Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism

by Madeleine Dobie, Dobie

Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism , Foreign Bodies examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France's colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this the prevalent figure of the "oriental woman," and the interplay of race and gender in both domestic and colonial history. It also offers a genealogy of contemporary French attitudes to Islamic culture, in which beliefs about sexuality and gender relations continue to occupy a privileged place. The author examines the extent to which the rhetorical status and political implications of Orientalism register the changing circumstances of French colonial activity, tracing the convergence, or divergence, of colonial practice and the literary record. She also argues against the tendency, in both historical and theoretical writing on colonialism, to divide center from margins, metropolitan from colonial. Instead, she shows how colonial products and ideas permeated the domestic culture and shaped its evolution. Finally, the book proposes that the feminine figures of Orientalist texts are often interwoven with representations of language, and more specifically with representations of language as an alien and resistant code―something other than the transparent medium of ideas. It suggests that in promoting awareness that language is not simply the neutral medium of thought and experience, these veiled figures of language function as "foreign bodies," creating disruptive effects within an economy orchestrated toward the production of knowledge of the other. However, the book also argues against the view, espoused by certain critics, that the self-reflexivity of Orientalist writing fully counteracts its polarizing political effects, arguing instead for a process of "double reading" that acknowledges both the geopolitical power encoded within Orientalist representation and the ways in which specific texts resist this power.

250 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The objective of Madeline Dobie’s brief but involved work Foreign Bodies is to explore the ways in which Orientalist literature from the west treated the feminine and engaged in a dual process of Orientalizing the feminine and feminizing the Orient. From a broad perspective, she argues that “Oriental” women are portrayed as self-absorbed machines and their “unknown” qualities are emphasized for various purposes. Their literal foreign bodies are conceptualized in these works as medical foreign bodies that are dangerous and pervasive, while the veiled woman became a symbol for truth as well as the need for, and impossibility of, penetrating it. These representations were undertaken as the west sought to reflect upon its own experiences through the lens of the Orient and critique itself through referencing the negative aspects of the “other”.

Following her introductory chapter, the author begins with an analysis of Montesqieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which she argues was in a larger part responsible for formulating the notion of the culturally Oriental “other”. She argues that “the fascination with the Orient that permeated eighteenth-century French culture was the symptom of a displacement of France’s interests in its new World colonies” and that it also “used the threat of Oriental despotism to critique the perceived despotism of the Bourbon monarchy”. She thus analyzes that ways in which Montesqieu’s brand of literature was used to critique French society by projecting Oriental society as the potential consequence of developments at home. Naturally, this examination focuses on the ways in which France’s concerns about sexuality and the status of their own women were reflected in depictions of Oriental women. This segues into her next chapter, which explores the dual need to recognize “others” and acknowledge that all cultures have “others”, which drove interest in the Oriental woman. Works that engage this subject highlight that women are others and must constantly be watched, rather than repressed or left to their own devices, and utilize the tropes of veiling and unveiling as a control of otherness, but also an awareness of its futility.

Dobie then proceeds to examine the relationship between virtue, capitalism, and representations of the Orient. This stems from a reflection on the follies of material culture, as well as an acknowledgement of the way in which colonial resources became a critical component of said culture in Europe. In a complex chapter that engages several different texts, she comes to the conclusion that the alienation of the self in the representation of the foreign, one cannot go beyond the veil of representation because it is irreducible. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, however, signaled a shift from fantasy to realism in the literature and catalyzed a quest for Oriental sexuality. The veil now brought “curiosity and desire” and thus became inherently ineffectual as a veil. More broadly, women become the site of contested discourses of colonialism, but regardless of the critiques, the Oriental images and tropes of women were almost always reinforced. Writers acknowledged France’s colonialism through the lens of other conquests, not their own, and as the process expanded they needed to downplay the negative and highlight “the timeless attractions of the Orient”. This led to a “drive to divorce artistic creation from political and social questions and to emphasize in their stead the formal qualities of the work of art”, which fostered a focus on art for art’s sake and an obsession with form.

Overall, Foreign Bodies is a complex work that cannot be represented accurately through a simple summary, but its short length and engaging perspective make it worth reading in its entirety for anyone whose field leads to them to interact with Orientalist literature. While it can be overly theoretical at times, and difficult to see how everything ties together or to her main argument, the broader themes and ideas that she is attempting to convey are usually relatively accessible. Non-specialists and those not in the field of literature may find less value in this work, but overall the way in which it deals with patterns of representation is broadly applicable across fields.