Isabella Lucy Bird’ The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither(1883) and William Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour(1930): A Postcolonial Comparative Study.
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Date
2015
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Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This piece of research is concerned with the study of Bird’s The Golden Chersonese and
The Way Thither (1983) and William Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the
Parlour(1930). To achieve our aim, we have used postcolonial theory as elaborated by
Edward Said in Orientalism (1978).In his theory, Said provides some key elements that
can be explored through the postcolonial approach to the text. The appropriateness of this
theory is explained by the fact that Bird and Maugham consider the Westerners superior to
the Easterners. By analyzing the two texts in the light of other postcolonial thinkers like
Reina Lewis’s Gendering Orientalism(1996) and Joseph Allen Boone’s TheHomoerotics
of Orientalism(2014),it is revealed that both authors revised Orientalism to achieve
personal goals. In our analysis of this topic, we have divided our discussion into three
sections. The first section consists of the misrepresentation of the Malays and other Far
Easterners. The second section deals with the celebration of the English power and its
people, emphasizing on their abilities to rule and govern the East and its inhabitants. The
third section focuses on the differences between Bird and Maugham. One is a female and
the other a male, which makes a real mark of difference. As a female traveler, Birdseeks to
give voice to all oppressed women and to counter patriarchal stereotypes of their
inferiority. However, Maugham as a homosexual traveler aspires to break the taboo of
homosexuality and finds the Orient as the appropriate place to gain his sexual liberty.
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53p.;30cm.(+cd)
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Culture and Media Studies