Reina Lewis, "Gendering Orientalism:Race, Femininity and Representation" (Book Note)

 

Gendering Orientalism investigates the overtly orientalist paintings of French artist Henriette Browne and the implicitly orientalist portrayal of Jews as the orientalized Other in George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda to trace the gendered agency of these cultural producers and its contribution to the imperial project. Lewis utilizes contemporary art criticism to examine the racialization of gender discourses and the gendering of race discourses. She argues that the production and interpretation of culture in nineteenth-century France and Britain were shaped by the construction and exclusion of a racialized and orientalized other. The complexities of women's imperial positionings in the second half of the nineteenth century are unraveled, exploring their simultaneous positioning within different experiences of imperialism, gender, class, and in relation to discourses of creativity. In this context, 'race, femininity, and representation' are interwoven constitutive elements in processes of both affirmation and negation. Lewis contends that women's differentiated gendered access to the positionalities of imperial discourse generated a gaze on the Orient and orientalized 'other' that registered difference less categorically than Edward Said's orientalism.

 

Chapters 1 and 2 serve as introductions, establishing the groundwork for a critique of Said's orientalist thesis. Lewis draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to emphasize the necessity of considering imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain due to its role in constituting England to the English. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Henriette Browne and her depictions of nuns and harems, with Chapter 3 exploring the gendered, generic, and national aspects of Browne's work. Lewis argues that Browne's authorial persona was constructed from responses to her major paintings, delineating a class-, gender-, and nation-specific persona focusing on her representation of female labor, sexuality, and space. Chapter 4, 'Only women should go to Turkey: Henriette Browne and the female Orientalist gaze,' marks a departure from Said's totalizing and masculinist thesis on Orientalism.

 

In Chapter 5, Lewis examines how her reformulations of the orientalist gaze can reshape the analysis of George Eliot's representation of racial difference in Daniel Deronda. Lewis demonstrates how Eliot's anti-discriminatory project relies on an orientalist construction of the Jewish other. Introducing Freud's concept of the 'uncanny,' Lewis discusses the repulsion readers feel for the character Daniel as a Jew based on the unpleasant confrontation with repressed elements of their own unconsciousness. Jews in Daniel Deronda are presented as the uncanny, simultaneously representing a projection of the self and something alien to the self. While enjoyable, this chapter, with its cursory use of Freudian analysis, feels somewhat appended at the end of the book.