The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration (review)

Piya Pal-Lapinski takes readers on a whirlwind tour of nineteenth-century British (and often French and Italian) cultural productions—literature, painting, opera, archeology, even jewelry—as she investigates racial, class, and national identity; colonialism; imperialism; disease; and toxicology and its female practitioners. Pal-Lapinski ties together these disparate concerns through the figure of the odalisque, which she sees as a hybrid form that encompasses not just the Oriental/Asian norm but also the exoticized European woman. She argues that "the body of the odalisque . . . resists closure and implodes the imperatives of ethnography, threatening the coherence of 'whiteness' as a racial category" (xvi). Pal-Lapinski presents the odalisque as "deeply linked to the tensions arising from the encounter between cultures of female libertinism and emerging bourgeois ideologies of domesticity throughout the nineteenth century" (xvii). In making this argument, she challenges the work of other postcolonialist scholars, including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, John Mackenzie, Lisa Lowe, Meyda Yegenoglu, Reina Lewis, and Hollis Clayton. Despite her declaration that she will "distance" herself from these scholars, Pal-Lapinski seems compelled to "out-Bhaba" Bhabha's frequently stultifying linguistic density.

Pal-Lapinski makes two major arguments. First, in not submitting to male or imperial dominance, the odalisque subverts the ideology of western/male hegemonic control over women and the world and disrupts the narrative of separate male and female spheres. Second, the racial and cultural hybridity of the odalisque challenges ninteenth-century discourses of racial and gender identity and hierarchies. "The production of the hybridized courtesan," she writes, "was generated by barely articulated anxieties about the fragility of 'disciplinary mechanisms' of empire/imperialism and ethnology" (18).

Chapter 1 introduces the odalisque as a site of racial and gender indeterminacy in French and British visual presentations. Of primary importance is the gaze, both of the male observers depicted in the paintings and of the odalisque herself, whose languid, even vacant gaze suggests indifference. That indifference, Pal-Lapinski claims, implies her power and underscores her exoticism. In Frank Dicksee's Leila (1892), for instance, "Leila [languorously seated amid Asian fabrics, divan, draperies, and screens] has the power to consume/commodify men for her own pleasure, as the courtesan does," her gaze fracturing "Dicksee's imperialist ideology" (11).

Pal-Lapinski expands her discussion of the nineteenth-century odalisque-courtesan to include the "vampiric female body," which she presents as an inversion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tradition of the male libertine. Moving beyond the orientalized Victoria de Loredani of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or the Moor (1806), Pal-Lapinski turns to Ameer Al from Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug (1839). Ameer Al, she argues, is a male odalisque and an example of "official discourses [working] to produce male bodies that were feminized, hybridized, and eroticized by engaging in the work of empire" (31). Pal-Lapinski also claims that the early-nineteenth-century rise of colonial medicine and the "medicalization of the imperial male body" increased western anxieties concerning contact with the hybridized (and potentially diseased) exotic body (male or female). Combined with "licentious indulgences," "intemperance," and a hot climate, the exotic body "predisposed the European male to tropical 'derangement' and exhaustion," making him "unfit to carry out his imperial duties" (33). In this discursive terrain of diseased, feminized Asian males and hypersexual, morally superior European male imperialists, the sexually transgressive Ameer Al projects both English desire and English sexual ambiguity.

In chapter 2, Pal-Lapinski links seduction, hybridity, toxicology, eugenics, and forensics. Examining Wilkie Collins's 1866 Armadale, Pal-Lapinski reads the move of the hybridized exotic female from the public sphere to the domestic sphere as the deepest threat to notions of "whiteness," domestic safety, and purity. Here, and in Collins's The Legend of Cain (1888), Victorian "sciences" fail because the invading, transgressive exotic woman cannot be fixed or classified as she disrupts the very site of English national identity—the...