الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Chapter One: The Discourses of Imperialism
1- The Mental Map
The European tourist, as demonstrated by numerous critics, came to the Orient for the sole purpose of uncovering the real Orient. S/he constantly constituted him/herself as a sovereign subject and the Orient as an object. Paradoxically, The Western traveler was keen on learning more about the Orient s/he had already known from books, paintings, and world exhibitions. S/he had to fulfill his/her as well as his/her readership’s expectations of the Orient, its culture, history, religion, and customs. So, this chapter explores the three writers’ claim to the truth of the Orient. It traces the recurrent motifs and prototypes of Orientalism in the selected texts.
The three writers pursued the ”real Orient” in two ways. The first way was by reading about it. In this part, I will trace what Said aptly called the citational nature of Orientalism. In many situations, the three Orientalists related the contemporary Egypt to The Arabian Nights and The Bible. Moreover, they cited other Orientalist works such as Lane’s notorious book The Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians. In every sense, as discussed by Said, Western knowledge always described the Egyptian culture as something ahistorical that challenged change and reform. The Western institution of Orientalism cut the Egyptian history out of its context and placed it as an ”appendage to Europe”(86), i.e. to Europe’s religion and fantasies. from another perspective, it is easy to infer that the three writers’ Orient was basically textual. They basically depended on the ”schematic authority of a text” (93).
2- The Ladies with the Gaze
It can also be said that the three writers attained knowledge by gazing. As noted by Timothy Mitchell most Europeans were learning to live as tourists and anthropologists through gazing; they believed that it was a sign of intellectual curiosity (28). Even before traveling to the Orient, they used to gaze at what they thought of as its perfect or objective representations in paintings and world exhibitions. In this process, their minds learned to confuse reality with representation. In this way, as explained by Jacques Lacan, their gaze was deceiving or triumphing over their eye and trapping their perception of the East forever (103). So, this part will tackle the three writers’ gaze and what it wished or expected to see in Egypt.
3- Reports from a Colony
Within the period of colonial expansion, the Orientalist’s stereotypical knowledge of the other proved very useful to the empire. On the one hand, it provided justifications for the empire’s unjust economic policies and military intervention. On the other, it equipped the sons of the ruling and middle classes who sought employment in the colonies with the information they needed for the management and manipulation of the native society. Some of the three writers provided information about the natives’ domestic and financial affairs, means of resistance, and religious beliefs as if they were compiling an official report for the British Colonial Office. They were turning into professional anthropologists and historians. Imposing their own imperialistic logic, they started to divide the Egyptian population into different racial, ethnic, and geographical categories.
On the other hand, the nineteenth century particularly marked with Mohamed Ali’s rule witnessed the introduction of the state’s modern disciplinary methods and some radical demographic and economic transformations. As discussed in some prominent historical references such as Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt (1991), Judith E. Tucker’s Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (1985), and Khaled Fahmy’s All the Pasha’s Men (1997), the measures that Mohamed Ali adopted did not alleviate the problems faced by the majority at that time. Moreover, during the same era, the European powers took advantage of Mohamed Ali’s pursuit of modernity and hindered the economic and military development of Egypt. The three writers, however, did not dwell much on the political and economic dimensions of the Egyptian situation. Everything they tried to explain was sandwiched between racialist stereotyping and the writers’ firm belief in their nation’s superiority.
Chapter Two: The Discourses of Feminism
As for the discourses of feminism, I should point to the fact that back in the nineteenth century, the word feminist was basically used to refer to suffragists. Therefore, the three writers did not identify themselves as feminists. Nevertheless, some of them argued against what they conceived as misogynist and patriarchal practices in the Egyptian society. They discussed freely the different aspects of Egyptian women’s life.
1- Western Feminism and the Other Woman
This part will show that some of these writers’ arguments against sexism in Egypt were detached and irrelevant. They were primarily a means to show their own rationality and superiority at the expense of the silent Egyptian women. Their so-called feminist values only projected the very Victorian chauvinism on indigenous women. In a way, they asserted the very concept they might have sought to challenge, i.e. the inferiority of women’s roles and activities. In the letters of Poole and Nightingale in particular, the reader will find that the male identities they adopted by being mobile and judgmental made them oblivious of the things they had in common with the Egyptian women.
Under the guise of feminism or women’s rights, most of the Western travelers vehemently attacked the Egyptian culture and religion. As explained by Ahmed:
Whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists, the ideas of Western feminism essentially functioned to morally justify the attack on native societies and to support the notion of the comprehensive superiority of Europe. Evidently, then, whatever the disagreement of feminism with white male domination within Western societies, outside their borders feminism turned from being the critic of the system of white male dominance to being its docile servant (154-155).
So these women held their pens to champion the Victorian status quo. Paradoxically, by writing they challenged it. Through writing they permissibly shouldered what Antoinette Burton called the ”white woman’s burden” (127). In their letters, they served the imperialist project by reiterating the same patriarchal stereotypes or by reporting on the country they visited.
2- Images of Women
The images of women presented in the letters will be thoroughly discussed in the second chapter along with the writers’ comments on the conditions of these women’s life. Despite the fact that the poorer classes and rural population formed the majority of the native population, the women belonging to that segment were either scarcely or casually mentioned especially in the letters of Nightingale and Poole. These women Orientalists overlooked the Egyptian working woman simply because she did not fit into their expectations of the real Oriental woman. Still, whenever she appeared on the scene, she became an object of shallow analysis and racial prejudice. They preferred to focus on the richer women living in seraglios and enjoying luxuries. For them the accounts of these ”idle” women would conform more easily to the norms of travel writing. They thought that these accounts would also serve as a better façade of whatever message they wanted to send to their own societies.
3- Femininity and Travel Writing
The circumstances of the production of these texts need to be examined. In this part, I will discuss the conflict between these Englishwomen’s conventional and imperialistic roles. It can be said that the three writers’ constant negotiation with their own social norms might have pressured them into contributing to what was assumed then to be a genre of low literary quality, i.e. travel writing. Furthermore, they preferred to play it safe by using the epistolary form unlike some other travel writers such as Amelia Edwards or Martineau. Despite the fact that these writers faced similar processes of conditioning and manipulation, their responses varied considerably. As explained in Mills’ invaluable study on women’s travel writing, Discourses of Difference (1991), there are certain features and styles by which a woman traveler could exhibit her acceptance of or resistance to both the generic and gender conventions imposed on and expected in her writing (67-107).
Chapter Three: Competing Discourses
1- The Muted Interlocutor
As asserted by Fanon, ”every contact between the occupied and the occupier is a falsehood” (Dying Colonialism 65). In other words, every dialogue between the dominant and the subordinate, and every colonizer’s attempt to represent his natives cannot be taken at face value. This part will examine power relations between the three travelers and the locals. It will illustrate how the three writers silenced their others as they were by far the more powerful party. It will discuss the tourists’ aggressive attitudes towards the natives, and the writers’ conscious choices to write certain facts and refusals to mention others in order to construct or maintain their agreeable self-image. This part suggests that there were many possible responses on the natives’ part which were expunged from the three Orientalist texts.
2- Subaltern Voices
In an attempt to make the subaltern speak for him/herself, I will explore six texts written by indigenous harem women. These will be the articles of Aisha Taymur (1840-1902), Zeinab Fawaz (1860-1914), and Malak Hefny (1886- 1918) in addition to the memoirs of Princess Djavidan (1877-1968), Huda Shaarawi (1879-1924), and Nabawiyya Musa (1886- 1951). This comparative part will hopefully contest the Victorian ladies’ spun stories of the Eastern women. It will describe the encounter with Western travelers from the standpoint of some local women. In addition, it will surprisingly show that some harem women were not less feminist than these Western travelers. Though, these harem women’s protest against their society’s sexism used a totally different approach. In these women’s articles and memoirs, there was the actual initiation of Egyptian feminism that had to challenge its own society’s chauvinism, and, thanks to the Orientalists’ interference, it also had to defend itself against the ceaseless accusation of being a colonialism collaborator.
If the previously mentioned texts presented voices from the seraglios, the other poorer women remained silent. In spite of their great numbers, the Egyptian working women were barely referred to in the three writers’ letters. With the exception of Duff Gordon, these women travelers seemed indifferent to the bad living conditions of these women. Being quite racist and highly class conscious, the three writers mentioned these poorer women only to stress their own moral and spiritual superiority. Comparing the images of the women workers and villagers in these Orientalists’ texts to the ones that could be deduced from the more recent studies such as those of Tucker and Fahmy should hopefully shed light upon the intricacies of Egyptian women’s situation.
The following chapter is on the discourses of imperialism in the three collections of letters of Poole, Nightingale, and Duff Gordon. It will tackle how and why these writers tried to know Egypt and to make it known. This chapter will also examine how Orientalist texts governed the three writers’ experience of the real and therefore their presuppositions dictated many of their conclusions, and stereotyping became a common motif in their letters. Eventually, the first chapter will elaborate how these writers’ knowledge of Egypt and its people was very helpful to the empire, and how some of them attempted to propagate the idea of colonizing Egypt through their texts.