The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, and: Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle: the Brutal Tongue (review)

Both volumes, although from very different areas of cultural inquiry and method, attempt to describe the flickering ambiguity of a marginal figure in Victorian society. Pal-Lapinski examines the odalisque, the exotic woman, a being without racial or geographic fixity, who flits through Southern Europe, Arabia and India unnerving colonial commentary wherever she appears. Ferguson focuses on the articulate brute or savage, another shifting marker with distinctly contradictory roles in Victorian philology, anthropology, biology and the late Victorian romance. Both critics also tend to regard popular forms as the primary vehicle for the cultural articulation of their ambiguous figures. Otherness is therefore redoubled: marginal figures in marginal texts.

Pal-Lapinski's slim but dense volume owes much of its theoretical armature to post-colonial criticism. The exotic woman, the woman of the harem or zenana, was the locus of repulsion/attraction in travel narratives, paintings and novels. Due to the different patterns of colonial engagement, the French tended to be obsessed with the Arabian or North African figure, the English with the women of the Indian sub-continent. In fact, she convincingly suggests we should extend this feminine trope into Europe (the exoticism of the Southern Italian or Spanish woman) and also use it to read the dense and contradictory investments of French and English writers in Egypt: 'the exotic female body has always been inscribed by a kind of métissage, a racial elusiveness' (xv). Pal-Lapinski suggests that much criticism has regarded the figure of the odalisque as a figure of oppression or domination.In what is now a familiar move, suitably deferential to Edward Said's foundational Orientalism but seeking to move beyond it, the book proposes a refinement that suggests that nineteenth-century discourses of exoticism 'produce the body of the odalisque via a dissident textuality that resists closure and implodes the imperatives of ethnography, threatening the coherence of "whiteness" as a racial category' (xvi). The exotic woman may well be the mark of racial subjugation, but also of defiance, evasion or subversion, and these disturbances can be traced in colonial texts. In her opening contextual chapter, Pal-Lapinski usefully situates the interplay of travel narratives (Julia Pardoe's Cityof the Sultan), painting (Ingres' Turkish Bath or Frederick Lewis' The Hareem), sensational colonial exposés (Taylor's Confessions of a Thug) and Gothic novels (Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya, or the Moor) in the production of the figure of the exotic woman. Chapter two explores the fearful figure of the female poisoner in Wilkie Collins' Armadale and Legacy of Cain. Chapter three looks at exotic woman as vector of disease in colonial settings, moving beyond familiar discussions about the racializing of successive epidemics of Asiatic cholera to consider the Anglo-Indian novels of Flora Steel. Chapter four unearths the medical concerns about the effect of the tropics on the reproductive capacities of white settler women, linking the fear of 'tropical ovaries' or 'deranged menstruation' with the fevered fantasy of Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm. Chapter five also works hard to link together the Orientalized jewellery of René Lalique (worn by Sarah Bernhardt and associated not just with daring actresses but also the exoticized demi-monde of bejewelled courtesans) and Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars. Here the female mummy's infiltration of a strapping young English lass is a 'hybrid vampire odalisque-queen that not only signified the fragility of narratives of progress but also transforms imperial history into nightmare' (107). The book ends with a chapter on the figure of the Italian opera diva, looking at the supernatural fictions of Bulwer-Lytton...