, Homi Bhabha argues for

ambivalent, hybrid spaces or what he calls in “The Commitment to Theory”

”third space”, a space of negotiation and translation.99 In this third space, “the

meaning of symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the

same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.”100

In saying this, Bhabha calls for destabilizing any form of binary oppositions

since there are no fixed identities, but ongoing hybrid and ambivalent ones.

In effect, such destabilization of binary oppositions is clarified by Mary

Louise Pratt’s concept of transculturation by which she means the process of

intercultural negotiation, appropriation, and adaptation.101 This process is a

phenomenon of the contact zone, which refers to “social spaces where

disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly

asymmetrical relation of domination and subordination”.102 And this space

98 Homi Bhabha, “Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism”, The politics of theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Baker (Michigan: University of Essex, 1983), 199-200. 99 Homi Bhabha, “The commitment to Theory”, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 100 Bhabha 37. 101Indebted to: Marry Louis Pratt, “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone”, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing, and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992) 6. 102 Pratt 4.

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also is used to refer to “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which

peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each

other and establish ongoing relations”.103 Actually, the importance of “contact

zone” resides in its tendency to nullify those rigid binary oppositions between

the colonizer and the colonized, giving rise to what Bhabha calls “hybridity”

and “third space”.

In the light of all that has been said above, it is noticed that space

representation is liable to different interpretations, especially in post colonial

discourse. Space can signify constructed imaginary oppositions, be they

geographical or cultural, between the “I” and the “other”, as well as it can

signify a blurring space, where no binary positions are possible, but

transcultural and hybrid ones.

3.3 The trope of race in colonial discourse The colonial/orientalist discourse without the presence of the trope of race is

unthinkable. And an “imperial romance novel” without raising the issue of race

is also unthinkable. It is due to the centrality of race in popular romances that

this section will try to shed light on how race is used as trope in the

construction of colonialist/racist discourse. Indeed, one of the main

technologies of the colonial discourse is the fabrication of racial hierarchies

through which one race is assumed to be superior to others. In this racial

hierarchy, it has been always the ‘western white race’ which is classified on the

top list of races, and the black one at the bottom. And as argued by Bill

Ashcroft, race emerged as a way of establishing hierarchical divisions between

Europe and its “Others”.104

By and large, the concept of race has been subject to criticism to the extent

that some would deny the existence of something called race. Even those who

have tried to define it show about their caution and reservation about it. For

instance, Ashcroft defines race as following:

103 Pratt. 6 104 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999) 80.

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A term for the classification of human beings into physically, biologically and geographically groups. The notion of race assumes, firstly, that humanity is divided into unchanging natural types, recognizable by physical features that are transmitted ‘through blood’ and permit distinctions to be made between ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ races’. Furthermore, the term implies that the mental and moral behavior of human beings, as well as individual personality, ideas and capacities, can be related to racial origin, and that knowledge of that origin provides satisfactory account of the behavior.105

In this definition, it is obvious that Ashcroft keeps using verbs such as

“assume” and “imply” so as to stress on the dubiousness of the concept and

their reservations about it. Put differently, what is claimed to be a kind of

classification of human beings in races is arbitrary since such divisions, which

are most of the time based on physical appearances, are believed to be

directly related to intellectual and mental capacities of races. The consensus of

the intellectual opinion today, both in humanities and the sciences, announces

that race is an inherently uncertain concept because its boundaries are

notoriously unreliable, and its identity categories such as white, black and

brown, are essentially incoherent to the extent that many variations are to be

found in one so-called race than among different races.106 This is meant to

refute any claim of racial differences as a basis for intellectual or mental

differences between races.

Importantly, what is at stake with this notion of race is that it is usually

accompanied with racism and racial prejudice in the sense that each race tries

to prove to be the best than the other. In an attempt to clarify this interlink

between race and racism, Kwame Anthony Appiah has made distinction

between racialism, extrinsic racism, and intrinsic racism, as being three distinct

105 Ashcroft 198. 106 Apollo Amoko, “ Race and Postcoloniality”, The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, eds, Simon Malpo and Paul Wake, (London; Routledge: 2006) 130.

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doctrines that express the theoretical content of race and racism.107 He defines

racialism as the belief

that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race. 108

Such distinctions between races, Appiah argues, are harmless as long as they

are “impartial” and “equitable” in terms of avoiding any assignment of moral

or intellectual characteristics with a certain race. Another less extreme doctrine

of racism is what Appiah called extrinsic racism, which means that extrinsic

racists tend to “make moral distinctions between members of different races

because they believe that racial essence entails certain morally relevant

qualities”.109 This kind of discrimination is based on associating between what

is essential in a certain race such as skin color and some of their virtues like

civilization, intelligence, and courage. For Appiah, such type of racism can be

refuted as long as one proves that racial differences do not equate with moral

differences. To elaborate on this point, Appiah argues that:

Evidence that there are no such differences in morally relevant characteristics- that Negroes are not especially lacking in intellectual capacity or that Jews are not especially avaricious- should lead people out of their racism if it is purely extrinsic.110

The last extreme doctrine of racism is the intrinsic one, which is usually found

embedded in the colonialist/racist discourse. Appiah argues that intrinsic

racists refer to those people who “believe that each race has a different moral

status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial

essence”.111 Unlike extrinsic racism, intrinsic racism cannot be verified since it

107 Henceforth all the coming arguments of Appiah are cited in: Apollo Amoko, “ Race and Postcoloniality”, The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory, eds, Simon Malpo and Paul Wake, (London; Routledge: 2006) 127-139. 108 Amoko 130. 109 Amoko 130. 110 Amoko 131. 111 Amoko 131.

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starts from the essential belief that each race is naturally entitled to behave or

act in a certain way. In fact, it is this last doctrine of racism which is found to

be the common one in the colonial discourse. I.e., the colonizer tries in

different ways, especially in ‘scientific terms’, to prove the “superiority’of the

white race and the ‘inferiority’ of the non-white race so that they can legitimize

colonization.

Importantly, racial thinking and classification was of great help in

westerner’s colonial expansion and domination of the natives. It is through

classifying races into civilized ones and primitive ones that the west was able

to give legitimacy to its “civilizing missionary”, through which the colonized

people were subjugated. The invention of scientific and social theories also

contributed to dehumanizing and primitivising some races. For illustration,

Social Darwinism, based on law of Natural Selection, justified “the domination

and at times the extinction of inferior races as not only inevitable but a

desirable unfolding of natural law”.112 And for Darwin the world races exist

side by side, being in different stages, where the “European civilized race” is

claimed to be in the highest point of these stages; thus it is the European race

which is defined as the fittest of all humanity, and the one which can rule and

civilize other races.113 Such pseudo-scientific theories are unfortunately used

by western colonizer as pretexts to justify colonization and exploitation of the

natives.

And as argued by Ellke Bohemer, another extreme process of figuring the

other races was the European symbolic complex called the “Great Chain of

Being”. In this chain, the highest forms of life, which are located in Europe, are

to be connected with the lowest forms of life, depending on their difference

from Europeans.114 Such classification is not only used to explain the

biological variety, “but the superiority or inferiority of different cultural types

112 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin., Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999) 201. 113 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discousre in Journalism, Travel Writing and imperial Administration, (United States of America: Duke University press) 63. 114 Elleke Bohemer, Colonial and Post Colonial Literature,( Oxford: oxford university press, 1996) 84.

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ranged on a scale of evolutionary progress”.115 In saying this, it should be

argued that the main danger of western myth of racial differences resides in

connecting between the physical differences between races and the cultural,

civilizational and mental differences between them, thus claiming that one race

is inherently civilized or intelligent.

It should be argued that such systems of classification are mainly racist in

the sense that they are based on the premise of debasing and dehumanizing

other races. And as argued above, it is highly difficult to define what is race,

and, therefore, any racial classification is arbitrary and is mainly oriented by

certain ideology. Therefore, the Europeans’ attempts to defend those racial

classifications stem from their ethnocentric and Eurocentric assumptions, and it

has been proved that all their invented scientific theories which try to justify

those classifications are erroneous and contradictory.116

In effect, the construction of such racial differences is basically related to

the construction of civilizational, cultural, and social differences between

races. And of great significance is that such racial classification, though they

are imaginary and socially constructed, can have deep impact on individuals

who are subject to racial discrimination. The two polemical works of Frantz

Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks117 and The Wretched of the Earth 118 do really

expose the impact of colonization and mainly the racist discourse of the

colonizers against the colonized.

Actually, it is in Black Skins, White Masks, where Fanon really highlights

the great impact of western racist discourse on the black’s perception of

themselves. Such racist discourses, Fanon argues, results in having complexes

of dependency and inferiority within the black communities, to the extent that

the black is no longer wants to identify with his/her color, but with the white

115 Bohemer 84. 116 Ania Loomba, for example provided three main reasons to refute the western “pseudo-scientific theories” of racial classification, for more details see: Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialsim, (London: Routledge, 1998) 115-123. 117 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 118 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Trans. Constance Farrington (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1967).

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one, thinking that the latter as being the role model color.119 Therefore, as

Frantz Fanon clearly announces it, one of his major purposes is to “help the

black man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been developed

by the colonial environment” 120, since such racial discriminations and

classifications are chiefly social and cultural constructs. Thus in enabling the

colonized people to understand this idea, Fanon believes that they can get rid

of their complex of inferiority, and will be proud to be themselves and not

somebody else. In sum, racial classification is to be seen as a western myth

buttressed by pseudo-scientific theories in order to prove the superiority of

western race, culture, and civilization over the ones of non-western races so as

to give legitimacy to western colonization and exploitation practices. Thus, any

classification based on race is dubious and erroneous.

119 Such issues are discussed in detail in Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks especially in the following chapters: “The Woman of Colour and the White Women”, “The Man of Colour And The White Women”, and in “The Fact of Blackness”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 120 Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967) 30.

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Conclusion:

Throughout the above three sections, an attempt has been made to

foreground for the practical part, which is going to be a postcolonial reading of

three popular romance novels in terms of their representation of gender, space

and race. The first section describes how the emergence of cultural studies has

interrupted “elitist” definitions of culture and literature, giving rise to the study

of all different literary/cultural forms, high or low, within academic spheres.

Then, it has been displayed how some popular culture forms are engaged in

orientalism, presenting Edward Said and Jack Shaheen’s works as instances

which expose that engagement. Still, given popular romance is part and parcel

of popular cultures, the question which is raised is why popular romance is

downplayed in postcolonial studies despite its being replete with

colonialist/orientalist ideologies. It comes into view that ‘elitism’, gender, and

popular nature of popular romance are amongst the main factors that have

contributed to the exclusion of popular romance from postcolonial studies.

Finally, in relation to the practical part, an effort has been made to discuss

gender, space, and race from a postcolonial perspective. Throughout gender, it

has been displayed how some ‘western women’ are engaged in the imperial

project through their writings and travels to the orient. In terms of space, focus

has been addressed to discuss how space can be capitalized on to create

“imaginative geography” between the “I” and the “other”. It is also explained

that space can function as a means to control, stereotype and primitivise the

“other”. Finally, the issue of ‘race’ has been raised to reveal about the pseudo-

scientific nature of westerners’ claims about racial differences. It has been

argued that race is a man-made myth through which one race, which is mostly

the western race, claims “superiority”, “civilization”, and “modernity”. It is

through such claims that westerners announce themselves as agents to

‘modernize’, ‘civilize’ and ‘enlighten’other inferior races. Henceforth, gender,

space and race will be delved into in terms how they are represented in Never

Marry in Morocco, The Veiled Web and Lord of the Desert, attempting to show

some colonialist/orientalist drives behind those representations.

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Part two: A Postcolonial reading of: Never Marry in Morocco,

The Veiled Web, and Lord of the Desert

Introduction: It is unarguably true that Said’s landmark book Orientalism is mostly the

first book to set forth a critical reading and analysis of the orientalist and

colonial discourses in western imperial narratives, paving the way, thus, for the

emergence of postcolonial studies and criticism. In this book, Said describes

how the west, through knowledge/power, was able to dominate the Orient. Said

capitalizes on both Foucault’s concept of “discourse” and Antonio Gramsci’s

concept of “hegemony” to display some mechanics and dimensions of the

orientalist/colonial discourse. Of great importance is the notion of discourse

since, as said explains,

without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage ─ and even produce─ the orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.121

Thus, it is in the light of Said’s understanding of colonial/orientalist discourse

that this second part is going to analyze the following three imperial romance

popular novels: Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco, Catherine Assaro’s

The Veiled Web, and Diana Palmer’s Lord of the Desert.

Colonial discourse and orientalist discourse are going to be used as being

complementary in the sense that one can not be separated from the other.

Colonial discourse is assumed to be more inclusive than the orientalist

discourse, being defined as “the system of statements that can be made about

the colonies and colonial peoples, about colonizing powers and about the

121 Edward W. Said. Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978) 3.

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relationships between these two”.122 In this sense, Orientalist discourse is to be

conceived of as part of the colonial discourse in terms that Orientalism in

general is meant to pave the way and give legitimacy for the colonial

discourse. I.e. the orientalist’s studies and writings are mostly of great help for

the colonial enterprise. Therefore, orientalist discourse should be considered in

terms of complementing and buttressing the colonial discourse.

Accordingly, This part is going to be a postcolonial reading of the above

three romance novels, trying to detect how the colonial/orientalist discourse is

materialized in terms of the (mis)representation of space, race, and gender in

those novels. Undertaking investigation on these three concepts is not meant to

claim covering all issues and concepts in those romance novels, but they are

used simply as instances to account for the colonial/orientalist discourse in

popular romance.

In this respect, this part is split into three major sections, and throughout

each section one concept will be delved into, trying to investigate how it is

represented in those novels. In the first section, focus will be addressed to

analyze how gender is constructed in the three novels, trying to display how

native or rather Arab Muslim women are represented under “western female

gaze”. Questions of patriarchy, harem, veil and construction of signs of

difference between western woman and native woman will be subject to

analysis in this section. The second section is concerned with examining how

oriental space is mis/represented, stereotyped, imagined and surveyed

throughout the three case studies. Finally, the last section tackles how race is

used as a premise on which the west articulates its superiority and the

inferiority of non-westerners.

122 Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 62. As far as the use of colonial discourse and orientalist discourse is concerned, it is noticed that many critics sometimes use them interchangeably and sometimes else as being different. But according to John Macleod, “Orientalism [or orientalist discourse] and colonial discourse do not amount to the same thing; they are not interchangeable. Colonial discourses are more complex and variable than Said’s model of orientalsm; they encapsulate Orientalsim, to be sure, but go beyond it.” See: John McLeod, Beginning postcolonialism, (New York: Manchester University Press, 200), 39.

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1. Gender and the representation of ‘native women’

The question of gender in popular romance is of paramount importance

given that it is identified as one of the main defining features of popular

romance genre, especially with the emergence of feminist movements in sixties

and seventies. How gender roles are constructed in popular romance has been

one of the main issues tackled by feminists. Still, with our focus on imperial

popular romance, in which cross-cultural issues are raised, our attention in this

section will be devoted chiefly to the investigation of how popular romance

constructs and represents western women versus non-western woman, trying to

trace some aspects of orientalist/colonial discourse in these representations.

In this respect, given the fact that the main novels that are subject to

analysis in this research are dealing with the representation of Arab Muslim

women, our analysis will focus on how these women are portrayed in the eyes

of western female writers. The question of Islam will be of great account in

order to understand the politics of such representations. Islam has in fact been

for so long time subject to western criticism in terms that Islamic practices, e.g.

veil, have usually been associated with the oppression of women.123 Muslim

women who stick to their religion are described as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’,

and in need to be emancipated and modernized. The western model of women

is represented as the role model to be universalized. For instance, from a very

Eurocentric vantage point, Juliet Minces argues as following:

Can the evolution of the condition of women in the Arab world be evaluated by the same criteria as in the west? Is it not Eurocentric to put forward the lives of western women as the only democratic, just and forward-looking model? I do not think so. The demands of western feminists seem to me to represent the greatest advance towards the emancipation of women as people. Ideally, the criteria adopted, like those for human rights generally should be universalized.124

123 MeyDa YEGENOGLU, “Saratorical Fabricatios: Enlightenment and western feminism”, in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, Ed. Laura E. Donaldson & Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002)84. 124 Quoted in MeyDa YEGENOGLU, “Saratorical Fabricatios: Enlightenment and western feminism”, in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, Ed. Laura E. Donaldson & Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002) 86.

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This discourse discloses the hegemony and Eurocentrism of western

feminist discourse which, as Meyda Yegenoglu has pointed out, believes in the

necessity of Muslim women’s breaking out from their tradition and religion for

the sake of “modernisation”.125 For them, this modernisation is only possible

by following the western paradigm in all its aspects, the fact which is

principally Eurocentric and essentialist. And this is why most third world

feminists and Islamic feminists have rejected to be subsumed within the above

western paradigm. For instance, Islamic feminists are trying to stick to their

religion and to their tradition, rejecting to be subject to any western hegemonic

power. Mariam Cooke provides here some of their principles and beliefs:

They are refusing the boundaries others try to draw around them. They are claiming that Islam is not necessarily more traditional or authentic than any other identification nor is it any more violent or patriarchal than any other religion. They are claiming to be strong within this tradition, to act as feminist without fear, so that they may be labelled western and imitative. They are highlighting women’s roles and status within their religious communities while at the same time declaring common cause with Muslim women elsewhere who share the same cause.126

Such principles of these Islamic feminists are meant to refute western

imperial and Eurocentric discourses, and also to stress on one’s right to be

different and to stick to one’s culture and tradition. Indeed, for each one his/her

culture and principles and no one has the right to negate the other for the sake

of imposing one’s model.

1.1 ‘Muslim women’ under western female gaze

In this section, we shall try to detect how Muslim women are

represented in the three romance novels under question. In fact, there are many

125 MeyDa YEGENOGLU, “Saratorical Fabricatios: Enlightenment and western feminism”, in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, Ed. Laura E. Donaldson & Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002) 84. 126 Miriam Cooke “Multiple critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical strategies”, in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. Ed. Laura E. Donaldson & Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002) 145.

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similarities among these three novels in terms of the representation of Muslim

women. Most of them represent Muslim women as subject to ‘oppression’ of

their religion and their cultural milieu. To avoid repetition, each of the three

coming sub-sections will try to tackle a specific issue in each novel. Patriarchy

and the ‘oppression’ of women will be discussed in Virginia Dale’s Never

Marry in Morocco; ‘harem’ representation in Diana Palmer’s Lord of the

Desert; and finally the trope of ‘veil’ in Catherine Assaro’s The Veiled Web. 127

1.1.1 Never Marry in Morocco: Patriarchy and the ‘oppression’ of women

Before moving to discuss how Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco

represents Morocco as a ‘patriarchal society’ in which women are subject to

male ‘oppression’, it should be argued that Virginia Dale as well as many other

western writers take it for granted that patriarchy is exclusive to ‘third world

countries’, though such a phenomenon is indeed a global one. In addition to

that, Muslim women, in particular, have been for so long time the main target

of western criticism which usually associates the oppression of women with

Islam, considering the latter as a means to ‘oppress’, ‘seclude’ and ‘objectify’

them.128

Importantly, Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco in fact

exemplifies an instance of those western discourses which ascribe the

oppression of women in the Arab world to Islam. In fact, such tendency to

associate Islam with the oppression of women can reveal about one’s

ignorance of what Islam has meant for women, and how it has contributed to

keep the status of women intact. Where Judaism permitted “polygamy,

concubinage, and unrestricted divorce for men and did not allow women to

inherit or to play a role in religion, to mention only some salient features”, and

127 Henceforth, when a novel is quoted, it will be referred to in an abbreviated form : Never Marry in Morocco will be referred to as (N.M.M.), The Veiled Web as (V.W.), and Lord of the Desert as (L.D.). 128 For more details on this point, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical roots of a Modern Debate (London: Yale University Press, 1992) 144-168.

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“some of these mores were accepted by Christianity”,129 Islam has affirmed

“women’s rights to inherit and control property and income without reference

to male guardians, in that it constitutes a recognition of women’s rights to

economic independence”130, and that it “ was Islam and not, as Europeans

claimed, the west, that first recognized an equal humanity of women.”131. This

shows how Islam differs from other religions in terms of respect and value

devoted to women in Islam. Still, western discourses insist on deconstructing

the image of Islam through representing it as a religion of violence and

oppression.

In this respect, Never Marry in Morocco exemplifies an instance of such

western biased discourses towards Islam and Muslims. That the novel is a

biased one is made clear from the onset in terms of its “attracting” and at the

same time troubling title. Never Marry in Morocco, as a title, expresses a

strong negative and authoritative judgment about Morocco as a whole. It does

not allow space of contention; rather it states a final and clear-cut sentence

which condemns a whole large people. It warns any reader against thinking to

get married in Morocco. By so doing, such title distorts the image of Morocco

in the eyes of foreigners who do not know about it anything, reducing Morocco

into a timeless negative image. That is, any one who reads that title can get a

negative impression about Morocco.

In the light of the novel’s events, the narrator tries to substantiate and

buttress the judgment made in the title about Morocco, by means of presenting

some instances of how women in Morocco are oppressed. As will be explained

below, ‘never marry in Morocco’ message is addressed primarily to westerners

who want to visit Morocco, in an attempt to warn them of not thinking to get

married there. The main reason behind stating such warning is due to the fact

that Morocco is ruled by ‘Islamic law’ which gives ‘supremacy’ to men over

women. Therefore, it appears that the question of marriage has not to do with

Morocco alone, but mainly with Islam and all Muslim countries. Thus,

129 Indebted to: Ahmed 34. 130 ------- : Ahmed 63. 131 ------- : Ahmed 139.

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Morocco as a Muslim country is presented simply as a microcosm for the

whole Muslim nations.

For more illustration of these issues, it would be necessary to put the

novel’s events in context. Never Marry in Morocco by and large revolves

around the story of Virginia, the heroine and narrator, who leaves United States

for the sake of adventure and romance. She meets a French-Moroccan guy,

Pierre, in Spain, with whom she gets married. And since Pierre’s family is

living in Morocco, the place where he has been born, the two go regularly to

Morocco in order to visit Pierre’s family. It is there in Morocco where Virginia

comes across with the Moroccans and their culture. In such an encounter, the

writer communicates via the experience of Virginia there many stereotypes on

Morocco. The most striking stereotypes about Morocco and Islam are

conveyed in the following conversation between Virginia and her mother-in-

law, Jean Paul:

“Virginia” she continued, “I must warn you.” I looked politely into her eyes, now serious with discretion.

“People outside of Muslim countries do not know their culture. So I must tell you. They still buy their brides here. There is a bride price established, and the groom must give that to the bride’s family. If she wants a divorce, she cannot keep her own children. The men have all the rights.”

“What happens to a divorced woman?” Now I was concerned.

“She must go back to her family and her family must give the husband back everything he paid for her: sheep, camels, gold and silver jewelry, everything.”

We looked at each other somberly for a moment. The idea of women being bought and sold stunned me into silence.

My mother-in-law put her hand on my arm and whispered into my ear, “Never marry in morocco, Virginia.” (N.M.M. p. 69)

In examining this passage, the writer tries to dramatize how women are

being ‘victimized’ and ‘oppressed’ in Islam, representing the latter as a means

to empower men over women. Describing women as “being bought and sold”

is meant to objectify and commodify Moroccan women. In saying this, narrator

condemns Islam as being a religion which enhances the ‘oppression’ and

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‘subjugation’ of women, which is not true. Dowry in Islam is a sacred practice

which is meant to pay respect for the wife; it also signifies the real will or the

serious intention of the husband to engage in marriage in order to establish a

family. So, the importance of what is paid as a dowry lies less in its financial

value than in its symbolic connotation. In fact, such misunderstanding or

distortion of some Islamic practices is not something new since it can not be

denied that Islam has been for a long time a target to western criticism and

distortion. This point is made clear by Leila Ahmed, arguing that

the practices of Islam with respect to women had always formed part of the western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam […] it may be said that prior to the seventeenth century Western ideas about Islam derived from the tales of travelers and crusaders, augmented by the deductions of clerics from their readings of poorly understood Arabic.132

In addition, the fact that Virginia is warned by her mother-in-law not to get

married in Morocco makes her abstain from having children with Pierre in

Morocco. She says:

After five years of marriage, Pierre and I still had no children […] because there was that rumor that if you had children in Morocco, they would belong only to your husband if you divorced. (N.M.M. p.15)

In such a tone of describing her reason why she decides not to have children

with Pierre, Virginia articulates and enhances the ‘victimization’ of women in

Morocco. Regardless of the fact that such an attitude is biased and based on a

kind of misunderstanding of how Islam treats women, the narrator also tries to

draw a negative image about Morocco by means of representing it as an

oppressing society of women. Likewise, the narrator tries to stress the fact that

Morocco is a patriarchal society par excellence, where men have all rights to

take children from their wives, and to divorce women easily whenever they

132 Ahmed 149.

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want. As far as divorce is concerned, Virginia, in an attempt to represent Islam

as an ‘oppressive’ religion, says:

Indeed, divorce was very informal in this country. All a man had to do was clap his hands in his three times, saying “I repudiate thee” each time. Then the wife was put out on the street with a basket of belongings to return to family. And the husband often requested her bride price, whether he had paid it to her in actual money or in sheep or other presents. “A woman should never marry into such a religion,” I thought sadly. (N.M.M. p.162)

In examining such a hateful passage, Islam is diametrically misrepresented in

terms of presenting it as an ‘unjust’ religion for women. Islam is represented as

a male religion which serves only men’s interest. Yet, has in fact there been any

fair religion to women, it is Islam. Islam, unlike what Virginia says, gives

Muslim women all rights within wedlock and outside it. Divorce, for instance,

is very restricted or discouraged in Islam, and takes place only after hope is lost

that a couple will continue together.133 To add, like men, woman in Islam have

the right to ask for divorce if she finds it unbearable to live with her husband.134

Hence, Virginia’s above discourse can be described as stemming out either

from her ‘ignorance’ about Islam, or her hatred to it. But it is highly possible to

include her among that new group of American women, described by Rana

Kabani as follows:

It has become intellectually fashionable for American women writers – with little or no experience of the Muslim world, with no knowledge of Muslim history- to spew forth, in books

133 Here are some verses and hadiths which discourage divorce in Islam, and asks for well treatment of women : Allah says : ‘And (remember)when you (Muhammed) said to the man (Zayd, Muhammed’s adopted son) whom Allah and yourself have favoured: keep your wife and have fear of Allah’ , He also says ‘Treat them with kindness; for even if you do dislike them, it may well be that you may dislike a thing which Allah has meant foryour own good’, and the Prophet Mohamed (PBUH) says : ‘Of all things licit, the most hateful to God is divorce.’ And in another hadith he says: ‘Let not the faithful man hate the faithful woman; if he dislikes some of her habits, he may like others.’ All these verses and hadiths are cited in: Haifaa A. Jawad The Rights of Women in Islam: An Authentic Approach (London: Macmillan Press Ltd 1998), p.84. 134 For more details about women’s rights in Islam, see, for instance: Haifaa A. Jawad The Rights of Women in Islam: An Authentic Approach (London: Macmillan Press Ltd 1998).

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and articles, on the ‘pathetic’ state of women under Islam … This literature also builds on some dubious foundations: that the western women have it all, and Muslim women have nothing. That the Muslim women to earn status and respect from the western feminism, they must denature themselves by throwing off their religious culture in its entirety. 135

Importantly, in her efforts to more concretize and dramatize the sufferance

of Moroccan women in their society, the writer presents the experience of

Amina and her mother, as being victims of their society and their religion.

Telling us about the background of Amina, Virginia says that Amina is

the daughter of the youngest wife of a wealthy Sultan’s harem in the south of Morocco, near Marrakech. Her mother had been too young to know how to fight for her share of the inheritance when the rich old man died, and she and Amina had only a small grocery store to support them. (N.M.M p.157)

In the light of this passage, the very use of the word ‘harem’ is meant to revive

the old western myth of ‘harem’. This myth alone makes the western readers

indulge in the ‘oriental’ ‘fantasy’ and ‘exoticism’, reminding them of how

women in orient are being ‘secluded’ and ‘oppressed’. Such oppression is

represented by giving the example of Amina’s mother who has been unable to

get her inheritance. The use of the word “fight for” is so revealing that it

implies that there is no law that governs inheritance or protects women’s rights

of inheritance in a Muslim society. This image entails that such societies are

ruled by anarchy, where the powerful subordinates the weak. By so doing,

these societies are represented as being still living in a very ‘primitive age’,

and they are in need to be ‘modernized’, and ‘civilized’. But, has Virginia

known that Islam is the first religion to give full humanity to women, and to

allow them to inherit, she would not have said that.

In addition to the above experience of Amina’s mother, Amina is also

represented as another victim of her husbands’ oppression. She is represented

as being divorced by her husband for the sake of another woman. He has left

135 Rana Kabbani. Preface. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of Orient (London: Pandora, 1994) ix.

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her with their son, giving them nothing to live with. Such representations are

in fact meant to emphasize the on-going process of women’s ‘sufferance’ in

Morocco, and in Muslim societies in general. Still, the real intent behind these

representations is in fact to draw a kind of difference between western women

and Muslim women so as to display the fact that women in the ‘west’ are more

‘liberated’ and ‘respected’ than in Eastern societies.

In a nutshell, the novel in question has tried to draw a negative image about

Morocco in particular, and about Islam and Muslims in general. It makes use

of women’s case in Morocco as a means to articulate a hateful orientalist

discourse against Muslims and Islam. Such western attitudes toward Muslims

are not surprising, but expected from a people who have never ceased to attack

Islam since antiquity.

1.1.2 Lord of the Desert: ‘Harem’ representation

The presence or the representation of ‘harem’ in most orientalist narratives

tends to be an omnipresent phenomenon. As the case with ‘sheik desert

popular romance’, it is hardly to come up with a “sheik desert’ romance novel

which does not tackle the issue of a Sheik with his ‘harem’ in their separate

interior. This issue of ‘harem’ representation, in particular, seems to be

timeless, and is opted for at any age and at any time. It is only enough for a

romance writer to refer to the word ‘harem’ in order to seduce western readers

and to make them live in a world of ‘fantasy’ and ‘exoticism’. Arguing for the

central presence of the cult of ‘harem’ in most orientalist discourses, Reina

Lewis says that

Although European orientalism was a heterogeneous phenomenon, it can be argued that the cult of the harem was central to the fantasies that structure the orientalist discourse. The mystique of the forbidden harem stemmed from the vision of it as a segregated space, a polygamous realm, from which

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all men except the husband (generally conceptualized as sultan) and his eunuchs were barred.136

It can be understood from the above passage that the west is so obsessed

with this notion of ‘harem’ that a writer needs only to raise it in his/her novel

to incite as many readers as possible. Indeed, the mystery of the orient, for

orientalists, resides mainly in raising issues of sex and fantasy; thus,

mentioning the word ‘harem’ is largely sufficient to serve those mysteries. In

his fascinating book about the postcards of Algerian women and aspects of

orientalist discourse in such postcards, Mallek Alloula argues that

there is no phantasm, though, without sex, and in this orientalism, a confection of the best and the worst _ a central figure emerges, the very embodiment of the obsession: the harem. A simple allusion to it is enough to open wide the floodgate of hallucination just as it is about to run dry. 137

In this passage, Alloula makes it clear how the very mention of ‘harem’ is

sexually oriented, and raises sexual fantasies within western readers. With

imperial romance, infusing texts with a kind of orientalist discourse is not the

sole reason; it is also due to the tendency of editors and writers to seduce as

many readers as possible that pushes them to eroticise and exoticise their

writings. And this is actually part and parcel of the dynamics of popular

romance as a form of mass fiction. In all romance novels that are subject to

analysis in this research, the cult of harem is visibly present. Henceforth, we

will take Diana Palmer’s Lord of the Desert as an example, to delve into how

this issue of harem representation is tackled.

Throughout this novel, the reader comes across with many passages which

aim at exoticizing the oriental settings both in Morocco and in Qawi (an

imaginative country in the Middle East). Both Gretchen, the heroine, and her

136 Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996) 111. 137Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem. Trans. Myrna and Wlad Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press1986) 3.

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friend Maggie describe their coming to the orient as a “leap of faith’ into a new

part of the world. Still, it should be argued that their encounter with the ‘orient’

in this novel is not their first time; but, they were introduced to it before by

means of novels, travel accounts and movies made about the orient. Thus, it is

clearly enough what images about the orient they are bearing with them. For

instance, the narrator describes Gretchen the first time she sets her foot in

Morocco as being “wide-awake and eager for morocco, the land of camels and

the Sahara desert, and the famous Berbers of the Rif Mountains. She could

hardly wait to see the ancient land in its desert setting.” (L.D. p. 11). So, given

such descriptions, one can sense to what extent Gretchen is biased about

Morocco and the orient in general.

That the above characters are influenced by previous orientalist works is

made obvious via their reference to some famous orientalist works, which

negatively stereotype the orient. For instance, in different passages the heroine

reminds the reader of some famous orientalist texts such as E.M. Hull’s novel

The Sheik and its version as a movie starred by Rudolph Valentino, and the

famous orientalist movie of The wind and The Lion. Such forms of

intertextuality are indeed sufficient to display the orientalist discourse with

which Lord of Desert is infused.

In this novel, Gretchen, the heroine, and her friend, Maggie, come to

Morocco, escaping their homes in order to seek adventure and romance.

Maggie is supposed to stay with Gretchen in Morocco for some days, and then

leaves for Qawi in Middle East to work with the Sheik of this country. Given

their readings about Sheiks and their sexual appeals, Gretchen and Maggie

have been enthusiastic to see and experience a love story with a Sheik in his

world of ‘harem’. So the very word of Sheik gives rise to images of harem,

concubines in their secluded interiors.138 Gretchen says to her friend the first

138 The word Sheik has in fact been used and abused in different imperial and narrative writings. According to Jack Shaheen, “ the word “sheikh” means, literally, a wise elderly person, the head of the family, but you would not know that from watching any of Hollywood’s [or reading any of sheik desert romance’s] “sheikh” features … Throughout Arab world, to show respect, people address Muslim religious leaders as sheikhs … Instead of presenting sheikhs as elderly men of wisdom, screenwriters [ and popular romance writers] offer a romantic melodramas portraying them as stooges-in-sheets, slovenly, hook-nosed potentates intent on capturing pale-faced blondes for their harems … ”

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time they have come to Morocco: “Just imagine having a fantasy like that

actually come to life, Maggie. Being abducted by a handsome sheik and having

him fall on love with you! I get goose bumps just thinking about it”. (L.D. p.

19) This is how the orient at large is imagined, being thought of as ‘an exotic’

‘romantic’ space where westerners’ wish-fulfilment can achieved. Edward Said

calls attention to this point in his argument that

the orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.139

Nevertheless, the above characters are afraid to stay in the orient because of

the stereotypes they have brought with them about oriental people and culture.

For instance, in the following passage, the narrator tells us how Gretchen feels

about her friend, Maggie, who is supposed to go to work with the Sheik of

Qawi:

Gretchen didn’t say another word. But she hoped most sincerely that Maggie knew what she was doing. It was one thing to be a tourist, quite anther to be dependent in another country. The job sounded almost too good to be true. And wasn’t Qawi a very male dominated society where women had separate quarters and separate lives from men? It did seem odd that the sheik would want only a female public relations officer, but one from a foreign country known for liberate women […] she did not want her friend in danger. (L.D. p. 25)

In this passage, the narrator describes how Gretchen is worried about her

friend, Maggie, who intends to travel to Qawi to work for a Sheik as his

personal social assistant. Being biased against Arab countries and how women

are treated in these countries, Gretchen is afraid that her friend will be subject

to such oppression and seclusion. Raising such a question as “And wasn’t

Qawi a very male dominated society where women had separate quarters and

separate lives from men?” is very revealing. This question reveals about her

Jack G. Shaheen, “Introduction”, Reel Bad Arabs: how Hollywood Vilifies a people, (New York : Olive Branch Press, 2001) 19. 139 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978) 1.

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stereotypes that all Arab countries are male dominated, where women are

oppressed and secluded in separate quarters. This notion of “separate quarters”

suggests the idea of the ‘harem’, where women are ‘imprisoned’ and ‘hidden’.

Their only function is to serve the sexual desires of their sheiks. Thus,

imagining such things makes Gretchen afraid that her friend will also be one of

the sheik’s ‘harems’.

Unexpectedly, the plan of the two characters has been interrupted. Maggie

has received a call that her lover got an accident, and that she should go back

to United States to take care of him. She suggests on Gretchen to go disguised

in her place to work with the Sheik in Qawi. In fact, Gretchen feels hesitant to

accept the offer because she is very prejudiced about working with a Sheik in

an Arab Muslim environment. In her answer to Maggie’s offer, Gretchen tells

her:

“Oh, that’s a great idea” [...] “I can be wife number four wrapped up from head to toe in somebody’s harem” (L.D. p. 29-30)

In this answer, Gretchen is very sarcastic, trying to ridicule the situation of

Muslim women’s dressing and their religion which allows man to get married

with four wives. In her reference to the way of clothing, Gretchen is mocking

at the Islamic way of dressing especially the ‘veil’. For westerners, such kind

of dressing is very primitive and traditional, or as Gretchen said in one passage

as “prehistoric”. Therefore, such ironic depictions are in fact part and parcel of

the orientalist discourse which is kept being repeated in most imperial

narratives about the orient. Actually, one of the essential means of conveying

the orientalist discourse is the repetition of the same images and discourses

voiced out by previous orientalists. By so doing, stereotypes and other

misrepresentations are being engraved in the mind of western readers, who are

eager to receive those representations.

Importantly enough, the orientalist discourse about ‘native women’ in the

Arab world is more emphasized when Gretchen moves with the sheik Philippe

Sabon to Qawi, a Middle Eastern country supposed to represent all Arab

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Muslim countries. Inside Qawi, Gretchen is represented as being face to face

with the mysterious world she reads about in different imaginative orientalist

writings. In fact, what is striking in such romances is that the writer represents

some of those stereotypes in a dialogic way in terms of making the indigenous

people speak about themselves, the fact that gives a sense of strength to such

discourses. For example, the sheik Philippe is represented as the main

character which proves or disproves Gretchen’s stereotypes. He is made to

speak about his society in a way which assures Gretchen about her stereotypes.

For example, telling her about how women are supposed to live in his society,

Philippe says “it would never occur to me to leave you seen by any of the men

in my personal guard or my circle of friends. You would be the only occupant

of my harem”. (L.D. p. 128) Such announcement ensures Gretchen about the

fact that women in the Arab world are secluded, deprived from going to public

spaces or working outside their ‘harems’, being there only to serve their

husbands’ needs.

By the same token, other stereotypes are transmitted in different passages

such as “selling women” in Arab countries, and making harm to women who

do not wear the Islamic dress. For instance, Philippe told Gretchen that

wearing the veil is “the same as opening an umbrella during a raining storm in

your country.” (L.D. p. 168), and that “there are still those among my people

who might do you harm if they see your shape blatantly displayed”. (L.D. p.

169) Actually, such images simply aim to dramatize the image of the Muslim

women as being secluded and invisible in their ‘harem’. Such dramatization of

the image of women in ‘harem’ is more strengthened aesthetically by the

description of “The Palais Tatluk”, the palace where Philippe and Gretchen

will live. When Gretchen and Philippe arrive to Qawi, the first thing that

attracts her sight is the architectural design of the Palais:

[...] it came into view, a towering, sprawling white stone structure with arched doorways and arched windows with black grillwork on both stories. There were no balconies, but then she remembered that in Arab households, the balconies

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always faced inward, not outward, so that the women were hidden to the eyes of the world. (L.D. p.174-175)

Such an aesthetic description of the Palais is largely meant to draw an

image in the reader’s mind about the architectural building where ‘harems’ are

secluded. The meticulous description of the balconies as being “always faced

inward, not out ward, so that the women were hidden to the eyes of the world”

is very telling in the sense that the writer wants to draw the attention to the

double invisibility of women in the Arab world, both in their clothes and in

their households, which does not allow the intrusion of foreign eyes. By such

description, Gretchen is represented as entering to a very different world par

excellence.

Given Gretchen’s gender, she has managed to access to women’s

‘harem’. Philippe introduced her to Leila, his sister, who is going to take care

of her in women’s interior. In this passage, the narrator describes how Leila

tries to familiarize Gretchen with the new place:

Leila took Gretchen into luxurious confines of the white and gold quarters in the women’s section of the palace. The Texas woman stood and stared at it with disbelief. It was like something out of a luxury magazine, she thought, with lavish tile on the floors and even that walls, with a bathroom the size of her house back in Jocobsville, complete with huge bathing pool and sky light. The pool was surrounded by the same tile that graced the floors; and potted palms and flowering plants all but concealed. (L.D. p. 192)

In the light of this description of the palais interior, it appears that the narrator

intends to aestheticize women’s section in order to give to the reader an

impression of those ‘Turkish luxurious’ or Arabian Nights palaces. Such

palaces are essential in western myths about the orient since they signify

Arab’s ‘luxury’, ‘sensuality’, and ‘exoticism’. Such images are emphasized by

Leila when she informs Gretchen that the above women’s section is the old

‘harem’, where Philippe’s grandfather “had twenty concubines, and this is

where they stayed surrounded by eunuchs”. (L.D. p.191). In fact, such images

and representations have become part of western orientalist register which is

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inevitably opted for by any orientalist to write about the orient so as to meet

western expectations.

In sum, the danger of these orientalist representations resides in their

generalizations and selectivity. Romance writers do not give space to the reader to

imagine possible situations, but they are rather meticulous in terms of the selection of

images to be represented. And by denying the existence of difference and variety in

what they represent, they come up with generalizing judgements. Such

generalizations and stereotypes are strengthened by their being inherited and repeated

by a writer after another. These stereotypes about the ‘harem’ and the fantasy of the

orient can be traced back to many centuries ago, but they are kept alive even

nowadays in the twentieth first century. For instance, contemporary imperial romance

is a good example of contemporary genres which keep dramatizing and reviving the

same orientalist stereotypes. Lord of the Desert is written in 2000, but one can not

distinguish it from other very early narrative accounts as far as the orientalist

discourse is concerned. Stereotyping becomes an ongoing process, which does not

stop but keeps developing in new different forms.

1.1.3 The Veiled Web: The trope of ‘veil’ Catherine Assaro’s novel, The Veiled Web, can be described as a different

novel in comparison to the above two novels because of its mixture of romance

and science fiction, and setting its events in the future (2010). The plot of the

novel in cursory revolves around a love story between Rashid Al-Jazerri, a

successful Moroccan genius who has invented an efficient Artificial

intelligence, and Lucia Del mar, a famous American dancer. The two meet

each other in Spain; but they have been obliged to escape to Morocco to hide

there, after a failed attempt to kidnap them. They get married in Morocco,

staying to live with Rashid’s family in Atlas Mountains for some time. And it

is via the experience of Lucia with Rashid’s family in Morocco that the novel

exposes many different cultural and religious conflicts between Islam and the

West.

Culturally speaking, The Veiled Web raises many controversial issues as far

as the relationship between Islam and the West are concerned. In this section,

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we will limit ourselves to the politics of ‘veil’ representation in terms of how

Catherine Assaro conceives of wearing the veil in a Muslim country. As a

matter of fact, wearing the veil, as an Islamic practice, has been used and

abused in different western narratives. By and large, the veil is represented in

western narratives as a symbol of ‘oppression’, ‘enslavement’ and ‘seclusion’.

In this respect, Leila Ahmed argues that

Veiling-to western eyes, the most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies-became the symbol now of both oppression of women (or, in the language of the day, Islam’s degradation of women) and the backwardness of Islam, and it became the open target of colonial attack and the spearhead of the assault on Muslim societies.140

In saying this, Leila Ahmed displays the hostility of the west to Islam and to its

practices. The West has kept assuming Eurocentric attitudes towards Muslims

and Islam, in the sense that they think that the solution for Muslims’

‘backwardness’ is to join the western model of ‘modernization’. Some western

discourses try to create a metonymic association between the orient and its

women, linking between unveiling women, which signifies for them

‘modernization’, with the transformation and modernization of the orient itself.

In this sense, it should be argued that the west’s call for ‘modernization’ is just

one way to homogenize the ‘other’, imposing the western model by negating

‘other’s’ differences. The veil in Islam is part and parcel of one’s identity and

one’s culture, and removing it can mean a distortion of one’s identity.

In this connection, The Veiled Web does not only revive the old western

stereotypes about the veil, but it tries to prolong such stereotypes by means of

representing those same attitudes in the future. I.e., it is by setting the events of

her novel in 2010 that Assaro enhances and prolongs those stereotypes about

Muslim women and Islam. By so doing, she accentuates the same old

orientalist discourses which look upon the orient as being in a timeless, stable

and unchangeable state. Regardless of the great changes that have been taking

140 Ahmed 152.

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place in Morocco and in many other Muslim countries, the writer keeps

reminding the reader that these countries remain as they ‘were’, ‘oppressing’

and ‘secluding’ women in their veils, and ‘harems’.

In this respect, before moving to discuss the representation of the veil in

Assaro’s novel, it seems important to read the paratext of the novel141. Two

main elements in the paratext appear to be significant as far as the trope of veil

is concerned: the title and the cover image. Concerning the title, it introduces

the reader to a veiled, invisible and unknown web; and this web is meant to

refer to a Muslim society, which is Morocco, where women are obliged to

wear the veil. This image is emphasized by the cover picture in which a

beautiful woman is pictured with only her face and hands that are visible. This

woman is represented as wearing the veil, but this veil is drawn in a form of a

horse archway. Such architecture is known to be part and parcel of Islamic

civilization. Hence, according to this horse archway architecture, the reader is

put in an Islamic context in which women are obliged to wear the veil. Still,

what is at stake in such representation of a veiled woman on the cover is the

tendency to dramatize western connotations of the veil, which, for westerners,

signifies the ‘oppression’ and ‘seclusion’ of Muslim women.

By the developments of the novel’s events, the above connotations of the

veil are buttressed via the experience of Lucia Del Mar in Morocco. Lucia

finds herself in a different place and culture, where she finds difficulties to

adapt herself to that new context. Once, Rashid’s sister, Khadija, comes to

Lucia with a Jellabs, and Litham, asking her to wear them in order to go to

Hammam. But, Lucia abstains from putting on that veil, especially because of

her awareness of her being Christian. When she is asked to wear the veil, “a

flush started in Lucia’s neck (where she puts on a cross) and spread to her

face”. (V.W.p.152). For Lucia, “wearing the veil had far more significance

than simply putting black chiffon across her face”. (V.W. p. 153). Showing her

rejection to put on the veil, Lucia tells to Khadija “I can not do that”. Here,

141 See the appendix

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describing her psychological state when she is offered to put on the veil, the

narrator says:

Lucia felt as she stood on shifting cultural sands with the tide eroding the landscape she recognized. She did not want to do this. It goes against principles basic to her personality. (V.W. p. 154).

According to this reaction towards wearing the veil, it comes into view

the symbolic connotations of the veil, which, for Lucia, does not mean only

“black chiffon across her face”, but more than that. In addition to many

stereotypes Lucia has about “veil”, she also decides not to wear it out of

respect to her religion. She is fully aware of her belonging to a religion

different from Islam, and that wearing the veil means a kind of infringement

for her religion. If so, it should be argued that both veiling and unveiling are

religious and cultural practices, which should be respected. Hence, the western

call for unveiling women for the sake of ‘modernizing’ them expresses lack of

respect to Muslim’s religion and culture. Since a western woman, like Lucia,

rejects to wear the veil because of her religion, the Muslim woman also should

be respected in wearing the veil because it is a must in her religion. But,

because of its being eurocentrically oriented, the west is not able accept such

mutual cultural respect, in which each one respects the other’s difference. The

west usually takes what belongs to it as the epitome of perfection, refusing any

kind of negotiation.

Importantly, in order not to embarrass Rashid’s family in the neighborhood,

and because of her awareness that people in Morocco value honor and dignity,

Lucia is represented accepting, by the end, to put on the Litham, but just for

one day as she has told to Khadija. According to this, there seems that the

novel seeks to attract the attention of readers to the fact that wearing the veil in

a Muslim country is obligatory for all people, be they Muslims or not. It is true

that Muslim women are recommended to wear the veil, but it can not be denied

that a large number of Muslim women nowadays do not wear the veil. And no

one is going to punish them for doing so, let alone non-Muslim women. So the

writer’s representation of Khadija as obliging Lucia to wear the veil so as to

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avoid embarrassment in the neighborhood is extremely exaggerating. Actually,

such an image can make western readers believe that once they come to a

Muslim country, they must wear the veil. And this represents Islam in a

negative way as being an intolerant religion which is governed by violence and

enforcement to follow its practices.

Another extreme representation of an Islamic practice concerns the way of

wearing the veil. In this passage the narrator describes how Khadija arranged

the veil for Lucia:

Khadija helped her arrange the veil and hood of her jellaba. Looking in the mirror, Lucia saw the hood covering her hair and forehead. The Litham hung across her nose, so only her eyes showed, large and a dark above the chiffon. The lower edge of the veil, with its white embroidery, came to a rounded point that outlines of her face through the sheer cloth. (V.W. p. 154)

In the light of this passage, it is observed that the narrator, first of all, shows

about her being familiar with Moroccan culture because of her being able to

describe in a meticulous way the manner some Moroccan women used to wear

the veil. Still, what is at stake in the above description is the fact the narrator

represents one of the oldest ways of wearing the veil, which hardly exists

nowadays. By doing so, the writer is probably trying to ‘exoticise’ and

exaggerate the way the veil is worn in Morocco, as a means of ‘invisibility’

and ‘seclusion’. In fact, tending to focus on what is exceptional and exotic is a

common feature among orientalist writers, because in this way they try to

construct a dividing line between the west and the east, which can show the

“superiority” of the former over the “inferiority” of the latter.

Most importantly, in order to lay emphasis on the imprisoning fact of

putting on the veil, the narrator, in the following passage, dramatizes on how

Lucia is feeling, after she has put on the veil:

Although it is easy to breathe, the cloth bothered her. Even after four days, she missed being able to go where she pleased, in clothes that felt normal to her[…] she had grown up in a land of wide-open spaces, endless sky, and a fierce

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independence that remained from the days of the frontier. Now she felt confined. Constricted. (V. W. p. 155) (added emphasis).

This passage constructs a clear opposition between “veiled Lucia” and

“unveiled Lucia”, and between “an imprisoned Lucia” and a “liberated Lucia”.

The above emphasized words display such binary opposition. That is,

describing Lucia as “missing being able to go where she pleased, in clothes

that felt normal” is used as way to reflect the imprisoning fact of wearing the

veil. And saying that “she had grown up in a land of wide-open spaces, endless sky,

and a fierce independence” while now, when she is in an oriental society, “she

felt confined. Constricted.” implies drawing a comparison between western

“liberated” societies and oriental “oppressing” societies. In reality, these binary

oppositions are meant to display to the reader how veiling, a typical Islamic

practice, equals a sort of “imprisonment”, “enslavement”, “confinement” and

“restriction”, whereas unveiling, which is typically western, “frees” and

“liberates” women from any form of restriction or limitation. In this case, “the

veil is taken as a sign of the inherently oppressive and unfree nature of the

entire tradition of Islam and oriental cultures and by extension it is used as a

proof of oppression of women in these societies.”142 Throughout the experience

of Lucia, the narrator intends to emphasize the idea of wearing the veil as a

constraint for a woman to attain freedom; thus presenting the western model of

living as a solution for women’s ‘liberation’.

By the same token, this idea of the veil as a means of imprisonment and

confinement is emphasized throughout this description of how Lucia feels

while she is wearing the veil: “It made Lucia feel strange. Veiled, hidden, and

forbidden, she had become invisible.” Here, the choice of words such as

“strange” “Veiled”, “hidden”, “forbidden”, and “invi sible” to describe a

veiled woman is very revealing. They are mainly used to make the reader

experience a sense of ‘oppression’, ‘invisibility’, and ‘exoticism’ while

thinking of the “oriental woman”. Also, those descriptions are meant to

142 MeyDa YEGENOGLU, “Saratorical Fabricatios: Enlightenment and western feminism”, in Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse, Ed. Laura E. Donaldson & Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2002)84.

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represent Islam as an ‘oppressing’ religion of women, while the west as a

model of ‘liberation’ and ‘freedom’. By so doing, it comes into view to what

extent the west is Eurocentric and narrow-minded as far as the other’s cultural

and religious differences are concerned.

In a word, the novel’s failure to accept Islamic practice of wearing the veil

and enhancing at the same time putting on “the cross” displays western

narrow-mindedness and Eurocentrism. Both veiling and unveiling are to be

considered as cultural facts, meaning that as long as the western woman has

the right to be unveiled in her society and culture, the Muslim woman has also

all the right to be veiled in her society and culture. Thus, veiling should not be

considered as an ‘oppressive’ practice, but as part and parcel of one’s religion,

identity and culture, which should be respected.

1.2 The ‘western’/ ‘Oriental woman’: Signs of differences

In the light of the above discussion of how ‘Muslim women’ are

represented under western female gaze, it should be argued that such

representations are meant explicitly or implicitly to construct signs of

differences between the western women and the oriental woman. Such

differences make out of the western woman look as ‘superior’, ‘liberated’ and

‘modern’, whereas the ‘oriental woman’ as ‘inferior’, ‘oppressed’ and

‘backward’. For westerners, all codes associated with Muslim/oriental women

such as ‘veil’ and ‘harem’ are read as signs, not of cultural differences, but of

‘oppression’, ‘primitiveness’, and ‘backwardness’.

In this relevance, Palmer’s Lord of the Desert is going to be given as an

example to display how the western woman is represented as the antithesis of

the oriental woman. In this work, focus will be centered upon how Palmer

constructs a role model of a western woman who is represented as being well

‘sophisticated’, ‘educated’ and ‘attractive’, a woman who makes miracles. By

so doing, the ‘oriental’ woman is portrayed as lacking all those attributes and

appears ‘inferior’ in comparison to the western woman.

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1.2.1 Lord of the Desert: The allegory of impotence

In Palmer’s novel Lord of the Desert, one of the main intriguing issues

raised in it is the one of sexual impotence of the hero, sheik Philippe Sabon,

who is supposed to represent an Arab Muslim community. In fact, this issue of

impotence has less to do with sexual side than with many sides such as the

political, economic, and the social impotence of Arab countries. For the sake of

better understanding of this issue, it will be necessary to contextualize the

events of the story.

Following the general formula of romance novels, Lord of the Desert

revolves around a love story between Gretchen and Philippe Sabon, who meet

each other by chance in Morocco. Gretchen, the heroine, comes with her

friend, Maggie, to Morocco to spend their vacation. As planned by the two,

when they finish their vacation, Gretchen will come back to United States

while Maggie will go to Qawi (an imaginative country in the Middle East)

where she is going to work as a personal assistant of the Sheik of this country.

This plan has been disrupted when Maggie was informed that her lover had a

dangerous accident; so she has been obliged to go back home, leaving

Gretchen alone in Morocco. Maggie suggests on her friend to go disguised to

work in Qawi in her place.

Before going to Qawi, Gretchen stays alone at the hotel preparing herself to

take the adventure of the new job with the Sheik. The idea of working with

Sheik was a mysterious thing for her. The image of Sheik reminds her of

Rudolph Valentino in the silent film entitled ‘The Sheik’. While talking about

the sheik of Qawi, Gretchen told to Maggie:

“May be he’ll be gorgeous and sexy and look like Rudolph Valentino. Did you ever see that silent movie, ‘The Sheik’?”[…] “Just imagine having a fantasy like that actually come to life, Maggie. Being abducted by handsome sheikh on a white stallion and having him fall

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madly in love with you! I get goose bumps just thinking about it.” (L.D. p. 19)

In this passage, Gretchen reveals about her many stereotypes she holds about

the orient, as being a place of having romance with an Arab Sheik who is

“gorgeous”, “sexy”, “and “handsome” riding his “white stallion”. The

reference to Rudolph Valentino’s film is also very revealing in terms that this

film or in its form as a novel constitutes one of the basic classical orientalist

works which negatively depicts Arab’s women, environment, and culture. In

this sense, it appears that intertextuality is one of the most important means

used by orientalist writers to enforce and enhance their stereotypes. Actually,

Palmer’s reference to ‘The Sheik’ is meant to attract the senses of the reader

and to introduce him/her to a world of fantasy, in which they can eroticize

themselves.

With such images about the sheik, Gretchen is curious to know more about

the Sheik of Qawi and to live in his different world, which will be, according

to her, full of adventure and romance. But, before her travel to Qawi, she has

met the Sheik by chance in the hotel where she has been staying, though not

knowing that he is the Sheik of Qawi. They have been attracted by each other,

and their relationship becomes closer and closer. As an important component

of the formula in popular romance, the hero and the heroine are usually

represented as being well sophisticated and attractive. In this sense, Gretchen is

represented as being a beautiful woman, with “her long blond hair loose and

faintly waving down her back” (L.D. p. 81). Philippe, who is originally an

Arab, is represented as being attractive and handsome; but he is not pure Arab,

being represented as “darker than the most American men, but not radically

so, and lighter than some of the Arabs and Berbers”. (L.D. p. 33). And in

another passage, Philippe is described as having the “French blood, as well as

Turkish and Arab” (L.D. p. 133).

In the light of this portrait of both characters, it should be emphasized that

western women with the blond hair are represented in most romances as being

the role model of beauty, which implicitly negates and lessens the value of

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women with non-blond hair, who are supposed to be the Eastern women. Such

idea is emphasized by presenting romance heroes, sheik Philippe in Lord of

The Desert as an example, who madly fall in love simply with a woman with

blond hair. By the same token, the hero is meant to be represented as being

hybrid in order to be accepted by western readership. A pure Arab, who is

usually depicted as being dark or brown, is not expected to be in love with a

western woman because of her being considered as superior than him. All such

depictions are in fact eurocentrically oriented.

Still, regardless of this portrait of the two characters, Diana Palmer

explicitly violates one of the important components of the romance formula.

That is, the heroes are supposed to be sexually potent so that the western

heroine’s sexual desires will be satisfied. But in this case, Palmer introduces

Philippe as being sexually impotent for more than nine years, after he had an

accident. And since that time he has lost hope to make sex or give birth to

children, after he has been assured by most famous “European doctors” that he

would never be able to do so. Actually, given the fact that Philippe is

represented as being originally an Arab and as the head of a Muslim country,

his being represented as being sexually impotent should be put under question.

Such sexual impotence is an allegory that tends to reveal about the impotence

of Arab countries in all fields, be they economic, social or political. Moreover,

this discourse of impotence is part and parcel of the orientalist/colonial

discourse which tries to reveal the weakness of the non westerners, and to give

legitimacy to their intervention to help them to overcome their impotence.

In this respect, Gretchen is represented as the “Christ” who has come from

the west in order to save Philippe from his impotence, and to show him how a

western woman can make miracles by enabling him both to have sex and to

give birth to children, the fact that has not able to be done by any Arab woman

in his country. This indeed reveals a colonial discourse which constructs signs

of difference between the ‘Western’ woman and the ‘Eastern’ woman in terms

of celebrating the potency of the western woman. Gretchen is represented as

the first woman to arouse Philippe’s sexual desires, after he has been assured

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by doctors that “he would never function as a man” (LD p. 110). The narrator

dramatizes this event as follows:

Nine years. Nine long, endless, agonizing years of impotence that everyone said was permanent. And he was aroused by a virgin. Not only that, but the one woman on the planet that he couldn’t seduce […] now there was a tiny possibility that he could still be a man. (LD p. 110).

But after his first contact with her, Philippe starts feeling to function as “a

whole man”, which is something incredible for him. “He saw it and thanked

providence for sending him this woman, who made him come alive again, who

made him feel like a man again.” (L.D. p. 146). In this sense, the reader gets

impressed by the power of Gretchen who is able to put an end to the nine long

endless years of agony and impotence. In fact, this image is allegorical in the

sense that the two characters are supposed to represent different nations and

different races so that the image of Philippe’s impotence is an image of the

impotence of all Arab Muslim men and their countries. And in order to

overcome their impotence, they should be dependent on the west to help them

get over their impotence and powerlessness.

This powerlessness of the Arab countries is referred to implicitly in many

occasions in terms of primitivising these countries. Qawi can be considered as

a microcosmic example of all the Arab countries so that primitivisng it means

primitivising all the Arab countries. While informing Gretchen about his

country, Philippe tells her:

“You go to a country vastly different from your own, much less sophisticated than Morocco. Many modern conveniences do not exist there, and even electricity is recent addition. The people of Qawi were largely nomadic until the early part of century. When it was parceled out among the Europeans, the people resisted and many families were decimated. It will require a great deal of tolerance for you to adjust to such archaic surroundings”. (L.D. p. 91)

Such quote is very telling as far as the discourse of primitivisation is

concerned. The writer’s reliance on dialogism is also very significant in terms

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of giving credibility to what is communicated by characters. For example,

given that Philippe is the ruler of an Arab country, what he has said above is a

sort of self-primitivisation in terms that the narrator voices out her orientalist

discourse via Philippe so that all what he says gets a kind of authenticity. In

this light, it comes into view that there is a kind of interlink between the sexual

impotence Philippe and economic and social impotence of his country.

More importantly, given the fact that Philippe is described as living in a

world in which “a man is judged by his ability with women, and his ability to

father children” (L.D. p. 235), his continuance as a ruler of his country

depends heavily on his ability to get a son. For Philippe, the chance to have a

child is something impossible. But with ‘the western woman’, Gretchen,

everything is possible! She has succeeded to get pregnant with Philippe.

Giving him a child is represented as a second miracle the western woman has

managed to do. This fact can explain how Gretchen is represented as a

‘miraculous’ western woman, who has managed to do what no ‘oriental

woman’ could do with sheik Philippe. But this is just one way used by

westerners to construct differences between the western woman and the eastern

woman, thus showing the ‘superiority’ of the western woman.

In addition to saving the Sheik from his sexual’ impotence’, Gretchen is

also represented as a ‘courageous’ woman who knows how to use pistols, and

fears no death; as an ‘intelligent’ woman who has been able to save Sheik’s

country from an outside attack; and as a ‘modern’ woman who has managed to

bring ‘modernity’, ‘civilization’ and ‘happiness’ to all Qawi’s natives. Such

representations, in cursory, are, of course, forms of ‘idealizing’ western

women, and dramatizing the ‘superiority’ of western woman over Eastern

woman. They are intended to construct an antithesis between ‘western’ woman

and ‘oriental’ woman by means of which the former looks ‘superior’ over the

latter. Such forms of binary oppositions are as old as the orientalist discourse, a

discourse which intends to construct ontological and epistemological

differences between the ‘occident’ and the ‘orient’.

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In the light of what has been said, it appears how Lord of the Desert tries to

construct rigid signs of difference between western woman and non western

woman, by means of representing the former as more ‘developed’,

‘sophisticated’ and ‘courageous’ than the latter. How the western woman saved

the sheik from his sexual impotence is also revealing in terms of representing

western woman as being highly potent, not only sexually, but also socially and

civilizationally. So it can be said that the above impotence has been in fact

used allegorically to refer to the impotence of Arab countries in all spheres,

and that their cure is to be found with westerners.

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2. Space and the construction of “imaginative geography”143

This section concerns itself with the investigation of how space is constructed in

the three romance novels under question in this study. Space construction in “imperial

popular romance” is very significant in the sense that it contributes to set a kind of

“imaginative geography” between the ‘I’ and the “other”. In all the novels we are going

to analyse, space is represented as a signifier of difference between the West and the

East, as well as a signifier of difference between ‘civilization’ and ‘non-civilisation’.

This section is split into two sub-sections. The first deals with the

mis/representation of the ‘oriental space’ in the light of Diana Palmer’s Lord of the

Desert, in which we will discuss how ‘oriental space’ is imagined /invented by

westerners; and in the light of Virginia’ Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco, in which

focus will be addressed to the investigation how postcolonial space of some colonised

countries is mis/represented. The second sub-section will embark on studying the

politics and poetics of surveillance in Catherine Assaro’s A Veiled Web. This sub-

section will try to answer these questions: how ‘oriental space’ is surveyed under

western eyes? How does surveillance manage to control and construct ‘oriental space’?

And how can space be gendered?

2.1 The (mis)representation of ‘Oriental space’

2.1.1 Lord of the Desert: ‘Qawi’ as an imaginary space

Throughout Lord of the Desert, the reader comes across imaginary spaces,

which do not exist in reality, but at the same time express a certain reality which has

been constructed in western imagination. These spaces are depicted with an ‘oriental

flavour’. In this novel, we have an imaginary country called Qawi which is located in

the Middle East. Qawi in fact is used as a metonymic space to represent all Arab

Muslim countries. I.e. Qawi is represented as an oil country, whose people are mostly

Muslims and speak Arabic. But, throughout this depiction, Lord of the Desert is

entangled in the (mis)representation of ‘oriental space’ by means of dramatising and

endorsing many stereotypes and clichés that have been constructed about the orient. For

143 This phrase is owed to Said’s use of it in a section entitled as “Imaginative Geography and its representations: orientalizing the oriental”, in Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1978), 49.

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instance, Qawi is represented as a ‘desert’ space, with palm tress, tents, and

camels as a means of transportation.

What is more striking in Lord of the Desert is the fusion between real

places and imaginary ones, pushing readers to see what is imaginary as real

and vice versa. For illustration, at the very beginning of the novel, the reader is

introduced to Morocco, where the heroine, Gretchen, and her friend have come

to spend their vacation. And after this vacation, Gretchen has travelled to Qawi

to work with the sheik of this country. This shift from a real place (Morocco),

where cities such as Casablanca, Tangier and Asilah are mentioned, to an

imaginary space (Qawi) reflects that fusion between the real and the imaginary,

between reality and fantasy. Still, in terms of representation, both spaces are

‘orientalised’ and ‘exoticized’, being represented as symmetric and similar

spaces.

Such similarity is apparent in the way Morocco has been first introduced at

the very beginning of the novel. When Gretchen has arrived to Morocco, she

has been described as being wide awake and eager for Morocco, “land of

camels, Sahara desert, old median with high adobe walls, Kasbah, grottoes,

market day”, to mention but a few, and “where men and women wore long,

graceful, robes, and women either wore head covers with veils or scarves tied

around their parents” (L.D. 12). Repeatedly, such images and customs of

clothing are kept referred to as being very ‘exotic’, ‘medieval’, and

‘mysterious’ or even ‘prehistoric’. And this is done mainly to dramatise

Morocco’s ‘exoticness’ and ‘differentness’ in comparison to the west.

Similarly, the same images drawn about Morocco are emphasised in the

representation of Qawi space. I.e. when Gretchen and the sheik Philippe have

left Morocco to Qawi, the narrator describes how Gretchen finds Qawi as

being very similar to Morocco:

It was no more what she’d expected than Morocco had been. There were date palms everywhere, sandy stretches that led to the Persian Gulf, and sparking blue water. Inside the ancient wall of the old city, the buildings were blinding white. There were beautiful mosques and a cathedral, and in the distance,

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she saw what looked like beginnings of a new modern city. (L.D. p. 168).

By reading this passage, we can detect how western discourse tends to frame

both Morocco and Qawi in one shape, evading all possible differences between

Morocco (North Africa) and Qawi (Middle East). Throughout the above

juxtaposition between the two spaces, it should be said that the orientalist

discourse appears like a one formula-discourse, which is applied to any oriental

country. And it is in such uniformity of discourse where western hegemony

resides, trying to minimise and reduce all Arab Countries into one unified

image.

Over and above, in describing Qawi’s cities as being in “the beginnings”

of modernity, the narrator conveys a sense that Qawi is still a ‘primitive’

country, which is in the process of modernising itself. In fact, this discourse of

primitivising Qawi is incessantly repeated throughout the novel at many

different levels. On the spatial level, Qawi is represented as desert space,

lacking means of modernity, and where people are still living in tents and using

camels and horses to move from place to place.

In this respect, the paratext is revealing. The cover image represents a

sheik, who is the ruler of Qawi, in a white stallion riding in an open desert.

This image is introductory to a desert world, which is intended to qualify the

Arab world as a desert space. In the text, that image is made clear. In the

following passage, the sheik of Qawi is described riding his stallion to save his

beloved, Gretchen, from the hands of his enemy:

Gretchen saw a cloud of dust, and riding out of it was a tall man on creamy Arabian stallion, yelling orders … the party of Arabs rode like gods on their exquisite horses, standing in the stirrups to fire on the run. She managed to get to her feet, thrilling at the way those men rode, at the very primitive rampage of native tribesmen against modern guerrillas. That tall Arab on the stallion fascinated her … his face was covered with white fold cloth, his head was in the traditional headdress with black ropes securing it. He looked like every dream of heroism Gretchen had ever had. A sheik on a stallion, saving the heroine from the great danger in desert… (L. D. pp249-250)

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This passage reiterates what is depicted in the cover image so as to display the

nature of Qawi’s space and how Arab people are still traditionally fighting by

using horses. The presence of desert, horses, and Arabs in the above passage is

indeed meant to ‘idealise’ and ‘exotcise’ the oriental setting, and to push

western readers to experience an “exotic” Arab oriental space with all its

‘flavour’.

Moreover, describing the ruler of Qawi as being engaged in the fight

with his stallion reflects that Qawi and, by implication many other Arab

countries, are still governed by traditional defence systems, where there is no

separate Army and soldiers, as it is the case in the west. For example, when

Gretchen asks the Sheik of Qawi whether they have an army, he replies: “Not

in the sense you mean, not yet … we are an old country … the rebels will have

to be met in the old way”. By answering her in that way, the Sheik depicts

Gretchen’s country, United States, as superior, whereas his own as inferior. In

such discourses, the narrator intends to construct a kind of binary opposition

between western countries and Arab countries in terms of showing how the

‘West’ is more ‘developed’ and ‘modern’ than the ‘East’.

More importantly, not only the military system that is primitivised, but

even the ruling system in Qawi is also primitivised. Gretchen wants to know

how her Sheik became the head of state. She has been thinking that he has

inherited the crown from his father, but the Sheik has told her: “‘No one

inherits a title among these desert people” he said softly, ‘it is won, and held,

only by the man who can defend it’” (L.D. p.170). So, Qawi is represented as

still being ruled by tribalism, a system in which the powerful rules the weak;

there is no ‘elections’, no ‘democracy’ or ‘parliament’. This is meant as

propaganda of USA’s ‘democracy’ in terms of showing how many Arab

Muslim countries are still in need of ‘American democratic system’ of ruling.

At many times, the narrator constructs binary oppositions between USA and

some of the Arab countries, as it is the case in the following dialogue between

Gretchen and the sheik. Gretchen says to him:

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“You said that your country was still rather … primitive” his broad shoulders lifted and fell: “compared to yours, certainly. But I have great plans for my people, for new educational facilities and modern hospitals and industry.” (L D p.144)

In this dialogue, it is apparent how the natives are primitivised. By answering

her “compared to yours, certainly”, Sheik is represented as self primitivisng

himself and his people. It is also noticed that his judgement is based on striking

a comparison between his country and Gretchen’s one, which means that the

writer tries via presenting this comparison the superiority of the USA and the

inferiority of Qawi. In sum, the construction of binary oppositions or the

‘Manichean allegory’ between the west and the East is part and parcel of any

orientalist discourse, and this discourse is embodied in the above

representation of Qawi.

Most importantly, in Lord of the Desert the writer keeps referring to Middle

Eastern countries as being dangerous spaces known by wars, crimes, and

atrocities. That is, the oriental space is portrayed as a space of violence,

disorder and chaos. As it is made clear in the text, western media has

contributed a lot to representing Arab Muslim countries as being dangerous

spaces. In one passage, Gretchen tells her friend, Maggie, that “I have heard

some scary things about Middle Eastern countries and beheadings” (L.D.

p.19). This statement displays the many stereotypes constructed about Arab

countries in the west, in which Arabs are linked to violence and danger.

Colonially speaking, representing some Arab countries in such ways can be

used as a pretext for western intervention under the umbrella term of

“civilizing mission”. And that media is one crucial source for diffusing those

stereotypes about Arabs is made clear in Gretchen’s saying that that

“All our television reporters talk about are scandals and political issues and the latest tragedy. They don’t tell us one thing about other countries unless somebody important is murdered in one”. (L.D. p. 52)

Apparently, it is noticed that many stereotypes that westerners have about the

‘orient’ have been an offshoot of western biased media. And no one can deny

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what impact media can have in shaping audience’s attitudes. In addition to

media, fiction does also promote and engrave those stereotypes. And our novel

in question is a vivid example which spreads such above stereotypes. Qawi,

which stands as an allegorical image for all other Arab Muslim countries, is

represented mainly as a desert space fraught with tribal wars, bloodshed and

violence. Thus, through reading such novel, a western reader will certainly

draw a negative image about Arab countries.

On the basis of what has been said, we can conclude that Lord of the Desert

makes use of the imagined space of Qawi as a means to mis/represent,

primitivise, and exoticise Arabs. The novel has managed to do so via mingling

between reality and fantasy, between real places and imagined places, blurring

differences between the two.

2.1.2 Never Marry in Morocco: The representation of postcolonial space In reading Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco, one easily notices the

strong presence of history as a defining feature of this novel. More specifically,

this novel records, though in a fictional way, some important historical events

which took place during the postcolonial period of Morocco and Algiers such

as the Battle of Algiers and the coup d’état of Skhirat. It also portrays some

repercussions of independence on both the coloniser and the colonised. I.e. for

the coloniser, independence has led to “loss” and “misfortune”; while for the

colonised, it has led to “chaos”, “corruption” and “political instability”. Of

great importance is that this postcolonial condition is narrated from an

American perspective. Thus, the primary goal of this section is to see how the

postcolonial space in North Africa is represented from an American

perspective.

In Never Marry in Morocco, Virginia, both the heroine and narrator, speaks

about her love experience with her French-Moroccan husband, Pierre. Since

Pierre’s parents are living in Morocco, the two go to live with them there.

Pierre’s parents used to be ex-settlers in Algiers, but they have been obliged to

sell all what they have had there after the great battle of Algiers, and have

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come to live in Morocco. They have made a vast fortune during the colonial

period in Algiers, because of the massive land grants they have been given by

the French authorities. They have sold their lands there and came to invest their

money in Morocco. Pierre’s family is an example of French colonial

exploitation, which has been silenced, and sometimes justified in the novel.

Accordingly, given her being a member of Pierre’s family, and living with

them in Morocco, Virginia manages to know many things about the French

colonisers and their relationship with the natives. In most chapters of the novel,

Virginia tries to present the postcolonial condition of both the coloniser and the

colonised after independence in North Africa. Yet, regardless of her attempts

to be neutral in narrating this postcolonial condition she is experiencing there,

Virginia is found entangled in supporting and even naturalising the French

colonisation of Morocco and Algiers. She does so, first, by dramatising the

‘loss’ and ‘misfortune’ of the French after they were kicked out from the

colonised lands, instead of expressing sympathy with the victimised natives.

Second, she represents the colonised lands, especially Morocco, as living in a

state of “chaos” and “political instability” after the departure of the coloniser,

implying that the natives are still not mature enough to rule themselves.

By and large, the first sentence the novel starts with is the “death” of

Pierre’s grandmother, Emilia. At the very beginning, Virginia thinks that she

has died of an old age, but subsequently, she discovers that she has committed

suicide because of her sense of frustration and disappointment, after she has

lost all her amassed fortune during the battle of Algiers. In this battle, many

French settlers are kicked out from Algiers empty-handed. Being unable to

grasp the loss of Algiers, Emilia tells to Virginia:

I miss the old fishing boats that had sails instead of noisy motors, the old farms that the young people have abandoned for the cities. I miss Algiers. … The French opened up the colony in Algeria to everyone so my parents immigrated to Algiers, the capital … a vast fortune … I miss Algiers. (N.M.M pp.11-12)

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Such expression of regret to lose Algiers explains the materialistic and

greedy nature of the coloniser, who still hankers for exploiting the natives

more and more. The French do not think about anything but their fortunes.

Like the case of Emilia, They can even commit suicide for losing something

that is originally not their own. The irony is that the French claim that they

come to the colonies in order to “protect” and “civilise” the natives. For

instance, Emilia has told Virginia that “the French had done so much there

(Algiers)… planted orange groves, cultivated farms, built hospitals, schools...”

(N.M.M p.20) But, Emilia has forgotten to tell her about what the French has

done to the culture of the natives and the atrocities committed against the

natives themselves. She regrets the loss of her fortune in Algiers, but not the

hundreds of the colonised people who were killed and dehumanized by her

country. Actually, this displays the Eurocentric and pragmatist side in the

coloniser’s mindset.

While narrating the story of Emilia, Virginia dramatises the loss and

misfortune of the French after independence, rather than criticising their unfair

presence and exploitation of the colonised people. Instead of describing

Algiers as being subject to exploitation and colonisation, Virginia refers to it as

being a fortune “that smiled to the French families”. This can be considered as

one way of naturalising and normalising the French colonisation and

exploitation of the natives.

Significantly, many French families, like Pierre’s one, feel regretful for the

independence of French colonies. Of course, they should be so since it is

thanks to the colonies that those families managed to amass “an enviable

fortune and created unparalleled lifestyle”! (N.M.M p.12) Pierre’s family is an

example of those families that have capitalised on the French presence in the

colonies to make out great fortune. After independence, they hate that day the

colonies got their independence. Expressing her disappointment about that,

Jean Paul, Pierre’s mother, tells to Virginia that “ the worst has already

happened. And that was the fault of de Gaul … in Algeria.” (N.M.M p.136)

Sharing with her the same feeling of regret, Pierre adds: “that de Gaul was a

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son of a bitch to abandon the French colonies” (ibid). In reading such

disturbing attitudes, we can sense how the French families are parched to carry

on colonising and exploiting the natives.

Perhaps the worst of all that is the westerner’s proclivity to claim being

“open-minded”, “liberal”, “civilised “and “humanist”. How can they be so

while having that eager to “eat the natives alive”, to exploit them and to

subjugate them? How can one claim to be humanist and at the same time

felling sorry to give independence to a certain people. Instead of thinking to

compensate what they have done to the colonised people, Pierre’s family, as an

example of many French families, are reminiscing the colonial time, the time

of exploitation, suppression and dehumanisation.

Over and above, when natives fight back against colonisers, they are

condemned to be criminal and murderers. For example, telling Virginia about

how Christine’ father was “torn from limb to limb” during the Moroccan

independence movement in 1954, Pierre said:

“He was driving through the farmlands near the Reif Mountains, very near our farm in Ouzzane, when a crow of people descended from the hills and tore him an the other Frenchman in the care to pieces. No one ever knew why.” (N.M.M p. 141)

This passage is a dramatisation of the ‘innocence’ of Christine’s father, and a

condemnation of Moroccans’ act of ‘killing’. And what is more surprising is

Pierre’s claim that no one knows the reasons behind that attack. Moroccans are

represented as criminals and murders, instead of being represented as a people

who defend their land, their honour, and their dignity. Has someone to be

condemned, it is in fact the French who are forcefully taking the natives’ lands

and exploiting them in unimaginable ways. Hence, in silencing the natives’

right to defend themselves and to resist the coloniser, Virginia becomes

involved in hiding the real image of the French colonisers who committed

physical as well as cultural atrocities against the natives, trying to normalise

the French colonisation.

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So far we have tried to describe the impact of the French colonies’

independence on some French families; and how Virginia, as an American

character and narrator, showed her sympathy to the ‘French’ loss and

misfortune after independence, instead of doing so with the colonised people.

Now we will move to elucidate how Virginia again tries to justify French

colonialism by means of portraying the Moroccan postcolonial space, as being

a corrupt and politically unstable one. I.e. Virginia tries to convey the idea that

Morocco is still immature enough to rule itself, and that it is still in need of

being under western protectorate.

In this line of reasoning, it can be argued that one of the features of the

colonial discourse is exemplified in terms of depicting colonised courtiers as

being fertile contexts of violence, despotism, corruption and political

instability. Such discourse is basically meant to justify the western intervention

in the name of ‘democracy’ of ‘civilising mission’. It is this same discourse

that Virginia tries to enunciate by representing Morocco, as being politically

unstable. Such instability is alluded to in the following dialogue between

Virginia, Pierre, and his mother:

“When was the Independence movement?” “The Moroccans got their independence Movement in 1956.” Pierre looked at my ashen face.” It was not a bloody movement.” “Except for the beheadings at the king’s palace” interjected Jean Paul… “But this bloodbath was between El Gloui, the pasha of Marrakech, and the loyalists,” argued Pierre. (N.M.M p.142)

In the light of this dialogue, Morocco is depicted as a space of “bloodbath”,

and “violence” after independence, a space in which there is struggle for

political power. As far as political instability, Morocco, like all countries all

over the world, is no exception. What seems to be exceptional is to use such

political instability as an excuse to pave the way for colonial intervention under

the pretext of “civilising mission”; or to attempt to show the gap left in the

colonized countries after the departure of the coloniser.

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For the sake of deepening the political instability in Moroccan, Virginia

devotes a whole long chapter to discuss in a fictional way the Coup d’Etat of

Skhirat during the birthday party of Hassan II. She dramatizes this event via

exposing in details some moments of this coup during which many people are

killed and injured. Such dramatisation of the situation is described by Virginia

as follows:

Those who ran through the front door of the palace were instantly mowed down by machine gun fire. Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta! Others jumped out of the palace windows and ran towards the royal gold course to meet the same fate. The shooting seemed indiscriminate; even foreign diplomats died in the line of fire. ((N.M.M p.226)

Then she adds:

Pools of blood splattered the room, and dignitaries littered the floor, sprawled in the pathetic positions only the dead assume. ((N.M.M p.229)

Such ‘bloody’ images that Virginia tries to portray are actually meant, first, to

show the absence of safety in third world countries, and, second, to show the

colonised countries in a ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’ state, in which the last

word is given to violence and massacres. Again, given that Morocco and many

other countries at that time are still new independent countries, it is highly

possible that Virginia, by representing these countries as politically unstable,

intends to expose the inability of colonised countries to rule themselves, and

thus being still in need of western ‘protection’ and ‘intervention’.

To recapitulate, Never Marry in Morocco tells a story of an American

woman who has tried to represent the postcolonial space of both the colonised

and the coloniser in Morocco and Algiers. And it is in her representation of

this space that she is found endorsing and sometimes justifying French

colonialism. I.e. she dramatizes the French’s ‘loss’ of colonies and at the same

time exposes the colonised’s space as being politically unstable, implying the

natives’ immaturity to rule themselves.

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2.2. On politics of surveillance

2.2.1 The Veiled web: On aesthetics of surveillance

Catherine Assaro’s The Veiled Web can be described as a novel of

surveillance par excellence. The main events of this novel are set in Morocco,

where the heroine, Lucia Del Mar, has an “out-of-place” experience. It is an

“out-of-place” experience because it expresses how Lucia has felt alienated,

and culturally shocked while living with Rashid’s family in Morocco. The

narrator tries via this experience of Lucia to introduce the western reader to a

very different space, where everything looks “unusual”, “traditional”,

“strange” and “spectacular” from what the westerners are familiar with. In

order to bring this different space into view, the narrator makes use of Lucia’s

surveillance/her visual experience there to represent that space.

Of great importance is that this very act of surveillance is one of the most

powerful strategies of imperial dominance, because:

it implies a viewer with an elevated vantage point, it suggests the power to process and understand that which is seen, and it objectifies and interpellates the colonized subject in a way that fixes its identity in relation to the surveyor.144

This is to display the power of surveillance and how it functions as a means of

representation, fixity, and interpellation. By the act of surveillance, the

surveyor can exclude many things and include others, depending on his/her

subjectivity, and interests. Such politics of exclusion and inclusion take place

mainly in many imperialist accounts, in which writers try to focus on what is

‘exotic’, ‘primitive’, and ‘touristic’ in the ‘other’s’ culture. Displaying how the

colonizer’s eyes function while surveying, David Spurr states that

The eye remains mobile and selective, constantly filtering the visible for the sign, for those gestures and objects that, when transformed into the verbal or photographic image, can alone have meaning for a western audience by entering a familiar

144 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1999) 226.

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web of signification. The journalist is literally on the lookout for scenes that carry an already establishes interest for a western audience, thus investing perception itself with the mediating power of cultural difference. 145

In this, David shows that the eye of surveyor is oriented by what interests or

attracts him/her, and thus becoming a powerful means of rendering what is

surveyed as subject to the authority and backgrounds of the surveyors’ eye.

This also means that there is nothing innocent in the process of surveillance.

As far as The Veiled Web is concerned, it will be argued that Lucia’s gaze

is very selective and exclusive in terms of reporting to the reader all that looks

‘traditional’, ‘different’, and ‘exotic’ about Moroccan space. She can be

described as taking the position of what Marry Louis Pratt calls “Monarch-of-

all-what I-see”, which means that the observer reflects her/his authority over

the scene surveyed.146 In our analysis of Lucia’s surveillance, we will adopt

David Spurr’s paradigm of surveillance analysis, in which he studies three

main elements: landscape, interiors and bodies.

To begin with, when Lucia and Rashid have managed to escape from their

kidnappers in Italy, they have gone directly to Rashid’s home to hide there.

After a long sleep at Rashid’s house, she wakes up finding herself at a very

different place, she has never seen. The narrator describes here how she

perceived that new space:

She slid off the bed and went to the window, where breezes ruffled the curtains. About fifteen feet below the window, the ground rolled away in a gentle slope from the base of the house. Beyond the open stretch of land outside, groves of almond trees spread out across the valley. In the distance, a minaret lifted above the forest, and beyond that, a range of mountains soared into the sky […] The lush scene was not what Lucia expected. She knew almost nothing about North Africa, though, neither geography nor culture. What recourse would she have if Rashid decided to keep her here? She doubted it would be safe for her to walk

145 David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and imperial Administration (United States of America: Duke University press, 1996) 21. 146 Marry Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing, and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992)201 – 208.

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off alone into the countryside in such an isolated region. (V.W. 73-74)

What is described here is a landscape surveyed by Lucia while looking from

her window. The first thing to be noticed is that this landscape is located in a

mountainous countryside, where there is no mention of signs of modernity or

civilization. All the elements described above such as valley, mountains, and

groves of almond trees belong to nature. By so doing, the writer depicts

Moroccan space a “deserted natural space” where means of civilization are

absent.

What is more, the above scene is associated with a sense of danger

describing it as being unsafe (e.g. She doubted it would be safe for her to walk

off alone into the countryside in such an isolated region). This sense of danger

is stressed upon by describing the region as being isolated and unsafe. In fact,

it is here where the narrator’s politics of selection and exclusion takes place.

Her focus is mainly addressed, not to the real Morocco with its big and modern

cities, but to an isolated, deserted region in Morocco. Thereby, for a foreign

reader, the whole Morocco is to be thought of as a deserted, unsafe space, and

this is of course the main image most orientalists try to convey about oriental

spaces.

Relevantly, the above landscape is aesthetisized, being represented as “a

lush scene”. To find such a scene in a North Africa country makes Lucia

puzzled and confused (e.g. The lush scene was not what Lucia expected),

because all what she expects to find in such places is desert and camels. Such

puzzlement reflects how westerners come to North Africa, bringing with them

many stereotypes they read about in novels or watch in movies. For

illustration, as an expression of her sense of surprise to see Morocco as a

beautiful place with pretty scenes, Lucia tells Rashid: “It is pretty here. It

surprises me. I had always imagined Africa as a desert.” In another passage,

she likens a Moroccan guy to “a camel”, as if there is no other animal to use

for metaphoric purposes, but a camel. Therefore, it can be argued that the

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above depiction of space and its people enhances the writer’s stereotypes about

Morocco and orient in general.

Additionally, the narrator represents some Moroccan houses in a very

primitive way, describing them as “earthen houses” “with arched doorways”,

“like geodes”, “featureless and unadorned”. This is stated clearly in the

following passage:

As they followed a cobbled lane, earthen houses rose on either side like pale gold cliffs, leaving the sky a strip of washed-out blue overhead. Arched doorways showed at intervals, many painted blue, with white or yellow borders. She saw few windows. The houses were like geodes, those rocks that appeared featureless and unadorned on the outside but when opened revealed a sparkling beauty of crystals inside. (V.W. P. 157) Added emphasis.

In this passage, it is noticed that the representation of the houses is highly

aesthetisized. For Marry Louis Pratt, there are three main conventions used by

observers to aestheticize landscape so as to create quantitative and qualitative

value for what is surveyed.147 The first convention is aesthesizing the

landscape, by means of which the sight is seen as a painted picture through

which the writer orders his description in terms of binary oppositions. This

convention is apparent in the above passage in terms of describing houses as

being both “featureless and unadorned on the outside” and “sparkling beauty

of crystals inside”. The second convention is the density of meaning by means

of which the observer uses adjectival modifiers to provide rich representation.

In the above passage, the emphasized adjectives (cobbled, earthed, pale,

unadorned, Arched, featureless, washed-out …) reflect how the narrator tries to

provide rich meaningful representations to all what is surveyed. The last

convention has to do with the fact that the observer holds a sense of mastery or

authority in her/his descriptions. That is, every thing is described from the

vantage point of the viewer. Therefore, it should be argued that the narrator’s

147 Indebted to: Marry Louis Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing, and Transculturation, (London: Routledge, 1992) 204.

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surveillance is governed by her personal perception of things, trying to focus

on what interests her and western audience.

As far as interior representation, it is observed that the same above

conventions of Pratt are also used in the following surveillance of Rashid’s

household. I.e., the space is aestheticized, the meaning is dense, and what is

described is subject to the power of the surveyor. Such conventions are

highlighted throughout the following depiction of a Rashid’s house:

Designs in carved wood covered the ceiling, and a beautiful chandelier hung there, made from many small pieces of dangling crystals…the room had an aged quality, as if it was an antique photograph. She crossed the room to another doorway and drew aside its curtain revealing a tilted foyer….Actually, ‘archway” was a paltry word; it looked like the keyhole for a giant skeleton key. The sides rose in marble pillars for eight feet, ending in flat tops. Above them the arch curved out and around in a semicircle, like horseshoe. Its highest point was at least fourteen feet above the floor. Engraving framed the arch in braided designs of flowers and vines. She realized the “vines” were the calligraphic strokes of Arabic writing. Two small shapes ran past the doorway, their outlines vague through its gauzy curtain. She went over, pulled aside the curtains- and gasped. Symmetry. Exquisite symmetry. She faced a courtyard with a fountain in its center, water bubbling in tiered bowls. (V.W P.61-63)

In such account about Rashid’s household, the reader gets bombarded with

different meticulous descriptions, images and sizes about the Moroccan/Arab

architecture. Thereby, the reader feels as if she/he is seeing those architectural

forms in reality. The power of description renders what is described as looking

real and lively for the reader. And this displays the power of surveillance in

terms of reporting one’s visual experience. Actually, this strategy of gazing or

surveillance is of great importance as far as the orientalist/colonialst discourse

is concerned. It is by means of which that the surveyor fixes and constructs the

reality of the other.

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Put differently, what is surveyed above does not only construct

Moroccan/Arab architecture, but it does construct their culture, identity and

religion. Lucia’s depiction of Moroccan traditional architecture takes the

reader back many centuries to the time when Arabs were known by their

famous attractive architecture in Andalusia. This idea is made clear in this

passage:

Lucia had seen pictures of the Alhambra, a spectacular palace. Rashid’s home echoed that architecture on a smaller, more subdued scale, with its colonnades, arabesques, vaulted halls, and horseshow arches. (V.W P.100)

In fact, this seems to be very important since it reminds us of Arabs’ victories

and their great civilization when they were ruling in Andalusia. However, it is

probably not this that the narrator intends to covey to the western reader.

Under western eyes, the above descriptions of architecture represent a sign of

racial/cultural/social and civilizational difference between the Occident and

the Orient. For them, such differences should be maintained in order to define

themselves in opposite to the non-westerners. Living in a very ‘modern’ age,

with different sophisticated means of life (imagine that the events of Asaro’s

novel are set in 2010), Western readers will conceive of the above descriptions

and images as signs of ‘otherness’, ‘primitivism’, and ‘backwardness’. In this

relevance, it should be argued that the above description of Rashid’s

household

is a synecdochic evocation of a social whole through the representation of its parts, a familiar trope for representing otherness by describing a single cultural aspect which appears immensely significant as a key to the whole culture but which is nonetheless a riddle or seemingly inexplicable event to the reader.148

And it is this synecdochic representation of the household that entails politics

of selection and exclusion in the sense that the above example of household

148 David Richards, “Third Eye/Evil eye”, Masks of Difference, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 220.

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will be taken as a representative of the whole Moroccan culture, and thereby

‘othering’ the whole society.

Significantly enough, the last element which is subject to Lucia’s

surveillance is the depiction of human body. Many members of Rashid’s

family, women in particular, were subject to her gaze. It is due to her gender

that she is able to have access to women’s interior where she unveiled them to

western readers. She describes their dressing, their faces, and their hair. In the

following passage, Lucia describes both Rashid’s mother and his sister:

Like a great ship coming into port, an older woman with silver streaked hair swept into the room, carrying a platter heaped with pastries. Her silk robe, the deep blush color of roses, swirled around her ankles. She had a plump, voluptuous figure and unmistakable resemblance to Rashid A younger woman came with her, the girl in the stripped robe, bringing a try with teapot and cups. She was small, about five foot two, with creamy skin and pretty face. The whites of her eyes were beautifully clear, making her irises look even darker and her eyes even bigger. (V.W. p. 131)

According to this passage, we can notice the meticulous description of the

body of Rashid’s mother and his sister, and how Lucia’s gaze captures the

details of their bodies in terms of their hair, skin, eyes, and size. Importantly,

describing the mother as “a great ship coming into port” implies the idea of

de-familiarizing the natives’ bodies. This also signifies how the orientalist

discourse tries to exoticize and deform everything that is non-western. The

image of the mother as a port is meant to convey the plumpness of the oriental

woman, and her lack of attraction in comparison to the ‘western woman’.

Not only women’s bodies that were subject to Lucia’s gaze, but Rachid’s

father as well. In this extract, Lucia meticulously describes Rashid’s father as

follows:

His face had an austere quality, all plans and angles, with a jutting nose and deep set black eyes. White peppered his heavy eyebrows and streaked most of the short black beard that covered his lower face. He stood taller than Ahmad, taller indeed than any one in the family except Rashid, with a lean,

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almost gaunt build. A turban hid most of his hair, and his robes hung loosely from his shoulders. He projected a sense of aestheticism, one heightened by fierce strength of his features. (V.W. p. 133)

In reading this passage, one feels that Lucia tries to project Rashid’s father

as an aesthetic picture to look at. She makes him subject to her gaze so that the

father becomes as an object of gaze. In describing the features of his face, Lucia

tries to dramatize his difference, and his distinctiveness from men she sees in

the west. And by describing him in his traditional clothes, she is trying to

present to us an image of a 'traditional’ and ‘backward’ oriental man.

According to what has been said above, we can conclude that A Veiled Web

is of course a novel of surveillance par excellence. Lucia is represented as “A

monarch- of all what I see” who has selectively managed to represent space in

terms of landscape, anterior, and human body. All that is represented is meant to

construct a kind of “imaginative geography” between the west and the east, the

goal of which is to display rigid differences between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’,

between ‘civilization’ and ‘non-civilization’, and between ‘development’ and

‘backwardness’.

2.2.1.1 Gendering space: The representation of Morocco as a patriarchal space In the process of space representation, space becomes a site/sight through

which many cultural, social constructs are communicated. In this sense, space

representation should not be viewed as being innocent or objective; rather it is

in the very process of representation that many social, cultural biases are

conveyed. This issue of space is, for instance, tackled mainly by feminists in

terms of the relationship between space and gender construction. In feminist

terms, space can be divided into a private space, which is associated with

women, and public space, associated with men. In relation to how space is a

patriarchal construct, Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose refer to Shirley Ardner

who argues that

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The social map of patriarchy created “ground rules” for the behaviour of men and women, and that the gender roles and relations of patriarchy constructed some spaces as “feminine” and others as “masculine” and thus allocated certain kinds of (gendered) activities to a certain (gendered) places.149

In saying this, the writer lays emphasis on how gender differences are

inscribed in different spaces, resulting in having both “feminine space” and

“masculine space”. Where the former refers to those minimal institutions and

modes of activity that are possessed by mothers and their children, or the

domestic haven of feminine grace and charm, the latter stands for the public

realm of culture, politics, the economy, and the arena of aggressive masculine

competition.150 As indicated by Chandra Mohanty, western feminism tends to

dissociate their societies from having such above space divisions, focusing on

“third world” countries as being real examples of the dramatisation of those

patriarchal divisions of space.151

In this respect, it is our primary goal in this section to delineate how Assaro

in The Veiled Web represents Morocco as a space which dramatises patriarchy.

Throughout the experience of Lucia with Rashid’s family, the writer lays bare

how Moroccan space is “patriarchally” constructed. In Rashid’s house, Lucia is

represented as being astonished to see a large house, made of more than twenty

rooms, in which women outnumber men. The thought that comes to her mind

is that Rashid’s house is one of those “harem interiors” she read about in

novels or watches in movies, where women are imprisoned and secluded from

the outside world. In saying this, Lucia stereotypes Morocco as a patriarchal

society, with extended families, and harems. Bearing in mind the time in which

the events of the (futuristic) novel are taking place (i.e. 2010), it should be

argued that it aims to prolong the same orientalist discourse which seeks to

149 Allison, B. and Gillian, R. “Introduction: Women’s Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies,” Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographie (London: The Guilford Press, 1994), 1. 150 Alison and Gillian 2-2. 151 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and colonial discourses”. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman.

Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993.

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encode “oriental countries” as being “stable”, “unchangeable” and

“traditional”.

Furthermore, to lay emphasis on the fact that Morocco is a patriarchal space

par excellence, Lucia describes her sense of disillusionment to see how

Rashid’s family is divided into two groups while having a meal:

“After their introductions, they settled down to eat their meal. The men sat at the table nearest the door, and the women and children took the other two”. (V.W p. 136).

Such an image can be described as an iconic one by means of which

Morocco is represented as a typical patriarchal space. After that, the narrator

describes how Lucia feels toward what she sees in Rashid’s home as follows:

For all what they went out of their way to make her welcome, though, she still felt separated, as if she occupied a bubble. Everything seemed defined by space: men here, women there, together, yet separate. The house itself made a space, enclosing them within its walls. The world outside was another space, one she sensed belonged more to men than women. (V.W p. 139).

In this passage, space is represented as being patriarchally gendered, in which

men’s space is separated from women’s one. Indeed, it is throughout this

space division that the Lucia describes women’s space as one of “enclosure”,

“separation”, and “imprisonment”. I.e., Moroccan women are conceived of as

being subject to subjugation in a male dominated space. As a matter of fact,

such representation of Moroccan women is Eurocentric and biased, and

displays western conspiracy against oriental countries. The orientalist

discourse is usually trying to depict the “other” in a negative way so as to

show the “superiority “of the west over third world countries. Likewise, that

Lucia is described as being “separated, as if she occupies a bubble” in

Rashid’s house is meant to describe her as feeling unable to be secluded, or

live as Moroccan women do. By this, the narrator tries to convey the idea of

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how western women, unlike oriental women, can not live in seclusion or

imprisonment.

Never the less, given the fact that Morocco is a Muslim country, it should

be argued that separation between men and women can sometimes be out of

religious necessity, and does not mean the subjugation of women. In saying

this, it should be argued that one’s religious or cultural differences should not

be taken as signs of ‘inferiority’ or ‘superiority’. Rather, there should be

respect to such differences as they are what identify some people as different

from another. Yet, due to some westerners’ Eurocentric propensity, they tend

to regard those who are different from them as being “backward”,

“underdeveloped”, and in need to adopt western model of life.

To conclude, taking into consideration what have been said above, we can

argue that The veiled web tries to emphasise the idea that Morocco is a

patriarchal society via representing its space as being patriarchally divided

between men and women. In doing so, Catherine Assaro contributes to

enhancing and dramatising western stereotypes about the orient, especially the

ones which regard women in ‘third world countries’ as being subjugated under

the patriarchal system.

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3. The (mis)representation of race

After tackling both how gender and space are (mis)represented in the three

novels in question, now turn will be directed to the last concept which is about

‘race’. Like the above two concepts, race is also of great significance in the

orientalist discourse, being in fact one of its chief driving forces in terms that it

is on the premise of race that the orientalist perceives of himself/herself as

being superior than other races. The significance of ‘race’ lies in its myth of

racial differences, which has been continually supported by western pseudo-

scientific theories so as to prove that difference in terms of ‘race’ or skin color

results also in having civilizational, social, and intellectual differences between

races.

In this section, the notion of race will be delved into in the light of the three

novels in question from different perspectives. In Never Marry in Morocco, we

will try to see how the sense of race superiority results in racism and

exploitation. In Lord of the Desert, we will explore how race can also be used

as a pretext to pretend civilizing and modernizing the natives, while it is in fact

just one way of primitivising the natives. Finally, in The Veiled Web, there will

be an attempt to display how racial differences are made use of to construct

cultural, civlisational and social differences between the West and the East

and, thus, between ‘civilization’ and ‘non-civilization’.

3.1 Never Marry in Morocco: The politics of race

It[ colour prejudice] is nothing more than the unreasoning hatred of one race for another the contempt of the stronger and richer peoples for those who are kept in subjection and are so frequently insulted. As colour is the most obvious outward manifestations of race it has been made the criterion by which men are judged, irrespective their social or educational attainments. The light-skinned races have come to despise all those of a darker colour, and at the dark-skinned peoples who will no longer accept without protest the inferior position to which they have been relegated.152 (Sir Alan Burns)

152 Cited in: Frant Fanon, Black Skins White Masks. 1952. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York :

Grove Press, 1967)118.

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Racial stereotyping has fundamentally contributed to justifying colonial

practices and pretexts. Condemning a certain race to be ‘inferior’, ‘primitive’,

and ‘uncivilized’ is one way to justify colonization and exploitation of that

race. Race has been used as a colonial construct to differentiate between a

‘civilized’ race and ‘uncivilized’ one. This section will be an attempt to

disclose some of these politics of ‘race prejudice’ in Virginia Dale’s Never

Marry in Morocco.

This novel, which can be described as a racist one par excellence, brings

into light many aspects of racist discourses against Arabs in general and

Moroccans in particular. It reiterates the same race prejudice constructed about

Arabs since long time. Arabs are represented as an ‘inferior’, ‘filthy’, and

‘defeated’ race. More than that, Never Marry in Morocco articulates a double

racist discourse both from without and from within. I.e. it represents the racist

discourse both of American and Europeans towards Arabs, and at the same

tries to capitalize on the ‘Myth of Berber’ to divide between Arabs and Berbers

in Morocco, following the same French colonial recipe of “Divide and rule”.

As far as the American racist discourse is concerned, it is exemplified in

terms of how Arabs are perceived of by Virginia, the narrator/heroine of the

novel, and her parents. For illustration, when Pierre offers Virginia a gift to

give it to her parents, she abstains from accepting the gift because it is a

painting of ‘a dark-skinned Arab’. Commenting on this painting, Virginia says:

The Painting was of a dark-skinned Arab, but the brown tones the artist had chosen were luminous. The portrait was magnificent. I knew it was very valuable. Then I thought of my parents narrow-mindedness, their racist attitude. I shook my head. (N.M.M. 71)

Then, trying to explain to Pierre that her parents will not accept such a gift,

Virginia tells Pierre:

“They will just see a picture of a dark Arab and sneer at the colour of his skin. They would never hang a picture like that in their homes.” (N.M.M71)

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Such depictions of Arabs are indeed revealing on many levels. First, Arabs are

stereotyped on the basis of colour, which is used as a trope of difference

between westerner and Arabs. The latter are represented with dark skin or

brown colour in order to make difference between the “white civilized” race

and the “non-civilized black race”. Along history, though most Arabs are not

black, the western orientalist/colonial discourse capitalizes on this trope of

colour to exoticize and “other” Arabs. In other words, the colonial discourse

always seeks to set a kind of “imaginative geography”, to use Edward Said’s

phrase, between the “I” and the “other” irrespective of what reality is, thus

using colour or race to create that ‘imaginative geography’.

Second, the above representation of Arabs reveal about how Americans,

incarnated by Virginia’s parents, are racist to the core. Virginia’s explanation

why her parents will reject Pierre’s gift reveals this fact. Of course such

American racism can be traced back to Hollywood’s bombardment of the

American audience with racist movies which do demonize and vilify Arabs in

unimaginable way.153 Last but not least, the act of painting Arabs is by itself a

form of orientalist discourse which aims to fix a negative image about Arabs as

a whole throughout time and space.

More importantly, in depicting those racist discourses, Virginia, the

narrator, tries to appear as not being racist, like her parents. She does so by

showing her reservations about her parents’ racist and narrow-minded way of

thinking. Still, in a number of occasions, Virginia expresses very Eurocentric

and racist attitudes towards the natives because of her sense of race complex.

She considers the American race as a superior one. For instance, when she

goes with Pierre to Club Equestre in Rabat, they are surprised by the coming of

the king Hassan II. Pierre, since he is familiar with Morocco and its mores, has

hastily asked Virginia to bow to the king if he comes in their way. Egoistically,

she answers him: “Wait a minute! I am an American citizen! I don’t have to

bow!”(N.M.M. p. 74) This statement is very telling in the sense that it reveals

153 For more details about this issue of Hollywood representation of Arabs, see: Jack G. Shaheen, Reel Bad Arabs: how Hollywood Vilifies a people, (New York : Olive Branch Press, 2001).

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about Virginia’s race complex. It also tells about the ascendancy of United

Sates as a powerful country, which is apparent in Virginia’s sense of pride to

be an American citizen.

Similarly, Virginia’s racist discourse manifests in her repeatedly

representation of Moroccans as shabby beggars decorating the doors of old

medina and the streets of Rabat. The image she represents about Morocco is

that one of poverty and destitution. Such representation of Morocco in fact is

meant to draw a dividing line between her ‘developed’ country and the rest of

‘third world’ countries. For instance, commenting on begging phenomenon in

Morocco, Virginia says that: “I had never seen anything like this in the

prosperous sixties on the united states”. (N.M.M. p.134) In saying this,

Virginia celebrates the ‘superiority’ of her country in comparison to the

‘inferiority’ and ‘backwardness’ of Moroccans, and ‘third world’ countries in

general.

So far, we have discussed some aspects of American racist attitudes

towards Arabs, and Moroccans in particular. Similar to those attitudes is the

ones hold by the French colonizers, represented in the novel by Pierre’s family,

towards Arabs. Pierre’s mother, Jean Paul, is the most racist character in the

novel. In one passage, trying to warn Virginia from Arabs, Jean Paul tells her:

“these people are relentless! You must beware of them”; then she adds: “sal

race! The Arabs are the filthy race. The scourge of earth.” (N.M.M. p.80)

In fact such extreme racist attitudes are heavily unbearable to be heard from a

people who claim ‘civilization’ and ‘humanism’. Has there any one to be

described in that racist way, it is the European colonizer who exploit and

subjugate the colonized people. Jean Paul, herself, and her husband are an

instance of French ex-settlers who have made a great fortune out of the

colonies, by means of subjugation and exploitation of the colonised. Thus, who

should normally be called “The scourge of earth', the coloniser or the

colonised? The question needs no answer.

In examining the above racist statement of Jean Paul, we notice how she

uses a declarative sentence in the present tense (The Arabs are the filthy

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race.) in order to condemn the whole Arab race through time and space. The

statement is generalising and all-inclusive, making of the whole Arab race in

the past, at the present and in the future a ‘filthy race’. As far as such use of

these timeless colonial statements or figures of speech, Edward Said argues

that

They are all declarative and self evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, European equivalent, which is sometimes specifies, sometimes not. For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is.154

Hence, the very use of simple present tense in orientalist discourse is a very

significant figure of speech used to fix the colonised in a timeless and

unchangeable image.

More Importantly, Never Marry in Morocco capitalises on the Arab-

Israel conflict to enhance the ‘inferiority’ and ‘defeatism’ of Arabs. It records

the six-day war between Arabs and Israel, describing how Arabs have been

‘easily’ and ‘shamefully’ defeated in that war. The main characters in the novel

are represented as happy and proud of the Israeli victory. The Jews are

represented as ‘victorious’ and ‘defenders’ of their right to exist, while Arabs

are ridiculed. This idea is clear in the following passage:

“All they [Arabs] left behind were their sandals” Jean Paul told me in Spanish, so I [Virginia] could understand.” That’s all that was left of the Egyptian army.” She chuckled at her sally … I later learned that the Israeli has had counterattacked the Egyptian air force while the planes were still on the ground, destroying their capacity for air force while the planes were still on the ground … they [Arabs] eventually run for it, taking refugee in Palestine, and they did leave a sea of sandals which Paris March pictured on the front cover of the magazine of the next month. (N.M.M. p.156)

In describing these events, there is no mention of the daily massacres and

inhuman practices committed against the Palestinians. All Israeli massacres

have been silenced; what is voiced out is the Israeli ‘right to exist’ and its

154 Said, Orientalism, 76.

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‘victory’ against Arabs. Indeed, such representations are amply enough to

reveal about the racist/colonial discourse conveyed against Arabs via Virginia

Dale’s novel. To add, those representations also disclose the conspiracy of the

west with Israel in the sense that it tries to justify the imperial and illegal

existence of Israel in Palestine. Such western support is not surprising since

most western countries themselves have grown up within an imperial/ colonial

milieu, a milieu which legitimises, justifies and endorses all forms of

colonialism and exploitation.

Last but not least, one of the most dangerous racist discourses the novel

articulates is the construction of a racist discourse among the natives

themselves. Following the same colonial recipe of “divide and rule’, Never

Marry in Morocco takes advantage of “Berber myth” to create a kind of

racism, which does not exist, among Arabs and Berbers. Such racist discourse

is fabricated by representing Amina as a Berber woman who hates Arabs. She

tells Virginia: “ I came from a good family. We are Berbers, not Arabs. We are

honourable people.” (N.M.M. p.162). Virginian, the narrator, strengthens such

racist discourse by commenting on Amina’s attitudes towards Arabs as

follows:

She seemed pleased with herself that week, singing little chants in her native Berber language. Amina was proud of her Berber heritage, as her people considered themselves better than the Arabs- more honest, hard working, cleaner in spirit. (N.M.M. p.163)

In fact, such scenario is fabricated for the sake of overemphasizing the

‘inferiority’ of Arabs, especially if we take into consideration the above racist

attitudes of Virginia, of her parent, and of Pierre’s family against Arabs. Such

capitalization on the ‘Berber’ myth is indeed one way of the colonial discourse

to divide among Arabs and Berber. The failure of such myth has been proved

by the unity of Arabs and Berber during the French colonization of Morocco

and their unity against the French’s attempts to divide them. Hence, Never

Marry in Morocco’s representation of racist discourse among Moroccans

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themselves displays its colonial discourse which attempts to revive the

French’s recipe of ‘divide and rule’.

In the light of what has been said above, it comes into view how Virginia

Dale’s novel makes use of politics of ‘race’ to articulate racist discourses

against Arabs both from within and from without. The racist discourse from

without is concretised in Americans and Europeans’ attitudes towards Arabs,

and from within in terms of trying to create a kind of ‘racism’ among the

Berber and Arabs in Morocco.

3.2 Lord of the Desert: Eurocentrism and the discourse of ‘primitivisation’/ ‘modernization’

The question of race is of paramount importance in the very construction of

a colonialist/orientalist discourse, in the sense that most westerners rely on the

premise of ‘race’ to pronounce their ‘superiority’ and the ‘inferiority’ of non-

westerners. And this is why it is found that most orientalist writers take it for

granted that their race, culture, and civilization are the prototype to be adopted

by other non-western societies. And such Eurocentric tendencies are actually

exemplified in many western orientalist writings in which there is a call for

‘civilizing’ and ‘modernizing’ the natives. In an attempt to unveil some of

those Eurocentric tendencies, this section will try to display how Diana

Palmer’ s Lord of the Desert does produce a discourse of ‘modernizing’ and

‘civilizing’ the natives.

Throughout the main events of the novel, the narrator makes it clear to the

reader that both Morocco and Qawi, in particular, are two examples of Arab

Muslim countries which are either in a ‘primitive’ state or in the process of

modernizing themselves. Most of the settings of both countries are

primitivized, exoticized, and reduced to spaces fraught with desert, camel,

palm trees, and ancient or medieval monuments. That is, in terms of

representation, the writer is very selective focusing only on what is touristic,

medieval, and exceptional. For instance, in their stay in Tangier, Gretchen and

Philippe are represented visiting some very ancient patrimonies, such as the

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old medina, the Kasbah, the palace of Raissouli, and the grotto of Hercules in

Tangier. All such settings are meant to bombard western readers with ‘exotic’

and extraordinary images about the orient in order to satisfy their eagerness for

oriental ‘exoticism’ and fantasy. In doing so, such countries are represented as

being ‘backward’, ‘primitive’, and ‘underdeveloped’, being in need of

‘modernization’.

For more illustration, the fact that Gretchen is asked for to be the personal

assistant to the ruling Sheik of Qawi, in order to “assume responsibility for

public relations, court functions and the organization of the household duties”,

is very revealing. This represents Arab governments as being dependent on the

west to provide them with officials and experts to help them recover from their

backwardness. The backwardness of the “third world” countries is emphasized

by the sheik Philippe himself when he proudly tells Gretchen that “I was

educated in Europe” and that “one matures in a sophisticated environment”,

implying that Europe is the place of civilization and knowledge. (L.D. p. 88).

Similarly, while informing Gretchen about the nature of his society, the sheik

Philippe says that in his country:

“many modern conveniences don’t exist there, and even electricity is a recent addition. The people of Qawi were largely nomadic until the early part of this century […] it would require a great dale of tolerance for you to deal with such archaic surroundings.” (L.D. p. 91)

In examining this passage, it becomes visible that the natives are

represented as ‘primitive’ in terms of representing them as nomadic, archaic,

and lacking modernity. What is troubling with such descriptions is that these

images of Arab countries are represented in an age where people have planes,

limousines, cars, and other different modern means of life. Still, there is a kind

of ambivalence in terms of representing these Arab countries. For instance, the

narrator sometimes describes the sheik of Qawi as driving limousines and

having his personal planes to move from one place to another, while in other

cases the sheik is described as riding his stallion to fight against his enemies.

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Modern and sophisticated means are put side by side with primitive, traditional

means. Such ambivalence can be read as a desire of the writer to create a

model like the western one, especially in the case of the sheik who is supposed

to get married with a western woman; yet, at the same time, to emphasize the

backwardness and primitivism of such countries in comparison to western

ones.

Significantly enough, one of the primary goals of the orientslist/colonial

discourses is not only to primitivise the natives, but to put on show that the

cure for such primitivism and backwardness resides in the western hands. In

such ways, westerners give legitimacy to their intervention in “modernizing”

and “civilizing” the natives. This is actually the same scenario that takes places

in Lord of the Desert. Gretchen, in this novel, is a representative of the west,

who is assigned the responsibility of the “civilizing mission”. She is

represented as the woman who brings out miracles. As discussed in one

previous sections concerning the allegory of ‘impotence’ and how Gretchen

was able to save the Sheik of Qawi from his sexual impotence, she is also

represented here as being an American “emissary”, who comes to an Arab

Muslim country to save them from their economic and social impotence.

In order to exhibit that the sheik’s country as a primitive one, Gretchen

tells to Philippe: “you said that your country was still rather…primitive” (L.D.

p. 144). And Philippe replies: “compared to yours, certainly. But I have great

plans for my people, for new educational facilities and modern hospitals and

industry.” (ibid) In such a brief dialogue, Gretchen feels a sense of superiority

and the Sheik of Qawi is made to feel a sense of inferiority in comparison to

Gretchen’s country. Therefore, the relationship between the two parts is taken

for granted that it is unequal, and that one is in need of the other for the sake of

development. By doing so, the ground is set for Gretchen to intervene in

“modernizing” the Sheik’s country.

Having said that, we will try now to trace some of aspects of the discourse

of modernization in Palmer’s novel. As will be made clear in the following

extract, Gretchen is represented as performing the white (wo)man’s burden. So

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it is worth to cite the following extract in length in order to show how Gretchen

is represented as performing “modernizing” as well as “civilizing” mission:

A week went by very quickly while Gretchen

learned her way around the enormous palace and got to know the people who served in it. She felt sorry for the poor servants who had to wash down the walls. They used bleach, and it made their hands raw. She complained about this to Philippe, who provided them with rubber gloves. She found one of the women in the kitchen barely able to stand, sick with some female problems, and this problem, too, she insisted on addressing. A doctor was sent for and the woman was treated and given sick leave.

………. Nor did she stop at the household. She found

children playing in the dirt with sticks. There were no toys, and there was no place to play. […] they played outside in the dirt, because there was no other facility. She went back to Philippe, and asked for a proper fence playground and a supervisor to watch them while their mothers worked. A kindergarten, she added, was going to be a necessity, and it must have a capable educator to run it.

Philippe agreed, all but shell-shocked at the change in her since her arrival. She seemed to be everywhere, watching, listening, learning. She saw things that needed changing and went right to work changing them. (L.D p. 202-203)

This extract is indeed “expressive”, needing no more elaboration as far as the

Eurocentric discourse of ‘modernization’ is concerned. That Gretchen has

come to ‘modernize’ the natives is self-evident in the above passage. Most

tropes of colonial discourse are present in that passage. There is discourse of

primitivisation (e.g. the lack of day care facilities and kindergarten), the

discourse of defilement (e.g. children playing in the dirt with sticks), the

discourse of derision (e.g. She felt sorry for the poor servants who had to wash

down the walls. They used bleach, and it made their hands raw), and the

discourse western modernization (e.g. shell-shocked at the change in her since

her arrival; She saw things that needed changing and went right to work

changing them). What is more, the writer represents all members of the

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household as being happy for what Gretchen has done for them. And when

Leila tells Gretchen that the “the household loves you”, Gretchen replies that “I

felt I must do something for them”. Such discourse of duty is in fact as old as

colonial discourse since most colonizing powers have been claiming a sense of

duty towards the natives. Thus, Gretchen is repeating here that same colonial

discourse.

Never the less, there is something new and different with such discourses of

modernization in these popular romances. The new is that such romances can

be described as a kind of propaganda to United States’s imperial drives.

Throughout the novel, Gretchen keeps reminding the sheikh of the power of

F.B.I. in which her brother is an important official, and the role of United

States in helping Middle Eastern countries in the process of development.

Philippe also explains to her that “considering the extent of our newfound oil

reserves” (L.D p. 339), his country has a prestigious relation with United

States. In fact, this shows that it is the greediness of United States for having

more diplomatic relations with oil producing countries that directs its

diplomatic relation with Middle Eastern countries.

To conclude, it is significant to say that Lord of Desert is a novel which

keeps repeating the same imperial discourse, which is based mostly on

discourses of “primitivisation”, “modernization” and “civilizing mission”.

What is different with such discourse in popular romance is that it is the

‘western woman’, rather that the ‘western man’, who is represented as a

‘modernizing’ and ‘civilizing agen’.

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3.3 The Veiled Web: the construction of cultural/racial differences

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and the (most of the time) the “occident”.155 (Edward Said)

Within the colonial frame of thought, racial differences necessarily imply

cultural, civilizational as well as social differences. In their colonial literatures,

some western writers tend to emphasize their difference throughout stressing

their racial, cultural, and civilizational difference from the non-western races.

In effect, one of the main manifestations of the colonial discourse appears in its

tendency to construct rigid cultural differences between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’,

since such construction of differences is meant to differentiate between the ‘I’

and the ‘other’, and thus between ‘civilization’ and ‘non-civilization’. In this

respect, the primary goal of this section is to delineate how Assaro’s A veiled

web, as an orientalist text, constructs like those differences between the west

and Islam and between western culture and Moroccan culture in order to

expose the ‘superiority’ of the former over the latter.

Before moving to the analysis of our text in question, it seems important to

highlight how the construction of cultural differences, as a form of orientalist

discourse, is used to emphasize the superiority and authority of the ‘west’ over

the ‘rest’. Homi Bhabha is amongst the first ones to call our attention to the

difference between cultural difference and cultural diversity, arguing that the

former is used a means of enunciating the west’s ‘superiority’ and authority

over the non-westerners. Bhabha argues that

Cultural diversity is an epistemological object – culture as an object of empirical knowledge- whereas cultural difference is the process of enunciation of culture as ‘knowledgeable’, authoritative adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate and authorize

155 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin 1978), 3.

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the production of fields of force reference, applicability, and capacity.156

In examining this difference between cultural difference and cultural

diversity, it appears that the problem does not lie in cultural diversity, but in the

enunciation of cultural difference, since the latter, as Bhabha says, “focuses on

the problem of the of the ambivalence of cultural authority: the attempt to

dominate in the name of a cultural supremacy which is itself produced only in

the moment of differentiation” 157. That is, it is via the authority of cultural

difference that domination of the ‘other’ takes place. On the basis of cultural

difference, the west holds Eurocentric attitudes towards non-western races that

are considered to be racially and culturally different from westerners. Hence, it

is through emphasizing cultural differences that one claims a sense of

“authority” and “superiority”.

Accordingly, in our analysis of Catherine Assaro’s The veiled web, we

shall try to detect how this novel enunciates and stresses some cultural, racial,

and civilizational differences between the west and East/Islam for the sake of

stressing the ‘superiority’ of the former and the ‘inferiority’ of that latter.

Actually, while reading the novel, the writer tries to envision a possible world

in which there might be more possibility of communication and tolerance

between different cultures and civilizations, especially between the west and

Islam. By so doing, the novel takes the challenge of the conflict between the

west and Islam, trying to portray to what extent there might be a kind of

reconciliation between the two worlds. This conflict is incarnated mainly

through the love relationship between the two allegorical characters: Lucia

Del Mar, who represents the western culture and Christianity, and Rashid

Alajazeeri, who represents Islam and Moroccan culture.

Given that the two lovers belong to two different cultures and religions,

they have faced the challenge of how to reconcile their differences. To save

their love relationship, Rashid insists that the solution to their conflicts resides

156 Homi Bhabha, “The commitment to Theory”, The Location of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 34 157 Bhabha 34.

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in what he calls “the Crossroads”. I.e. Rashid explains to Lucia that religions

and cultures are like roads which come from different directions and meet in

“a place of light” and “pure air”, “a place with no hate, no war, no bombs, no

prejudice, no violence. A place of acceptance. Of peace.”(V.W. p. 171.). Then

he adds that “if not even one man and one woman can reach the crossroads,

how can the peoples of entire world do”. Such ideas, at least in theory, are

indeed enlightening and very optimistic in terms of reconciling differences

between peoples and individuals. Yet, the problem lies in how such ideas can

be put into practice, especially if one part insists on his or her superiority over

the “other”?

In this regard, throughout the events of the novel, it comes into view that

both Lucia and Rashid failed by the end of the novel to reconcile their

differences though they believe in the idea of “the crossroad”. This failure is

mainly ascribed to the fact that each one of them wants to stick to his/her

religion and culture. Still, what seems to be eurocentric in the novel is the

writer’s tendency to attribute the failure of the two character’s relationship to

Islamic and Moroccan cultural practices. That is, throughout her experience

with Rashid’s family in Morocco, Lucia is represented as being unable to get

along with Rashid’s family, his culture, and his religion. Rashid and Lucia are

represented as living in two very “different” worlds; yet, it is Rashid’s world

which is put under question, by representing it as being ‘traditional’,

sometimes ‘primitive’, and ‘irreconcilable’.

In effect, such differences are embodied in the experience of Lucia in

Rashid’s house with his family. As it is apparent in the novel, we find that all

what is represented about Rashid’s culture and family is determined by the

writer’s stereotypes and biases. That is, we can notice that representation in

general is not innocent, but very biased and selective. In this sense, Lucia, for

instance, is represented in a very traditional earthen house, designed in

“carved wood”, with “horseshoe arches” everywhere, “long pillar”, and “large

decorated doors”, to name but a few. These descriptions deny the fact that

there are any modern or well-sophisticated houses in Morocco. Morocco will

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be perceived of as a very traditional, if not a ‘primitive space’. And it is herein

where the power of the orientalist reductive discourse resides.

Also, those descriptions can remind the western reader of that Arabesque

architecture the Arabs used to design when they were in Andalusia. But, what

is at stake with this image is that it conveys the stability of Arabs and their

sticking to the past. For orientalists, the orient is timeless and stable, and it is

this idea of timelessness that the narrator tries to convey by representing

Rashid’s house as being very traditional. In seeing such house, Lucia says to

Rashid that she can not live with him in his house. Thus, Lucia’s refusal to

live in Rashid’s house implies that what they have in the west is very different

and developed than what she sees at Rashid’s house.

This idea is more emphasized by describing Rashid’s house as having “few

windows”, having “no chairs” or “beds”, but “only divans and cushions”. In

saying this, the writer dramatizes the difference between the western houses

and the Moroccan ones so that the western ones will appear as being more

developed and modern than the ones in Morocco. While describing how Lucia

finds Rashid’s house, the narrator says that

A low black-lacquered table stood by Tamou, and brocaded divans lined the walls, their gold gleaming. Although Lucia saw no bed, she realized the divans could serve the purpose. At first she wondered why Rashid had European style bed in his room. Then it occurred to her he might not fit on a divan. Large by any standard, he was huge for a Moroccan. (Added emphasis). (V.W. 96)

The last sentence in this passage is indeed very disturbing in terms that it

shows about the narrator’s Eurocentric and biased discourse. That Rashid

adopts western style of life makes of him a different modern person in

comparison to other Moroccans. The bed is given as an example of western

modernity while the divan is an example of primitivism and tradition. In doing

so, the above passage tries to construct a kind of difference between the west

and the east, a difference between ‘civilization’ and ‘backwardness’.

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Likewise, the above passage depicts Rashid as being a modern man, who is

different from all Moroccans, “by any standard”. Actually, it is noticed that in

most desert romances, the heroes are represented either as being hybrid or as

being westernized so that they can be accepted by western audience. In

Rashid’s case, he is represented as being westernized; he differs from the rest

of Moroccans by his European style. Lucia describes him as being “a

confusing mix of cultures, modern and traditional, west and East”.( P.68) For

westerner, a white heroine can not be engaged in love with a pure traditional

Arab, and this is why most romance writers try to focus on either “a hybrid” or

“westernized” Arab heroes. By such way of thinking, we can understand the

racist and Eurocentric attitudes of westerners towards Arabs in general.

Another example of deepening cultural differences between the west and

the East manifests in representing Rashid’s family as an extended one, while

Lucia’s one as a nucleus one. And given the western Eurocentric thinking, the

nucleus family is supposed to be the role model, while the extended one is to

be associated with traditional and primitive societies. For instance, Lucia is

represented as having only one sister, whereas Rashid having “four brothers”

and “five sisters”. These two families models are in fact meant to reveal about

the difference that exists between westerners and Arabs. In this respect, the

problem with this discourse of representation is that it uses Rashid’s case as an

allegorical example to represent all Moroccans and Arab families as being

extended families, which is to a large extent erroneous.

Importantly, Lucia represents Rashid’s house as a patriarchal one par

excellence. She, for instance, describes how space is divided between men and

women during eating, and it is Rashid’s father who represents the patriarch

authority in the house. Rashid’s father is described as follows:

Abdullah presided at the men’s table, his authority all the more impressive in that he almost nothing. He listened to his sons, nephews, cousins, and grandsons, asked as question here, prompted a response there … his awareness included the whole room, encompassing his entire family. (V.W. 138-139)

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Such description is amply enough to understand how Rashid’s family is

represented as a gendered and patriarchal family. Thus, as it is the case with

all orientalist discourses, most western writers tend to associate all “third

world” societies with patriarchy as a sign of their backwardness so that

western societies will appear as more liberal and un-patriarchal. However, it

will not be denied that patriarchy is a universal phenomenon which can be

found in the West as well as in the East. In brief, the above cultural

differences which are represented about Moroccan culture are essentially

meant to construct rigid differences between the west and the east, which will

allow the representation of the former as ‘superior’ and ‘modern’ , while the

latter as “inferior”, “backward”, and “underdeveloped”.

As far as Islam is concerned, The Veiled Web can be described as an

‘informative’ novel which informs western readers about many Islamic cues,

practices and beliefs. It is in this process of representing Islam that the novel

works to ‘exoticize’, ‘other’ and de-familiarize it by means of representing it

as very ‘strange’, ‘different’ and ‘oppressive’. Throughout the novel, Rashid,

who is represented as a pious Muslim, keeps informing Lucia about many

Islamic practices such as about zakat, praying, pilgrimage, and fasting, to

name but a few. All these Islamic practices are represented as being very

strange, unfamiliar, and sometimes “oppressive”, as in the case of the wearing

the veil. For Lucia, the veil is a means to seclude and subjugate women in

Islam. But for her, wearing the cross is part and parcel of her religion, which

she can not take off. Herein, the cross and the veil are two religious practices,

which should be respected; yet, Lucia’s narrow-mindedness towards the veil

reveals about her eurocentrism. To sum up, the novel is replete with different

forms of misrepresentations of Islam, but because of time and space

limitations, we will not be able to cover all of them.

What this section in brief has intended to do is to expose some examples of

how Assaro’s novel has managed, via presenting some cultural and religious

differences between the west and East (represented via Morocco), to enunciate

the ‘superiority’, ‘modernity’, and ‘development’ of the ‘west’ over the

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‘East/Islam’. And in so doing, it is also the myth of “racial differences”

between westerners and Arabs that is being played out. Hence, of no doubt is

that A veiled Web is a novel which carries on the mission of constructing

western, imperial, racist, and biased attitudes about Arabs.

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Conclusion:

To the extent what popular romance can be a vehicle to revive, prolong, and

transmit colonialist/orientalist stereotypes about the orient in general is the

main question this part has tried to answer. It is through having a postcolonial

reading of Never Marry in Morocco, The Veiled Web and Lord of the Desert in

terms of how gender, space, and race are represented that this part has tried to

answer the above question. The answer is mainly exemplified in the above

issues discussed under each section. In making a comparison about how each

novel represents gender, space, and race, it can be concluded that all the novels

are heavily biased and Eurocentric. That is to say, all the novels agree upon the

idea that the western woman is ‘superior’, more ‘developed’, and ‘liberated’

than the ‘oriental woman’. The three novels make use of the veil, harem and

patriarchy as windows through which they can stereotype and primitivise the

‘oriental woman’. Concerning space, it is subject to misrepresentation,

imagination and surveillance, being represented as a criterion through which

cultural, civilizational and racial differences are constructed between the ‘West’

and the ‘East’. Space is used as a means to articulate a kind of ‘imaginative

geography’ between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. Similarly, race is also exploited as

a premise to pronounce the “eternal” superiority of the western race and the

inferiority of the non-western race. Put differently, the three novels capitalise

on the myth of racial differences so as to inferiorise and primitivise the ‘Other’,

claiming at the same time the westerner’s sense of duty to “civilise”,

‘enlighten’, and ‘modernise’ that ‘Other’.

But, what can be considered new or different in the above imperial romance

novels is that they herald the emergence of a new imperial power which is that

of Unites States of America. The presence of American shadow, American

sense of power and authority, and American proclivity to dominate the world is

ubiquitous in all the three novels. Most characters in those novels are

represented as being proud of their ‘Americanness’ and as representatives of

their country in the oriental space. In never marry in Morocco, Virginia comes

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to Morocco being fully conscious of the superiority of her race and the

development of her country. For instance, when she is asked to bow to the king,

she refuses, saying “I am an American citizen; I do not have to bow”. As well,

when Lucia del Mar, in The Veiled Web, is kidnapped to Morocco, American

authorities intervene to save her, considering such act of kidnapping as a

terrorist one. Finally, it is in A lord of the Desert where the American presence

is made clear. In this novel, Gretchen is represented as an American

representative who comes to a Middle Eastern country to help its people to

‘modernise’ and ‘civilise’ their country. In the light of this brief survey of these

three novels, it appears that United States is represented as a ‘powerful’,

‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ country. Hence, it is through such representation of

America that the novels can be described as endorsing American imperial

tendencies.

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General Conclusion: All in all, this dissertation has undertaken the endeavour to investigate some

of the manifestations of orientalist/colonial discourse in imperial popular

romance. Whether popular romance is to be perceived of as a kind of colonial

literature or not has been in fact one of the main questions this research has

tried to answer. This question has been somewhat problematised in the first

part of this research by trying to see any interlink between imperial discourse

and popular culture/romance. Throughout the writings of Edward said, Jack

Shaheen, and Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, it is found that popular culture,

especially the American one, has been engaged in producing orientalist and

colonial discourses, the main target of which is Arab Muslims.

Still, the less interest that has been devoted to popular romance in

postcolonial criticism has been in fact a very problematic point. So, an attempt

has been made to explore some of the reasons that have led to the downplaying

this romance genre in postcolonial criticism. It is found that ‘elitism’, gender,

and popular nature of popular romance are the main reasons, among others,

that have contributed to the exclusion of popular romance from postcolonial

criticism. Thus, it has been the major goal of this research to dig up the

relevance and importance of reading imperial popular romance from a

postcolonial perspective, irrespective of all biases constructed about this genre.

To attain this objective, three imperial romance novels have been selected

as case studies: Virginia Dale’s Never Marry in Morocco, Catherine Assaro’s

The Veiled Web, and Diana Palmer’s Lord of the Desert. That these novels

exemplify orientalist/colonial discourse has been elucidated via the

investigation of how gender, space, and race are constructed throughout these

novels. Through gender, it has been found that all the three novels endorse

similar stereotypes about Arab Muslim women in terms of representing them

as being ‘oppressed’, ‘secluded’ in their harems, veils and under their

patriarchal societies. It is via this representation of Arab Muslim women that

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western women are portrayed as the total opposite of them, being represented

as more ‘developed’, ‘civilized’ and ‘modern’.

As far as space is concerned, all the three novels take advantage of spatial

differences to articulate civilisational, cultural, social, and economic

differences between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’. Oriental space has been subject

to different forms of (mis)representation, primitivisation, and imagination the

goal of which is to construct a sort of “imaginative geography” between the ‘I’

and the ‘Other’. Finally, the three novels are based on the myth race as a

crucial principle through which westerners articulate their ‘superiority’ and the

‘inferiority’ of non-westerners.

Therefore, it should be argued that popular romance should not be seen as

a mere popular or cheap form of literature which seeks to entertain a certain

audience. It is actually more than that. It should be viewed as a vehicle through

which many western stereotypes and biases are conveyed on mass level. Of

paramount importance is that this romance genre is more influential than many

other colonial narratives as it targets millions of readers from the mass. Also,

given the commercial nature of popular romance, it should be regarded as a

significant aspect of “culture industry”, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s

concept, which capitalizes on ‘orientalizing’, ‘exoticizing’ and ‘eroticizing’ the

‘Other’ (the ‘Oriental’) for the sake of seducing as many western readers as

possible. In brief, has there been any conclusion to be drawn from this

research, it would be as follows: colonial/orientalist discourse is an on-going

process which keeps developing, and adapting new forms X popular

culture/romance as an example of these formsX; and it is not exclusive to

certain cultural literary forms, but can take shape in different cultural literary

forms, ‘high’ or ‘low’.

Of course, no doubt is there that this research has its limits and limitations.

For instance, each of the above concepts (gender, space, and race) is supposed

to be devoted a dissertation alone so that it can be covered from all its different

perspectives and dimensions. In putting them together in this dissertation, it

should be acknowledged that there are still gaps to be filled within each

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concept. In addition to those concepts, other issues and concepts like culture,

religion, and class can be subject to analysis as far as popular romance is

concerned. Also, it would have been of paramount importance to make a

comparison between colonial/orientalist discourse in imperial popular romance

and in other imperial narratives, such as in Travel Literature and in Cinema.

Yet, it has been the major goal of this research to draw attention to the

colonial/orientalist discourse in popular romance, making use of gender, space,

and race simply as instances through which that discourse is materialised.

In the end, it is to be hoped that this research has succeeded, to some

extent, to bring into light the importance of studying imperial popular romance

in terms of its colonial, orientalist, and cultural discourses. It is also hoped that

this research has managed to exhibit how colonial/orientalist discourse knows

no limits or barriers, but goes across time and space, across ‘high culture’ as

well as ‘popular culture’.

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Appendix

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