7 de Dezembro de 2015 | 15.00 | ISCAP
RESUMO
In 1870, Isabel Burton accompanied her husband, the famous administrator and writer Richard Burton, to the Middle East; a sojourn which resulted in a detailed travel account published under the title The Inner Life of Syria, Palestine, and the Middle East. The purpose of my presentation is to reflect on the dynamics of gender and race in this account. Drawing on the analyses of Billie Melman, Mary Louise Pratt, and Reina Lewis, I would like to highlight the writer’s ambivalent attitude towards the natives, and native women in particular. While describing them as sensible and courteous, and while acknowledging the merits of the veil as a costume which guarantees its wearer discretion and protection, Burton voices no doubt as to the superiority of her own sartorial behavior and, indeed, of her own perception of woman’s proper status and function. In a gentle, friendly tone, she “lectures” Oriental women at length on the virtues that an ideal wife is expected to possess and that, it is implied, she herself incarnates.
Burton’s combination of an amiable tone and a preaching, self-satisfied manner is reminiscent of the feminine version of “the Monarch-of-All-I-Survey attitude” that Pratt, in Imperial Eyes, defines as female travelers’ tendency to soften down the commanding attitude manifested more openly in men’s writings. In turn, I would like to argue that this posture betrays a problematic eagerness to accommodate both the rather masculine will-to-domination which characterizes the Westerner abroad and the Victorian code of femininity, with its valorization of female meekness. Other instances of oscillation between masculinity and femininity abound in The Inner Life. While deploying an impressive range of knowledge – especially historical knowledge – obviously meant to show that she was man’s intellectual equal, Burton does not disdain to discuss domestic subjects like cooking and furniture. Similarly, while boasting her dexterity in performing masculine activities like riding ad hunting, she takes great care that all this sound proper and respectable to her reader; a concern with morality that Melman and Lewis identify as one of the central features of female travel writing.
Nota biográfica
Lynda Chouiten is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages of the University of Boumerdès (Algeria), of which she is also the head of the Scientific Committee. Her PhD, awarded by the National University of Ireland, Galway, was funded by the Irish Government under its internationally competitive PRTLI programme (Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions). Chouiten’s research interests include colonial and postcolonial literature, travel writing, Orientalism, and Gender Studies. She is the author of Isabelle Eberhardt and North Africa: a Carnivalesque Mirage, published by Lexington Books (MD, USA) in November 2014 and of several articles pertaining to the (post)colonial condition. She has taken part in a considerable number of international conferences and was herself the organizer of the Authority and its Discourses international conference, held at the University of Boumerdes in October 2014. A subsequent volume, edited by herself and entitledCommanding Words: Essays on the Discursive Constructions, Manifestations, and Subversions of Authority, will be published by Cambridge Scholars (UK) in early 2016.