Against ‘the Usual Restraints Imposed upon their Sex’: Conflictive Gender Representations in Nineteenth-Century Orients

Abstract

Defining masculinity and femininity in the representation of the ‘Other’ in Victorian and Edwardian travel ethnographic writings and historical fictions as well as commercial and governmental photographs is not easy. Moreover, when one attempts to analyse nineteenth-century cultural representation of the orients in a post-Saidian era, the re-evaluation of the locations of colonial stereotypes themselves seem to be challenging. Yet some successful writers and photographers from the long nineteenth century require specific attention to understand that some of the now well-established tropes could — if not entirely, at least partially — be reconsidered. Although Philip Meadows Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (1839) was famously considered to be one of Queen Victoria’s favourite novels and belongs to an era when travel writing was flourishing, it nonetheless tells another story of the conventional description of the British Empire and masculinities. To a certain extent, Taylor’s Confessions ofa Thug, Sophia Lane Poole’s The Englishwoman in Egypt: Letters from Cairo (1844), Samuel Bourne’s photographs in the 1860s, Lucy Garnett’s The Women of Turkey and Their Folklore (1890), Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896) and Gertrude Bell’s albums of Mesopotamia at the turn of the century participate in a typical scheme of representation of nineteenth-century imperialism and Orientalism as coined by Said, but they also involve ethnographic surveys and artistic features, which give ‘nobleness’ and ‘beauty’ to the people or scenes they portrayed.¹