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Rereadings in Orientalism: Oriental Inventions and Inventions of the Orient in Montesquieu's
"Lettres persanes"
Author(s): Lisa Lowe
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 15 (Spring, 1990), pp. 115-143
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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Rereadings
in Orientalism: Oriental Inventions
and Inventions of the Orient in
Montesquieu's
Lettres
persanes
Lisa Lowe
I
T
he Western
European power
to
name,
represent,
and narrate
stories about
non-Europeans
is a
privilege
that derives from
the histories and circumstances of Western
European
colonial in-
volvements with
non-European
worlds. T he
diversity
of narratives
about
European
notions of national
identity
and their
figurations
of
cultural, sexual,
and class otherness
express
not
only changing
proximities
and shifts in
power
between Western and non-Western
worlds but also the
changing
motives and means for
producing
narratives about social difference in the West. Orientalist texts are
Western cultural artifacts that dramatize
dynamics peculiar
to the
cultures
by
which
they
are
produced
and which
they,
in
turn,
produce.
T hese texts do not
merely
illustrate how the Orient
is constructed as the Other of the Occident while
establishing
coherent
European
national
identities;
they
are,
more
importantly,
statements about the kinds of social and
political
circumstances
upon
which narratives of Occident and
Orient,
male and
female,
aristocrat and
peasant,
center and
margin,
are
produced.
?
1990
by
Cultural
Critique. 0882-4371
(Spring
1990).
All
rights
reserved.
115
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116 Lisa Lowe
T he last decade of criticism on this
subject, particularly
since
Edward W. Said's influential
Orientalism,
suggests
that
literary
Ori-
ents are invented and that "the cultures and nations whose loca-
tion is in the East" are dominated
by
means of these fictions or
constructed
misrepresentations.'
Orientalism is a
discourse,
Said
argues,
that
is,
on the one
hand,
homogenizing-the
Orient is
leveled into one
indistinguishable entity-and,
on the other
hand,
anatomizing
and enumerative-the Orient is an
encyclopedia
of
details,
divided and
particularized
into
manageable parts.
T he
discourse
manages
and
produces
information about an invented
Other,
which locates and
justifies
the
power
of a
knowledgeable
Europe.
In this
essay,
I do not
dispute
Said's central thesis-that
there is a discernible
history
of
European representation
and
ap-
propriation
of the Orient and that this
history
has a
relationship
to the
history
of
European
colonialism.
However,
my reading
of
Montesquieu's
Lettres
persanes
(1721)
does
problematize
the as-
sumption
that orientalism
monolithically
constructs the Orient as
the Other of the
Occident,
by
means of a more
specific
discussion
1. Edward W.
Said,
Orientalism
(New
York: Random
House, 1979),
5. T he
1984 Essex conference on the
Sociology
of
Literature,
on
representations
of
colonial and
imperial power,
is a fine
example
of interest in orientalist criticism
and of the attention
given
to Said's work.
T opics
covered in the
published
volume
of
papers
include orientalist
painting,
Flaubert in
Egypt,
Islam and the idea of
Europe,
the Chinese and
Japanese
in the United
States,
aspects
of India under
the
British,
and multiculturalism in Australia. Said also
presents
a reconsidera-
tion of Orientalism in the
light
of its
reception.
(See
Europe
and Its Others: Proceed-
ings of
the Essex
Conference
on the
Sociology of
Literature,
July
1984,
ed. Francis
Barker et al.
[Colchester:
University
of
Essex, 1985]).
T he
Group
for the
Study
of Colonialist
Discourse,
associated with the
University
of California-at
Berkeley
and Santa Cruz-is a network
responsible
for
concentrating
and
gener-
ating
some recent anticolonialist criticism and other
responses
to orientalism.
"Race,"
Writing,
and
Difference
(ed.
Henry
Louis
Gates,
Jr. [Chicago: University
of
Chicago
Press, 1986]),
a
special
double issue of Critical
Inquiry,
constitutes an-
other forum in which critics
respond
to the
implications
and
consequences
of
Said's
theory
of otherness. T he debates in
anthropology
and cultural criticism
represented
in two collections of
essays, Writing
Culture: T he Poetics and Politics
of
Ethnography,
ed.
James
Clifford and
George
E. Marcus
(Berkeley: University
of
California
Press, 1986),
and
Anthropology
as Cultural
Critique:
An
Experimental
Moment in the Human
Sciences,
ed.
George
E. Marcus and Michael M.
J.
Fischer
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago
Press, 1986),
are also
clearly
marked
by
Said's
work.
Indeed,
of all the modern
disciplines, perhaps
it is the
anthropological
project
of one culture
authoritatively rendering
another culture that has been
most shaken
by
Said's notion of orientalist discourse.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 117
of the contradictions and
noncorrespondences
within the notions
of "orientalism" or "otherness" themselves.
Although
we
acknowledge
that orientalism is a discourse of
power by
which the Occident
creates,
incorporates,
and controls
the
Orient,
we must observe
equally
that orientalism is neither a
discrete nor a monolithic discourse. Orientalism is
very
often one
discourse in a
complex
intersection;
the
figuration
of the oriental
as Other
overlaps
with and enunciates the
structuring
themes of
various concurrent discourses-discourses that
figure
women,
workers,
non-Europeans,
non-Christians,
and colonized
races,
as
Others.
However,
the means of
representation
of each discourse
are
uneven,
unequal,
and more and less enunciated at different
moments. For
example,
in the Lettres
persanes,
the
portrait
of the
Persian eunuchs
figures
their oriental otherness in both cultural
and class
terms,
while the
representation
of the Persian wives
builds
upon
concurrent
discourses,
not
only
of
class,
but of
gen-
der,
in addition to orientalism. In this
sense,
orientalism is articu-
lated within a
heterogeneous
and
plurally
inscribed discursive
terrain.
In
addition,
the means
through
which orientalist literature
figures
its Others are
distinctly heterogeneous
in different cultur-
al, national,
and historical moments. French
orientalism,
for ex-
ample,
is a tradition that includes literatures as different as
eighteenth-century
travel fictions
by Montesquieu
and
Voltaire,
nineteenth-century
narratives of
pilgrimages
to the Orient
by
Vol-
ney
and
Chateaubriand,
the
diversely
orientalist twentieth-
century
novels of Pierre
Loti,
Andre
Malraux,
and
Marguerite
Duras,
and the more
theoretically
self-conscious
representations
of
Japan
and China
by
Roland Barthes and
Julia
Kristeva. Fur-
ther,
the character and
purpose
of various national orientalisms
produced
in similar
periods
are
quite incongruous:
nineteenth-
century
British literature about India was marked
by
an
entirely
different set of
conventions,
figures,
and
genres,
from the French
literature about
Egypt
and North Africa of the same
period.2
2. Not
only
are there
many noncorrespondences
between the individual na-
tional cultures and literatures of
England
and
France,
but
nineteenth-century
Britain's
century-old
colonial involvement in Indian
culture,
economy,
and ad-
ministration and France's more recent
occupation
of North Africa
exemplify
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118 Lisa Lowe
Likewise,
while both
eighteenth-century
British and French travel
literature
figured
occidental travelers in
foreign
lands encounter-
ing strange
and
disorienting
customs and
practices,
travel served
not
only
to
express
a
general eighteenth-century
colonial
preoc-
cupation
with land and
empire,
but,
as a
representation
of ter-
ritorial
ambition,
travel became a
predominant
discursive means
for each national culture to
manage
its
particular
internal social
differences and
change.
In
England,
these social
challenges
to the
status
quo
included
religious
dissent,
parliamentary challenge
to
monarchy,
and the
emergence
of a
working
class;
whereas in
France,
the ancien
regime
faced aristocratic dissent
against
the
monarchy, republican challenges
to
aristocracy,
and
peasant
re-
volts.
Finally,
and
perhaps
most
pertinent
to this discussion of the
Lettres
persanes,
individual orientalist moments themselves are nei-
ther uniform nor without contradictions. T exts and discourses are
neither univocal nor
static;
they
include not
only
dominant for-
mations but also
challenges
to those dominant formations. In this
essay,
I consider several instances in which the
structuring para-
digm
of orientalism in the Lettres
persanes
is
challenged.
First,
I
discuss some of the
literary examples
of
irony
and
paradox
in the
story
of the Persian travelers in Paris in order to illustrate how the
novel both
exemplifies
and
critically
observes orientalist forma-
tions.
Second,
I turn to the
figurations
of the wives and eunuchs
in the Persian
story
of the harem
revolt,
in order to
suggest
that
the dominant formations of
eighteenth-century
French oriental-
ism were
variously
contested,
supported,
and subverted
by
con-
current
apparatuses
that
figured
difference as sexual and class
otherness.
nonequivalent degrees
of rule and
relationship.
T his
heterogeneity
is
perhaps
borne out most
simply
in the different
meanings
of the "Orient" over time: in
many eighteenth-century
texts,
the Orient
signifies T urkey,
the
Levant,
and the
Arabian
peninsula
now known as the Middle East. In
nineteenth-century
litera-
ture,
the notion of the Orient
additionally
refers to North
Africa, and,
in the
twentieth
century,
more often to Central and Southeast Asia. Notions such as
"French
culture,"
"the British
Empire,"
or
"Europe"
are
replete
with
ambiguity,
conflicts,
and
nonequivalences
as well.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 119
II
T he
eighteenth-century
French tradition of travel literature
contains its share of travel accounts that were the
by-products
of
French colonial ventures in the
Caribbean,
West
Africa,
and
North
America,
as well as
missionary
activities in China.
Yet,
in the
eighteenth century,
the French
figure
of the Middle Eastern Ori-
ent is more often
developed
as a fictional
site,
elaborately
drawn
from a
literary
tradition. Rather than
directly issuing
from
diplo-
matic and commercial contacts with
T urkey
and the Middle
East,
the Orients of
Montesquieu,
Diderot,
or Voltaire were more
frankly imagined
and
literary,
for,
to a
large
extent,
the French
figuration
of the Orient as an exotic world of sexual and
despotic
license
predated
the extension of French colonialism to that re-
gion. Eighteenth-century
French orientalism
prefigured
the more
extensive French economic and
military
intercourse with
Persia,
Egypt,
and the Middle East that
began
in the
early
nineteenth
century
under
Napoleon
I,
with the invasion of
Egypt
in 1798 and
with his efforts to establish a
military
alliance with Iran as an
instrument of anti-British and anti-Russian
policies.3
T his is not to
imply
that France was not
gripped by
the desire
for
empire
and the "mission to civilize." French colonialism in the
Americas,
West
Africa,
and the
Caribbean,
and to a smaller extent
in
India,
was well under
way by
the
eighteenth century,
and colo-
nial ambition was
piqued by
continental
competition
as the
French trailed the British and Dutch in the
struggle
for
empire
under Louis XIV. In this
sense,
the
literary figure
of the Orient
portended
an as
yet undeveloped relationship
for France: the
Orient became the French
sign
of desire for
yet unconquered,
uninfluenced territories in the context of a race for colonies
among
the
European
continental nations.
T hus,
in the
eight-
eenth-century voyage imaginaire,
travel is
allegorized
to a
great
3. On the
importance
of
Napoleon's campaign
in
Egypt
to the tradition of
orientalism,
see
Said, Orientalism,
especially chapter
I. iii. For accounts of
Napoleon's
use of Iran for anti-British and anti-Russian
policies,
see Hasan-e
Fasa'i,
History of
Persia under
Qajar
Rule,
trans. Herbert Busse
(New
York: Colum-
bia
University
Press, 1972).
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120 Lisa Lowe
extent-it is a
geographical metaphorizing
of the French nation's
encounter with the non-French world-and the Orient is an
imaginary figuration
of
"ailleurs,"
of the "au-dela." For France in
the
eighteenth century,
the Orient becomes the
imagined
site for
the realization of colonial ambition.
At the same
time,
the travel literature of
Diderot, Voltaire,
and
Montesquieu figured
social elements that were
marginal
to,
and that
contested,
the social structures of the ancien
regime.4
T here were internal and external
challenges
to the
stability
of
feudal France: nonaristocratic
republican
elements,
antimonarch-
ical
forces,
peasant
revolts,
the
beginnings
of small
industry
that
necessitated some
migration
and different roles for women and
men,
as well as the
increasing
continental
competition
from other
colonial
powers
such as
England, Spain,
and Holland-and in
travel
literature,
these
pressures
are
represented by
and in the
foreign space
of an
imagined
Orient.
Just
as
English
novels of the
same
period
based on the fiction of travel-such as Defoe's Robin-
son Crusoe
(1719)
or Swift's Gullivers T ravels
(1726)-portrayed
England's
internal social and
political struggles
in the
displaced
4.
By
ancien
regime,
I am
referring
to the feudal
organization
of old French
society
that
prevailed
in the
period
from
roughly
1600 to 1750. T he
predomi-
nant economic base of the ancien
regime
was the rural
agricultural economy.
It
was a
rooted,
stable
society
with
very
little or no class
mobility
or
redefinition,
a
society being organized
in terms of the
seigneurie-a group
of landed estates
owned and
jurisdicted by
the
seigneur-and
administered
by
the
intendants,
and
the manses
(tenured farms)
were worked
by
the mainmortables
(serfs),
peasants,
or
indentured farmers. For a
thorough demographic description
of the ancien re-
gime,
see Pierre Goubert's L'Ancien
Regime,
2 vols.
(Paris,
Armand
Colin, 1969).
During
the seventeenth
century,
19.5 million out of 20 million French
people
remained bound to the
land,
plot,
hut,
cottage,
or
quartier
where
they grew up
(Goubert).
T he old France was characterized not
by
unrest,
social
mobility,
and
popular migration
(as
it was
by
the mid-nineteenth
century),
but
by
sedentari-
ness. Other
important
studies of life
during
the ancien
regime
include Marc
Bloch,
Les caracteres
originaux
de l'histoire rurale
francaise,
2 vols.
(Paris:
Armand
Colin, 1952, 1956);
Fernand
Braudel,
Civilisation materielle et
capitalisme (Paris:
Armand
Colin, 1967);
Robert
Mandrou,
Introduction a la France
moderne, 1500-
1640;
essai de
psychologie historique
(Paris:
Albin
Michel, 1961);
and Natalie Zemon
Davis,
Society
and Culture in
Early
Modern France:
Eight Essays
(Stanford:
Stanford
University
Press, 1975).
Alexis de
T ocqueville's
LAncien
Regime
et la Revolution
(Paris:
Michel
Levy,
1856)
offers a
political analysis
of the ancien
regime
from the
standpoint
of its
dismantling
of its institutions after the French Revolution of
1789.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 121
and
imaginary
locales of Crusoe's island or the lands of the
Lilliputians, Brobdignag giants,
and
Laputans,
so too did the
eighteenth-century
French
voyages imaginaires
become the means
through
which internal domestic
challenges
to social order could
be
figured
and
plotted
as
foreign challenges, though clearly
the
nature of the internal
struggles
was determined
by
different
forces and factors in the
English
and French situations. Voltaire's
representations
of the social
injustices
of a
thinly disguised
ancien
regime
in the
faraway
worlds of
Zadig (1747)
and
Micromegas
(1752),
or
Montesquieu's
wives, eunuchs,
and oriental
despots
in
the Lettres
persanes, employ
the
topos
of travel to
signify
the desire
for
empire,
as well as to veil the more
urgent preoccupations
with
the
diminishing stability
and coherence of the French social order
itself.
T hus,
the
literary topos
of travel not
only expresses
the
French
preoccupation
with land and
empire,
but travel as a
repre-
sentation of
imagined
territorial
expansion
becomes a means of
registering
and
regulating
the domestic culture's concern with
internal
challenges
to the ancien
regime.5
III
Montesquieu's epistolary
novel is
composed
of 161 letters
exchanged
between two Persian travelers in Paris and the wives
and eunuch
guards
in their harem at home. T he novel
imag-
inatively places foreign
visitors in France who
report
their
percep-
tions of French culture back to their families and friends. T his
5. In a
sense,
I am
responding
to a
question posed by
Louis Althusser at the
point
where he discusses
Montesquieu's
idea of
despotism:
"If the Persian does
not
exist,
where does a French
gentilhomme,
born under Louis
XIV,
get
the idea of
him?"
(Politics
and
History: Montesquieu,
Rousseau,
Hegel
and
Marx,
trans. Ben
Brewster
[London:
New Left
Books, 1972], 75).
I
suggest
that
despotism
is
Montesquieu's postulation
of evil as
lawlessness,
the lack of order that
continually
threatens the structure of feudal
monarchy;
it is not based on
knowledge
of the
Persian
system
of
governance
but on a
representation
of the
perceived
threats to
social
order,
cloaked in
foreign guise.
As Alain Grosrichard writes
concerning
the
eighteenth-century concept
of "oriental
despotism":
"What makes it
possible
in effect to think the
concept
of
despotism
is less the
reality
of a
political regime
than the
irrepressible part
of the
imaginary
on which all
political power
rests.
Despotism
is the
concept
of a fantasm
(La
structure du serail: la
fiction
du
despotisme
asiatique
dans l'occident
classique [Paris: Seuil, 1979], 40).
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122 Lisa Lowe
device facilitates the establishment of the Persian travelers' voices
as the occasion for a
lively critique
of French
society,
customs,
language, religion,
law, education,
sexual
roles,
and
government,
from the
point
of view of the
culturally
different Persians who
travel to France. In the sense that the fiction of the oriental is a
literary
device that
permits commentary
on the French
world,
the
structure of the novel
epitomizes
Western literature's invention of
the oriental as the
complementary
Other to Western
identity;
the
juxtaposition
of the two cultural frameworks situates a coherent
eighteenth-century
French world in terms of the otherness of its
oriental observers. Rica's letters
exemplify
and elaborate the ori-
entalist
topos,
as
they continually
demonstrate and comment
upon
the
asymmetrical opposition
of Persia and France. In Lettre
XXX,
to his friend Ibben at
Smyrna,
Rica describes his
reception by
the
inhabitants of Paris:
When I
arrived,
they
looked at me as
though
I had been sent
from Heaven: old men and
young,
women and
children,
they
all wanted to see me. If I went
out,
everyone
stood at the
windows;
if I was in the
T uileries,
I
immediately
became the
center of a circle.6
T wentieth-century anthropologists
have recorded similar
experi-
ences in which an
ethnographer,
crowded
by staring
"natives,"
enters another culture to do fieldwork. In the context of
eighteenth-century
Parisian
society,
Rica,
the
protoanthropolo-
gist,
in Persian
garb,
is
strikingly
visible: he is marked
by
his dif-
ference,
and his dress codes him as
other,
foreign,
outre. "In
short,
never was
anyone
as seen as much as I
was,"
he writes. He finds
portraits
of himself in Paris
shops;
his
image
is
multiplied,
dis-
tributed,
and circulated
everywhere.
T he Parisians' fascination
with the exotic
exposes
a fascination with difference based
upon
a
preoccupation
with
defining
sameness,
an
anxiety
about the con-
sistency
and the cohesion of French
identity
in an
age
of mount-
ing
colonial ambitions. But
paradoxically, although
Rica is
often,
6. All
quotations
are translated from Charles de
Secondat,
Baron de Montes-
quieu,
Lettres
persanes
(Paris: Gallimard, 1973),
and will be identified
by
letter in
the text.
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in Orientalism 123
as letter
writer,
in the role of an
"anthropologist" describing
the
French
"natives,"
he does not
study
their cultural
otherness;
rather,
he finds himself in the
position
of
being
the
object
studied
by
the Parisians.
Fittingly,
when Rica decides to
"go
native,"
to
give up
Persian
dress and to dress as a
European,
he finds he is
ignored:
"Free of
all
foreign
ornament,
I found
myself
assessed more
exactly
...
for all at
once,
I fell into a terrible state of nonexistence."
People
no
longer
stare at
him;
rather he falls into oblivion. It is the
cultural
costume,
the
representation
of
difference,
which is the
European
fetish. When someone announces that Rica is
Persian,
he
reports
in Lettre XXX that "I would hear a buzz around me:
'Oh! oh! Is he Persian? What a most
extraordinary thing!
How can
one be Persian?"' In this
sense,
Rica's cultural difference is like a
costume or mask that is attributed to him
by
French
society.
T he
Persian must assume the costume constructed for him
by
French
society
or fall into nonexistence. As he is encircled
by
Parisian
observers,
Rica's costume
provides
a mark of difference around
which the Parisians can
position
themselves. Yet without his exotic
garb,
Rica cannot be
objectified
as
Other;
the circle has no central
object,
and the crowd lacks
cohesion,
perspective,
and
point
of
view. Without invented
signs
of visible
otherness,
sameness fails to
locate itself. "Comment
peut-on
etre
persan?"
is indeed the
ques-
tion,
for while it is
possible
to
occupy
the
position
of either the
French or the
exotic,
the same or the
different,
it is not
possible
within the world
represented
in the Lettres to be other than either
of the two
categories
of the
opposition.
Rica's two choices are
visibility
as an exoticized
object
that exists
only
in contrast to occi-
dental
orthodoxy
or
invisibility disguised
as a Frenchman. In the
French world of the
Lettres,
the
subjective presence
of Persians is
inconceivable; thus,
it is the
paradox
of both
being
Persian,
yet
not
being
adorned as an exotic
object,
which initiates the Parisians'
incredulous
query,
"How is it
possible
to be Persian?"
Yet,
Rica is a
complex figure,
for he is both a central voice
and
authority
that
presents
French
customs, attitudes,
and
society,
as well as an invented
"foreigner,"
the means
through
which the
French text
stages
its
critique
of French culture. T he
paradox
of
Rica's authoritative
position
(as
author of the
letter)
and Rica's
ultimate
disempowerment
(as
masked
fiction,
as constituted Oth-
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124
Lisa Lowe
er)
foregrounds
the fundamental
irony
in
Montesquieu's
text.
Rica's letter thematizes the use of the oriental in the
process
of
French cultural identification and
self-regard;
at the same time
the letter is an
example
of this
appropriation
which
suggests
that
the Lettres
persanes
is not a
simple
orientalist text but more
pre-
cisely
a text that both discloses and comments
upon
the
eight-
eenth-century
French invention of the Orient. T hat
is,
the Lettres
persanes
does not
simply
"colonize" the
oriental;
the text also crit-
icizes cultural
appropriation by
means of the manner in which it
inverts and destabilizes the
very categories
of observer and ob-
served,
ruler and
ruled,
or
"persan"
and
"parisien."
T he inver-
sions of the
"persans"
and the
"parisiens"-throughout
a text that
has as a
very
clear thematic the identification of France
through
the
discovery
of its
foreign
Other-call into
question
the oriental-
ist
binary logic upon
which the
making
of Others is founded.
T hroughout
the
Lettres,
the Persian world is
presented
as
France's absolute
opposite:
the
tyranny
of the exotic Persian
harem is contrasted with French
representative government,
the
cruel instinct of the Persian master and his eunuch
guards op-
poses
French rationalism and
law,
and the confined
chastity
of the
Persian wives counters the freedom and
infidelity
of the married
French women.
However,
at the same time that this orientalist
logic
structures Persia as France's
Other,
individual letters that
thematize the
theatricality
and artifice of culture comment
upon
the means of
"staging"
Persia. For
example,
in the
juxtaposed
Lettres L and LI-about French
vanity
and cultural
ethnocentrism,
respectively-the
invention of Others is
closely
associated with the
need to construct a
coherent,
viable cultural
identity;
the two
letters
together imply
that French concerns with cultural and so-
cial
difference-including
the
projections
of other cultures as ei-
ther
opposite
or identical to France-can be
symptoms
of a
preoc-
cupation
with
defining
French cultural sameness and
identity.7
7. In Lettre
L,
Rica describes the forms of
vanity
and self-reflexive
praise
he
observes
among
the
French;
as an
example
he cites a man who finishes two hours
of
speaking
about himself
by denouncing
"la vanit." T he Frenchman's
speech
is
itself a mirror within which he is so
captivated by
his own
image
that he is
oblivious to his own
self-reflexivity.
In Lettre
LI,
Nargum,
a Persian
envoy
in
Moscow,
records his observations of
Russia;
he describes the T sar's absolute
power
over his
subjects,
as well as the absolute
power
of men over their wives. He
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in Orientalism 125
Rica states later in Lettre LIX: "It seems to
me, Usbek,
that all our
judgments
are made with covert reference to ourselves. I do not
find it
surprising
that the
negroes paint
the devil
sparkling
white,
and their
gods
black as coal.... It has been well said that if
triangles
had a
god, they
would
give
him three sides." In this well-
known
letter,
Rica
humorously suggests
that all cultures
imagine
their
gods
like themselves and their devils unlike themselves.
Rica's observations mock the
operations
of ethnocentrism and the
logic by
which one
group
defines itself in terms of other cultures
conveniently
constructed as similar or
opposite
to itself. At the
same
time,
insofar as the novel's orientalism is a fiction based
upon
this ethnocentric
operation,
the
orientalizing
structure of
the text is
parodied
in Rica's letters.
Although
the novel structures
the
relationship
between the French and the Persians
according
to
a
logic
of
binary dependence
and
compatibility-in
which France
seems to be
prior
and dominant to the
secondary
Persia-
individual letters
continually
comment
upon
and
ultimately
un-
dermine the terms of this
logic.
Ethnocentrism and the
representation
of Others are also il-
lustrated and
ironically parodied by
Lettre
LXXVIII,
a letter that
includes another letter. Rica
quotes
for Usbek a letter written
by
a
Frenchman
traveling
in
Spain.
In the
quoted
letter,
the French-
man describes the customs and character of the
Spanish
and crit-
icizes the colonial ambition of
Spain.
Rica concludes that an analo-
gous
letter written to Madrid from a
Spaniard traveling
in France
might
be
easily
as
critical,
suggesting
that most cultural
descrip-
includes within his letter one from a Russian woman about the convention of
wife
beating
in order to establish that this is an
important
and
approved
custom.
T he Persian
Nargum exemplifies
the
paradigm
of
ethnocentricity;
he is able to
view the Russians
only
in terms of Persian custom and observes
only
the
parts
of
Russian life that
correspond
to Persian life. Placed
together,
Lettres L and LI
foreground
the similarities between the model of individual
vanity
and the eth-
nocentric
impulse
that refers to one's own culture
by appropriating
and
project-
ing
cultural otherness. In
addition,
Rica and Usbek
continually
observe cultural
behaviors and traits
among
the
French,
but do not seem to
recognize many
of
them as their own. For
example,
in Lettre
CII,
Usbek delivers a
strong
criticism of
monarchical rule: "It is a violent state that
always degenerates
into
despotism
or
republicanism."
Usbek does not
identify
his own
despotic power
within the mo-
narchical
example,
even
though comparisons
between the
government
of Louis
XIV and Usbek's rule are made
throughout
the novel.
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126 Lisa Lowe
tions are
biased,
uniperspectival,
and blind to the
position
from
which
they
are
written;
the Frenchman's letter condemns
Spanish
and
Portuguese
missionaries in the
Americas,
even
though
it men-
tions
nothing
of the French slave trade from West Africa to the
Caribbean. Rica's letter
quotes
from the Frenchman's letter:
T hose who live in continental
Spain
and
Portugal
have a
great
feeling
of inner
superiority
if
they
are what
they
call "Old
Christians" . . . and those who live in the Indies are no less
pleased
with themselves when
they
reflect that
they possess
the
supreme
merit of
being,
as
they
call
it,
"men of white
flesh." No
queen
in the Ottoman
emperor's
harem ever took
such
pride
in her
beauty
as the oldest and
ugliest
ruffian does
in the
dingy
olive whiteness of his
complexion, sitting
with his
arms crossed in his
doorway
in a Mexican town.
In
criticizing
the
Spanish,
the Frenchman denies
any
resonance or
similarity
between the nationalistic
temperaments
of the French
and
Spanish.
T he Frenchman condemns
Spanish pride,
racial
prejudice, missionary
zeal,
and colonialism
yet
does not account
for the extent to which France is also
deeply
involved in these
same activities.
Indeed,
the Frenchman himself
betrays
more than
a few racial
assumptions
in the
comparison
between the Ottoman
"sultane,"
cited as the
epitome
of
pride,
and the Mexican
"matin,"
who
proudly
exhibits the
Spanish
within his mixed blood. T his is
one of the few letters in the novel in which
race,
rather than
nationality,
is so
clearly
marked as a
topos;
in
mocking Spanish
racial
pride,
the Frenchman
suggests
that due to
Spanish
colonial-
ism,
the ones who are
proudest
of their race are those who are
darkened
through intermarriage
with the colonized Indians. T he
Frenchman's
mockery depends
on a racial
hierarchy
that assumes
the
superiority
of the
European
"men of white flesh" over the
Mexican with "the
dingy
olive whiteness of his
complexion,"
a
hierarchy
that the Frenchman himself holds and on
top
of which
he
places
the French. It is Rica who includes this Frenchman's
letter in his own letter to
Usbek,
and
again
it is Rica who observes
the French cross-cultural
representations
of
Spaniards,
T urks,
and Mexicans. Yet
Rica,
when he comments
upon
French ethno-
centrism at the end of the
letter,
glosses
over the salience of the
racial
hierarchy
described in the letter. For a similar
hierarchy
of
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 127
race is also embedded in the structure of
power
in the Persian
harem,
in which the race of the eunuchs determines the nature of
their castration
and,
consequently,
their rank and status in the
harem
community.
Rica,
in
overlooking
the racial
inequalities
within the Persian
system, represents
another instance of ethno-
centrism
portrayed by
the text-the fiction of Rica and the Per-
sian
system
mimics the Frenchman's blindness to French colonial
ambition and involvement in the New World.
T hus,
in its
representations
of ethnocentrism and the estab-
lishment of cultural
identity
in the
projection
of
otherness,
the
text introduces criticisms of the invention of Rica and Usbek as
Persian
complements
to French
identity;
the orientalist
logic
is
challenged
in the letters that
foreground
the
paradoxical
status of
Rica and those that
parody
ethnocentrism. T he
divided,
self-
critical
quality
of the text is further
expressed
in the
epistolary
genre,
a form that
privileges multiplicity,
contrast,
and dissent.
Due to its
epistolarity,
the Lettres
persanes
is not
strictly
a travel
story,
in that the narrative is not
uniperspectival
and does not
represent
a
departure,
arrival,
and return.
Rather,
the narrative
sequence
and the
chronology
of travel are
disjointed
and discon-
tinuous. T he
perspective
of
narration,
or
point
of
view,
is multi-
ple:
the different
points
of observation
fragment any continuity
of events. T he sense of
geography
and
space
is
distorted;
at one
point,
the letter writer is in
Smyrna,
and then
immediately
the
next letter is written from Paris. T he
epistolary
novel
collapses
the
distances between
places
and
cultures, and, further,
the
point
of
view of the narrative shifts
continually
back and forth from Persia
to France. While the time of travel is fictionalized in the careful
marking
of dates of the
letters,
the
epistolary
narrative-which
places
letters of
disparate
times
adjacent
to one another-
collapses
and eliminates durations of time.
Although
a
story
of
the Persians' cultural
adaptation
and conversion is
being
told,
the
epistolary
form of the novel undermines the
continuity
of this
familiar
plot.
Not
only
do the
multiple perspectives
of the letters
disrupt any impression
of
continuity
or
duration,
but there are
the
many lengthy digressions
in the novel: for
example,
the fable
of the
T roglodytes,
the
quotation
of others' letters within
letters,
the
story
of
Zulema,
etc. T he
epistolary
form
repeatedly
starts
and halts action. T ravel is not
represented
as
steady
and continu-
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128 Lisa Lowe
ous; rather,
the
contiguity
of the letters from Paris and the letters
from the harem
abruptly
contrasts the
European
with the non-
European,
and this
formaljuxtaposition strongly foregrounds
the
cultural inversion of the
"persans"
and the
"parisiens."
IV
At the same time that the novel
represents
France from
Rica's "oriental"
point
of
view,
it also
depicts
an "oriental world" in
the
portrait
of the Persian harem offered
by
the letters from
Usbek's wives and the eunuch
guards.
T hese letters describe the
intrigues
and crises that take
place
in the harem
during
Usbek's
absence.
T hus,
Montesquieu's
novel of letters is often described as
containing
two
parallel
stories-one of Usbek's and Rica's travels
to Paris and the other of the
despot's
eventual loss of
authority
and the revolt of his wives in the harem.8 But even as the
repre-
sentation of the Persian world
presents
a French
image
of its
cultural
Other,
it also
allegorizes
the
problems
and tensions of
eighteenth-century
France: the oriental
despot
is a
figure
for
Louis
XIV,
the harem
hierarchy
of white and black eunuch
guards
is an
analogy
for the roles of the
nobility
and
intendants,
and the wives-in-revolt are
figure
for the
peasantry during
the
Regency
of
Philippe
d'Orleans,
following
Louis's death in 1715. In
the sense that the first
story
/ second
story
structure erects a
binary
relationship
in which the oriental world is subordinated as a meta-
phor
for French
political problems,
this
binary
structure is itself
instrumental to the orientalism of the novel.
But,
to the
degree
that the second
story
about the
despot's
overthrow
interrupts
and
disallows a
satisfactory
closure of the
portrait
of
foreign
visitors in
8.
See,
for
example,
Robert
O'Reilly's
"T he Structure and
Meaning
of the
Lettres
persanes,"
Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century,
67
(1969): 91-131,
and Aram
Vartanian,
"Eroticism and Politics in the Lettres
persanes,"
Romantic
Review
60,
no. 1
(February 1969):
23-33. T he notion of "two stories" should not
be
applied
too
literally,
however. It is
merely
a critical device to allow the discus-
sion of two different
impulses
in the
novel,
for the two stories are not so
easily
distinguished. T hroughout
the letters of Rica and
Usbek,
the two stories
overlap
and intersect at different
junctures.
For
example,
some of Usbek's letters to his
wives and to the eunuchs can be considered as
contributing
to the "first
story,"
others to the "second
story."
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 129
Paris
depicted by
the first
story,
the
orientalizing
structure is trou-
bled and rendered more
complex.
Indeed,
the
heterogeneous
conflicts invoked in the
portrait
of the harem
bring
a
variety
of
narrative,
logical,
and rhetorical
challenges
to bear on the orien-
talist fiction of the novel.
As we saw in the discussion of Rica's Lettre
XXX,
the "first
story" stages
Persian culture as a means of
commenting upon
French institutions and
practices;
this
staging
of Persia establishes
a
binary relationship
of
complementarity
between the French and
oriental worlds. But this
logic
is not restricted to the
binary
cultur-
al
opposition
of France and
Persia;
it is reiterated
by
several meta-
phors
invoked in the first
story-in particular,
the institutions of
slavery
and
marriage. During
his
stay
in
Paris,
Usbek writes con-
tinually
to his wives and eunuch slaves. In these
letters,
the rela-
tionships
between master and slave and between husband and
wife are each
represented
as an
analogy
for the
topos
of
despo-
tism.9 T he
relationships
between the
despot
Usbek and members
of his harem
appear
in the first
story
as
analogies
for French
political tyranny
and rule and are the
principal
vehicles for Mon-
tesquieu's
attack on the tendencies in the French
system
toward
despotism; yet,
if we understand the rule of French
despotism
to
extend to
foreign
territories under
France,
the
relationships
be-
tween Usbek and his slaves and wives serve as
metaphors
for the
French
appropriation
of
empire-that
is,
as
examples
of the ori-
entalist
topos
itself. A
critique
of this
topos
is
provided by
the
particular
narrative
challenges
to the institutions of
slavery
and
marriage
and,
more
generally,
in the narrative of Usbek's declin-
ing
rule. T he second
story's
narratives intervene in the first
story's
orientalism
by complicating
its
binary logic
of "ruler" and "ruled"
9.
Despotism,
in this
sense,
is the extreme
tyranny
of one over others. Ac-
cording
to
Montesquieu, despotism
is
distinguished
from a
democracy
or a mon-
archy:
in a
democracy, property
and even relative wealth are
guaranteed by
the
law;
in a
monarchy,
the
nobility
and
clergy
are
protected by
a
recognition
of their
privileges;
but in a
despotism,
there is no
hereditary
order,
no
nobility.
Grosrichard
suggests
that for
Montesquieu, despotism
is "the master of mon-
archy,"
the internal
possibility
of disorder that
may potentially erupt:
"But then it
stops being
a
specifically
distinct form of
government,
and one
might
conceive of
monarchy
and
despotism
as
being
each a
part
of the other"
(La
structure du
serail,
59).
In this
sense,
despotism
is the "other" of the French
political system, figured
in the Orient of Persia.
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130 Lisa Lowe
with the more
heterogeneous
and multidirectional conflicts be-
tween the
master,
the eunuchs,
and the wives,
and
by ultimately
concluding
the novel with the wives'
triumph against
the master.
Within the structure of the
harem,
a
hierarchy
exists in
which Usbek dominates both the eunuchs and his
wives;
in his
absence,
the wives answer to the eunuchs who are the
representa-
tives of the
despot's
will.10 T he eunuchs are enslaved
by
the mas-
ter,
and are
absolutely subject
to his
orders;
while commanded to
exercise the master's
power
in his
absence,
they
are
essentially
without their own
power.
In this
sense,
their
physical
castration is
a sexual
sign
of their enslavement and of their
political impotence
within the serail.
Just
as the eunuchs have sexual desire but lack
the
ability
to enact this
desire,
so too do
they
have the illusion of
exercising political power
and
yet, upon being
commanded
by
the
master,
realize that
they
have no
power
of their own. In Lettre
IX,
the Premier
Eunuque
offers a
poignant description
of his life in
the harem to his friend Ibbi:
[D]uring
the course of a
long
life,
I cannot
say
that I have had
one
day
of
peace,
or one moment of calm.
When
my
first master conceived the cruel
project
of
entrusting
his wives to
me,
and
obliged
me,
by
inducements
backed
by
innumerable
threats,
to be forever
separated
from
myself..
.I
hoped
that I would be freed from the seizures of
love
by my
lack of means to
satisfy
them. But alas-the effects
of
passion
were eliminated in
me,
but not their
cause;
and far
from
finding
relief,
I found
myself
surrounded
by
scenes
which
continually
aroused them. On
entering
the
seraglio,
everything
made me
yearn
for what I had lost. I felt excited
all the time.... T o crown
my
misfortune,
I had a
happy
man
permanently
before
my eyes.
10. T he Lettres
portrays
the harem as a hierarchical
system,
in which Usbek is
master of the eunuch
slaves,
and the slaves control the behavior of Usbek's wives.
Locating
these
relationships-of slavery
and of sexual domination-in the ori-
ental harem
displaces
the
responsibility
for these
systems
of
oppression
from
France. T he slave trade that
brought
West Africans to work for the French on
the
sugar plantations
of the Caribbean islands and the
political
and social in-
equality
of women to men in
eighteenth-century
France are concealed
by
this
orientalist
displacement.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 131
Within the structure of the
harem,
the absolute domination of the
slave
by
the master is
sexually
coded in the castration of the eu-
nuchs. T he eunuch is
literally
forever
separated
from
himself,
and his divided
person, lacking
sexual
means,
also excludes him
from the social institutions of
marriage, family,
and
generation.
In
this
way,
his sexual misfortune emblematizes his social and
politi-
cal
impotence."1
Further,
as the eunuch's letter makes
clear,
the
castration does not
simply
render him
"asexual";
it does not elimi-
nate
sexuality
and desire from his
person.
In the harem world
described in the
Lettres,
castration is not a neutral or
satisfying
state of
nonpossession.
Rather,
it coexists
always
with an idealized
memory
of
possession
and
power;
it is the mark of a state of lack
that is characterized
by
desire that can never be fulfilled.12
For the
eunuchs,
Usbek is the
figure
who
represents
self-
possessed masculinity
and sexual
identity:
he
appears
"whole"
and
undivided,
he rules
authoritatively,
and has total access to his
subjects.
Like the
eunuchs,
Usbek's
political mastery
is also
sym-
bolized
by
his sexual status-that
is,
by
his noncastration-and
by
his sexual
rights
to
possess
the wives. T he
supposed possession
of
himself and his wives creates Usbek's
"phallic"
role in the
harem,
11. T he eunuch's social exclusion is a characterization of the
political
exclusion
and
impotence
of the
nobility
that
began during
the
reign
of Louis XIV and
continued
during
the
Regency.
Indeed,
although L'Esprit
des lois is
adopted by
Enlightenment
thinkers as liberal
political philosophy,
it must not be
forgotten
that
Montesquieu
wrote his
critique
of
despotism
from a
position among
a trou-
bled and disenfranchised
nobility.
As Althusser
points
out,
Montesquieu
had a
very particular understanding
of
"republicanism"
based on ancient models that
placed
the "free men" at the forefront and the multitude of artisans and slaves in
the shade. He would have the
people deprived
of all direct
power,
but
grant
them the
right
to choose
representatives. Montesquieu
does not want this "com-
mon
people" (bas-peuple)
to have
power.
Althusser writes that "in
denouncing
despotism, Montesquieu
is not
defending against
the
politics
of absolutism so
much
liberty
in
general
as the
particular
liberties of the feudal
class,
its individual
security,
the conditions of its
lasting
survival and its
pretensions
to return in new
organs
of
power
to the
place
which had been robbed from it
by history." (Politics
and
History, 83). T herefore,
on its most overt
level,
the Lettres
persanes
moralizes:
despotism
is the sure road to
popular
revolutions.
"Princes,
avoid
despotism if you
would save
your
thrones
from
the
people's
violence,"
paraphrases
Althusser
(85).
12. T he desire for the lost state of wholeness
may
be a
figuration
of the
aristocrat's
nostalgia
for the feudal
estate,
and the untroubled
autonomy
of the
noble classes
during
the ancien
regime.
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132 Lisa Lowe
while the sexual and
political
enslavement of the eunuchs is
repre-
sented
by
their castration or
by being deprived
of the mark of
masculinity.
In this
way,
the
representation
of the eunuchs' castra-
tion
provides
a sexual
allegory
of
political hierarchy
and
power.
T hat
is,
Usbek's mark of masculine
potency,
or
"phallus,"
is
purely
symbolic;
it is not denoted or determined
by
the mere
presence
of
sexual
parts.13
Rather,
the
"phallus"
is a
socially
constructed and
conferred mark of
masculinity
and is itself a
signifier
for the
desire for masculine
self-possession
and its social and
symbolic
significance.14
T he eunuchs do not
merely
lack what Usbek seems
to
have;
their lack also includes the
impossible
desire for Usbek's
marked
power, authority,
and
subjectivity.
Further,
the novel's
placement
of Usbek
away
from the harem and the
story
of his
declining power
and
authority
there illustrate that even the mas-
ter himself does not
possess
the
"phallus";
his sexual and
political
rule is
challenged,
and he is soon no
longer
the
principal authority
around which the harem is
organized.
In this
sense,
both Usbek
and eunuchs alike desire
phallic potency;
absolute
mastery
and
self-possession
eludes them all.
Despite
the structure of the
serail,
which would seem to offer
the
despot
absolute
power,
Usbek is
portrayed
in an
increasingly
vulnerable
position
as the novel
progresses. Many
of his letters
betray
a sense of
geographical
isolation and a
suspicion
of the
precariousness
of his
position
at home. For
example,
in Lettre
CXIII,
Usbek writes about
flux,
change,
and the eventual
decay
of
life,
as if he is anxious that even the most
permanent
structures
may
include their own
destruction;
he seems to
suspect
the de-
cline of his
authority
in the harem even before the eunuchs
report
it to him. And Lettre
CXIV,
an
argument against
the virtues of
polygamy
as a means for
raising populations, exposes
Usbek's
13. Grosrichard
argues, citing
Ancillon's "T raite des
eunuques" (1707),
that
traditionally
eunuchs were
organized
into four
classes,
characterized
by
different
degrees
of
physical
castration: "those who were born
such,
those from whom
everything
was
removed,
those rendered
sterile,
and those
types
of men who
were so unsuitable or of such a
frigid temperament
that
they
were
incapable
of
procreating"
(La
structure du
serail, 190).
14. See
Jacques
Lacan,
"T he
Agency
of the Letter in the Unconscious or
Reason since
Freud,"
in
Ecrits,
trans. Alan Sheridan
(New
York:
Norton,
1977),
146-78.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 133
fears about not
satisfying
his
wives.'5
As
early
as the second letter
of the
novel,
Usbek writes to the Premier
Eunuque
Noir in order
to maintain his troubled rule over the harem. In other
words,
the
novel
begins
with Usbek's rule
endangered by
his
absence,
his
commands and threats to the eunuchs
expressing
an
anxiety
about his
waning
rule.
[Y]ou
serve them
(the wives)
like the slave of their slaves.
But,
by
a reversal
of authority, you
are master of them like
myself,
whenever
you
fear a relaxation of the laws of
chastity
and
modesty.
Always
remember the
nothingness
from where I
brought
you,
when
you
were the lowest of
my
slaves,
and I
put you
in this
post
and entrusted to
you
the
delights
of
my
heart. Humiliate
yourself profoundly
before the women who share
my
love,
but
at the same time make them aware of their absolute
depen-
dence.
(Lettre II,
my emphasis)
Usbek maintains his rule over the eunuch slaves
through
threats
and reminders of their
powerlessness
("You
serve them like the
slave of their
slaves"), and,
by
means of his control over the eu-
nuchs,
he
attempts
to rule his wives. But even
though
the eunuchs
are the executors of Usbek's will over the
wives,
they
are indeed
slaves,
as Usbek is
quick
to remind them. In some
ways they
inhab-
it even lower
rungs
of the ladder of harem
hierarchy
because,
under Usbek's
orders,
they
must also serve the wives. T he slaves'
impotence
is
signified
not
only by
their castration but also
by
their
lack of
names;
while
Usbek, friends,
and wives are all named in
the
letters,
many
of the eunuchs are referred to
only by
their rank
and color
(for
example,
"Premier
Eunuque
Blanc,"
"Premier Eu-
nuque
Noir," etc.).
T he eunuchs themselves are not a
homoge-
neous
group
of
equal standing,
for not
only
are there black and
white
eunuchs,
but
among
these
groups
there are "first" and "sec-
15. Usbek writes in Lettre CXIV: "I think of a
good
Muslim as an athlete
doomed to
compete
without
respite,
who is soon weakened and overcome
by
his
initial efforts and
languishes
on the
very
field of
victory, lying
buried,
so to
speak,
beneath his own
triumphs....
It is to this state of
debility
that we are
always
reduced
by
the
large
number of wives we
have,
which is more
likely
to
wear us out than to
satisfy
us."
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134 Lisa Lowe
ond" eunuchs. Alain Grosrichard
argues
that the difference in
color is also a mark of a division of labor in the harem:
T he white eunuchs are the officers of the harem who com-
mand and administer
according
to a strict hierarchical order
or who serve as
keepers
of the children. T he black
eunuchs,
on the other
hand,
specialize
in
guarding
the
harem,
where
they
watch the entries and exits. T he white eunuchs accom-
pany
the
despot
and are like his shadow. T he blacks accom-
pany
the
wives,
whom
they
never let out of their
sight.16
T his coded
system
of rank
among
the eunuchs-a
highly
com-
petitive group among
whom there is scarce and
diminishing
power
to be shared
among many-reinforces
the
parallel
between
the eunuchs and the
nobility
and intendants under French mon-
archy.
T he
passage
above from Lettre II is also
very important
be-
cause it establishes the
analogy
between the
topoi
of
despotism
and
slavery,
between the relations of ruler and his
subjects,
and of
master and his slaves. T his
analogy
is enunciated
by
Usbek's use of
the
expression
"a reversal of
authority"
(un
retour
d'empire)
to con-
vey
the sense of a transfer of command over the wives from Usbek
to the eunuch. On the one
hand,
this
expression signifies
a shift-
ing
of
power
from Usbek to the
eunuch-indeed,
a "return" of
power
and
masculinity
to the castrated slave.
But,
on the other
hand,
un retour
d'empire
also carries the sense of a reversal of
empire
(that
is,
a
reverting
of dominions to another
rule,
perhaps
home
rule);
the
power
to command the wives is
equated
with the
rule of territorial
empire.
T he double valence of the
expression
not
only conveys
Usbek's
anxiety
about the
security
of his rule-in
that it
portends
the end of the novel where there is a reversal of
authority,
where the "ruler" becomes the "ruled"-but the choice
of the word
"empire"
also reinforces an
analogy
between the to-
pos
of
slavery
and colonial rule.17
T he eunuch's social exclusion is often
interpreted
as a char-
16.
Grosrichard,
La structure du
serail,
185.
17. T he use of
"empire"
to describe the rule of the wives in the harem
emerges
also in Lettre IX. After
having
described the frustration that results from his
castration,
the Premier
Eunuque singles
out one last source of
pleasure:
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 135
acterization of the
political
exclusion of the
nobility
and intendants
during
the
reign
of Louis XIV and
continuing through
the Re-
gency.
What is most notable about the
figure
of the eunuch is the
discrepancy
between the eunuch's "class" status and his actual
access to
power.
T he eunuch is the instrument of the master with
the
ability
to command the wives for
him,
but he also
possesses
less
collective
power
and a less stable
position
with
regard
to the mas-
ter than do the wives. For unlike the
wives,
who have
some,
though
limited,
social and sexual means of
negotiating
with
Usbek,
the eunuch does not.
Further,
unlike the
wives,
the eu-
nuch feels
competitive
with his fellow
eunuchs,
and he is not
inclined to
join
with them-or with the wives-in revolt
against
the
master;
for in his
singular impotence
he is too attached to and
dependent upon
the structure of the harem for social status. De-
spite
his enslavement and
subjection
to the master's
rule,
he be-
lieves in the fiction of the limited
power
he is
granted
over the
wives; therefore,
he colludes with the master rather than
object
to
his own enslavement.
T hus,
the class tensions of French
society
become
figured
in
the Persian harem in terms of the eunuch's
castration,
his rank in
I
always
remember that I was born to command
[the wives],
and it is
as if I become a man
again
on the occasions when I now
give
them
orders....
Although
I
keep
them for another
man,
the
pleasure
of
making myself obeyed gives
me a secret
joy.
When I
deny
them
anything,
it is as if I was
doing
it on
my
own
behalf,
and
indirectly
I
always
derive satisfaction from it. T he
seraglio
is
for
me like a little
empire,
and
my
ambition,
the
only passion
which remains to
me,
is to
some extent satisfied.
(my emphasis)
Deprived
of social and sexual status
by
his
master,
the eunuch is able to "become
a man
again"
when he commands the wives. Several
important equations
are
contained
by
the eunuch's remarks:
firstly,
he echoes his earlier formulation that
masculine station is
provided,
and
signified, by
the subordination of the
wives;
that
is,
possession
of the
phallus
in the harem is
essentially
a
socially
conferred
position.
But
further,
for the eunuch in the absence of the
master,
the harem
becomes for him "a small
empire";
that
is,
the wives are
equated
with territories
and
colonies,
while
masculinity
is conflated with
patriotism.
T his
portrait
of the
eunuch
guard
as
petty oppressor,
in which his own
subjugation
is converted into
the will to subordinate the
wives,
renders the eunuchs as
figures
somewhat like
the colonial French-the
groups
of settlers and
military
sent
abroad,
many
of
whom
may
have been
unprivileged
commoners in
France,
but were
suddenly
and
arbitrarily powerful among
the
Caribbean, Canadian,
and Indian
popula-
tions over whom
they
ruled.
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136 Lisa Lowe
the
hierarchy,
and,
most
interestingly,
in terms of his relation to
the master and his
power
over the wives. But if we consider the
slavery
of the eunuchs to be not
only
an
analogy
for
despotic
rule
but also a
metafigure
for orientalism
itself,
then the
degree
to
which the eunuchs accommodate the rule of the master is
signifi-
cant. It
suggests
that the class drama that is
figured through
the
eunuch
story
never
completely
intervenes in or reverses the orien-
talist
logic
embodied in the master/slave
relationship.
Just
as the
eunuchs continue until the end to
uphold
Usbek's rule and are
not
willing
to disturb the structure of
tyranny upon
which the
harem is
built,
so too the narrative of the eunuch's dissatisfaction
does not
truly challenge
the narratives of
mastery, tyranny,
or
orientalism for which the
topos
of
slavery
stands.
T hough
the
eunuch
plot complicates
the
binary logic
and structure of the first
story's
orientalism,
the narrative about
slavery ultimately
corrobo-
rates and sustains orientalism's
logics
and its
figures.
T he
wives,
like the
eunuchs,
are also subordinated
by
the
harem structure and
subject
to the will of the master.
However,
unlike the
eunuchs,
the wives revolt
against
Usbek,
and the narra-
tive about the wives'
triumph
reverses and intervenes in the
binary
logic
of the novel's orientalism. T he sexual domination of the
wives
by
Usbek is first evident in the letters in which wives are
characterized as
property-"ornament, treasure"-kept
for the
honor of the husband: "How
unhappy
a wife
is,
.. .a useless
ornament in the
seraglio, kept
for the
honor,
not the
happiness
of
her husband!" writes
Fatme,
one of the
wives,
to Usbek in Lettre
VII. Lettre
XXVI,
in which Usbek writes to his newest wife
Roxane,
also reiterates the
proprietary
ownership
of the wife
by
the hus-
band;
he characterizes the husband's
right
of sexual access to the
wife as the
"mastery
of that treasure that
you
defended so stead-
fastly."
In the world
imagined
in the
Lettres,
the Persian "mar-
riage"
is
represented
as the
relationship emblematizing
the mas-
tery
of women
by
men;
marriage,
like the
topos
of
slavery,
also
serves as a
metafigure
for orientalism itself.18
18. T he
subjection
of the wives
by
the husband can be considered as an
analogy
for a number of social hierarchies in
eighteenth-century
France: the
relationship
of the colonial
power
to the
colonies,
the
relationship
of
sovereign
and
citizenry,
and the ecclesiastical subservience of the church to God. In this
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 137
Usbek's letters to the eunuchs
express
his evident
anxiety
about the
security
of his rule at home. But the sense of the
pre-
cariousness of his rule is even
greater
in terms of his
relationships
with his wives. In Lettre
XXVI,
Usbek
attempts
to reestablish his
authority
over Roxane
by renarrating
the tale of his
physical pur-
suit of her
during
the first
days
of their
marriage.
He simulates
the structure of his earlier desire in the
writing
of the letter itself:
You took a
dagger
and threatened to
destroy
the husband
who loved
you,
if he continued to demand
something
that
meant more to
you
than he did. T his
struggle
between love
and virtue lasted two months. You carried the
scruples
of
chastity
too far:
you
did not
surrender,
even after
you
had
been
conquered; you
defended
your dying virginity
at the
very
last
extremity; you
considered me an
enemy
who had
inflicted an
outrage
on
you,
not as a husband who had loved
you.
I did not even have a
tranquil possession
of
you:
you
deprived
me,
as far as
you
could,
of
your beauty
and
your
grace,
and I was intoxicated with the
greatest privileges
with-
out
having
obtained the lesser.
Usbek reinvents his desire for
Roxane,
representing
her re-
sistances and inaccessibilities as
prohibitions
to be exceeded-not
only by
the husband on the
wedding night
but
by
his own contem-
porary
narrative. In Usbek's narration of the
consummation,
Rox-
sense,
the entire Persian
plot,
and
particularly
the
ending
of the
novel,
in which
the wives
revolt,
may
be understood as a
represented
inversion of the
many
hierarchies that constitute the French social order in the
early eighteenth-
century. Marriage,
or the subordinated
relationship
of women to
men,
is a
signif-
icant emblem of social hierarchies in
general during
the
early eighteenth
cen-
tury.
In "T he Reasons of Misrule" and "Women on
T op"
(in
Society
and
Culture),
Natalie Zemon Davis
suggests
that in
early
modern
France,
the festivals in which
symbolic
reversals of sexual and social roles of women and men occurred con-
stituted
regular
intervals of relief from the traditional
order;
these inversions
were a social and cultural means of
deferring
actual disorder or real redistribu-
tions of
power
in
family
and
political
life. One
implication
of Davis's
argument
is
that the
relationship
of men and women
was,
in this
period,
a
privileged symbol
of social
hierarchy
that came to
represent
a
variety
of social
relationships.
In this
sense,
the wives' revolt at the end of
Montesquieu's
novel
may
have been one of
the cultural
metaphors
of revolution that
helped
to
postpone
the eventual
upris-
ing
of the
peasantry
and the T hird Estate
against
the
nobility
and monarch in
1789.
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138
Lisa Lowe
ane first
attempts
to stab him and for the
succeeding
two months
resists his advances. After the
physical penetration
takes
place,
she
still does not surrender but defends her
"dying virginity"
until the
end
by withholding
her own desire. What Usbek construes as
Roxane's
modesty
is her one
potent
form of resistance. T o dis-
allow Usbek "a
tranquil possession,"
to refuse
willing
or
passion-
ate
participation,
is her
only weapon.19
As if
acknowledging
his
lack of total
possession,
in his letter Usbek substitutes a narrated
conquest
of Roxane for the actual
conquest
he has never attained.
Lettres CXLVII
through
CLXI record the
story
of the revolt:
the eunuch's letters
report
the wives'
growing
defiance to Usbek.
Usbek's letters order the
guards
to secure the wives'
obedience;
yet, ultimately,
the wives' letters to Usbek refuse to
recognize
his
authority
and declare their
independence
from him. T he wives'
acts of rebellion include
quarrelling, disobeying
the
eunuchs,
gaiety,
and
infidelity.
But the
transgression
most
forcefully
con-
demned in the eunuchs'
reports
to Usbek is the
implied
erotic
relationships
between the wives and their female slaves. In both
Lettres IV and
CXLVII,
the
topos
of female homoeroticism is intro-
duced as one of the most serious violations of the rules of the
harem. In Lettre
IV,
Usbek's wife
Zephis
alludes to the eunuch's
reports
of illicit
homoeroticism,
and offers an
explanation
of the
eunuch's
suspicions:
He is determined to take
my
slave Zelide
away
from
me,
Zelide who serves me so
faithfully,
and whose deft hands
per-
form
beauty
and
grace everywhere.
It is not
enough
for him
that this
separation
should be
painful;
he wants it to be dis-
honorable as well. T he brute wants to
regard
the motives for
my
trust as
criminal;
and because I
always
send him outside
the door and he
gets
bored,
he
boldly
assumes that he has
heard or seen
things
that I could not even
imagine.
19. In the novel's last
letter,
Lettre
CLXI,
written
during
the wives'
revolt,
Roxane is able
finally
to articulate her refusal and to
divulge
her means of
resistance. She reveals to Usbek that
though
she submitted to his
physical
de-
mands,
she
always
withheld herself and
sought
her
pleasures
elsewhere. She
triumphs
in
announcing
her
deceptions
and
betrayals:
"Yes,
I deceived
you.
I
suborned
your
eunuchs,
outwitted
your jealousy....
I
may
have lived in servi-
tude,
but I have
always
been free." Roxane is
ultimately
able to refuse and
escape
Usbek's
tyranny,
and to
topple
his
authority, by informing
him that she
only
appeared
to be
possessed
when she indeed was not.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 139
Zephis's
letter not
only registers
that female homoeroticism is re-
garded
as a most serious
transgression
of harem
laws,
it also
pro-
vides an
important analysis
of how that
transgression
is con-
stituted.
Zephis's explanation
of the eunuch's accusations
suggests
that female
homosexuality
has a
history
in the cultural text and
imagination
of the harem: whether as a
pleasurable fantasy
for
voyeuristic
eunuchs
or,
conversely,
as an
imagined
threat to the
master's rule and to the structure of the
harem,
the
topos
of
"oriental
sapphism"20 already
exists as a constructed
opposition
to
the
required
licit heterosexual fidelities of the wives that sustain
the harem
hierarchy.
Further,
in
emphasizing
that the eunuch is
always kept
outside the
door,
she
implies
that the eunuch has
particular
motives for
fabricating
his accusations. As Lettre IX rec-
ords,
the eunuchs feel continual
frustration-among
the women
they
desire
yet
cannot touch and in the shadow of the master
whose access to the wives the eunuchs
envy.
T he
imagined
locus of
female
homosexuality-a
site that the eunuchs are forbidden to
enter or even to
gaze
into-is the
perfect
emblematic
figure
for
the eunuchs' frustration and for his castration.
Finally,
the
possi-
bility-whether
real or
imagined-of
a nonheterosexual female
society
not
organized
around the master's
phallus
threatens to be
the ultimate subversion of the institution of
marriage
and
fidelity
to the
master,
so essential to the structure of the harem. T he
eunuch's accusations of
Zephis
and Zelide and his insistence on
the
separation
of the two women illustrate the
powerful
force of
this
specter upon
the
imaginations
of those most invested
in,
and
dependent upon,
the harem structure.
T herefore,
at a later
point,
the
reported
incident of one of
the
wives, Zashi,
sleeping
with her
slave,
fills not
only
the eunuchs
but also Usbek with
panic
and dread.
T hey
believe that the acts
and
practices they previously
had
only imagined
have come to
20. See Malek Alloula's T he Colonial
Harem,
trans.
Myrna
Godzich and Wlad
Godzich
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota
Press, 1986),
particularly chap-
ter
9,
"Oriental
Sapphism."
In the discourse of
orientalism,
the female
harem,
forbidden to male
spectators
and
travelers,
is invented as the site of a limitless
possibility
of sexual
practices among
women,
including homosexuality.
But the
harem is not
merely
an orientalist
voyeur's fantasy
of
imagined
female sex-
ualities;
it also
represents
the
threateping possibility
of an erotic universe in
which there are no
men,
a site of social and sexual
practices
that are not
orga-
nized around the
phallus
or a central male
authority.
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140 Lisa Lowe
pass;
it is the
beginning
of the end. In Lettre
CXLVII,
"le Grand
Eunuque" reports
to Usbek:
"T hings
have arrived at a state which
can no
longer
be
endured;
your
wives have come to think that
your departure
meant
complete impunity
for them. Horrible
things
are
happening
here.... I found Zashi in bed with one of
her
slaves,
which is so
strictly
forbidden
by
the laws of the
seraglio."
T he "horrible
things"
he
reports
would seem to refer to
homosexuality among
the
wives,
for the letter
goes
on to
report
that Zashi was found in bed with one of her slaves. But the acts
themselves remain
unnamed,
as if to allude to sexual excesses in
general.
Malek Alloula describes the locus of the
seraglio
in orien-
talist literature as "a universe of
generalized perversion
and
of
the
absolute limitlessness
of pleasure."21
T hat
is,
the
reporting
of "horr-
ible
things" may
be
purposefully ambiguous
to allude to
many
things-not only
forms of female
sexuality
that are neither de-
pendent upon
nor
organized
around
men,
but the
possibility
of
other sexual acts and
practices
that are
unimaginable,
deviant,
polysexual
that also break the laws of the serail. In her final letter
to
Usbek,
Roxane declares that she has "remade" the harem laws:
"I knew how to turn
your
terrible
seraglio
into a
place
of
delight-
ful
pleasures....
No: I
may
have lived in
servitude,
but I have
always
been free. I have reformed
your
laws
according
to the laws
of
nature,
and
my
mind has
always
remained free"
(Lettre CLXI).
In
announcing
to Usbek that she has remade his laws
according
to
"the laws of
nature,"
Roxane ventures an ironic reversal that ren-
ders the wives' new diverse
pleasures among
themselves as "natu-
ral" while the "licit" heterosexual
fidelity
that is demanded of the
wives is cast as "unnatural."22 Roxane's
proclamation
of
having
remade the harem into "a
place
of
delightful pleasures"
invokes
21.
Ibid.,
95.
22. Roxane's declaration of her ultimate freedom from Usbek's
mastery
and of
her own sources of
pleasure
echoes an earlier statement
by
Zelis,
another
wife,
in
Lettre LXII:
"However,
do not
imagine,
Usbek,
that
your present
circumstances
are
happier
than mine. Here I have tasted a thousand
pleasures
unknown to
you.
My imagination
has been
continually
at work and made me realize their
value;
I
have lived while
you
have
merely repined.
In the
prison
in which
you keep
me,
I
am freer than
you."
Both Roxane and Zelis taunt Usbek that
they
have invented
other means of
pleasure, pleasures
he could not offer them and to which he does
not have access.
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 141
the
topos
of sexual
transgressions among
the wives. As if to
goad
Usbek's
imagination
further,
she
stops
short of
specifically
nam-
ing
these acts and
pleasures;
the
specter
of female
sexuality may
be even more
powerful
when it remains unnamed. Her willful
defiance unsettles him and reminds him that the husband's hold
over the wife is a
wholly
uncertain one. T he
marriage/slavery
relationship
can be
reversed;
it
may
be the master who is then
ruled
by
the slaves. T he revolt of the wives and the
images
of
female
transgression
end the
novel;
Roxane has the last
word,
and
her statement of her
independence
and the failure of Usbek's
authority
are the final motifs of the novel.
T hus,
although
the novel is
organized
in terms of a
binary
theme that invents the Persian world as
opposite
to or other than
French
orthodoxy
and status
quo,
this
appropriation
of otherness
is
challenged
and subverted in both the "first
story"
of Persian
travelers in Paris and in the "second
story"
of the wives' revolt in
the harem. We have remarked that the novel's orientalist structure
is
foregrounded
and criticized in the first
story's
ironic treatment
of ethnocentrism-the
paradoxical position
of Rica-as well as
by
the
epistolary
features of the text.
Likewise,
we have seen that the
Persian harem
plot
also
disrupts
the orientalist themes of the
novel
by
means of its narrative
challenges
to the
topoi
of
slavery,
marriage,
and
despotism.
In
Montesquieu's
Lettres
persanes,
the
tensions between orientalism and the numerous criticisms from
competing
narratives demonstrate that orientalism is not a uni-
fied and dominant
discourse; rather,
orientalist
logics
often exist
in a climate of
challenge
and contestation.
V
T he
concepts
of "orientalism" and "otherness" are neither
static nor
discrete,
and this discussion of the Lettres
persanes
has
focused on the
heterogeneity
and
instability
of these terms as a
means of
urging
us to reconsider the uses of "orientalism" and
"otherness" as tools and methods of
contemporary literary
and
cultural criticism.
At
particular
moments in the
history
of criticism and
theory
in the United
States,
the notion of "the Other" has been
powerful,
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142 Lisa Lowe
illuminating,
and transformative. In feminist
debates,
for exam-
ple,
this notion
accompanied
the introduction of
psychoanalysis
into feminism and has been
absolutely
crucial to the formulation
of feminist
critiques
of
psychoanalysis,
literature,
anthropology,
and
sociology.23
In a like
manner,
Said's
analysis
of the construc-
tion of "the Orient as Other" has initiated a
questioning
of schol-
arly assumptions
in several academic
disciplines,
not the least of
which is a serious
ongoing interrogation
of
ethnographic practice
within the field of
anthropology. Analyses
of how
races, cultures,
economic
groups,
and sexualities are marked and
figured
as "oth-
er" or as the subordinated
counterpart
of dominant
privileged
categories
are
absolutely
essential to our current
project
of cultur-
al criticism. Yet I believe we risk certain
dangers
in
continuing
to
use monolithic notions of
"discourse," "orientalism,"
or "the Oth-
er": the
production
of more of this kind of
theory may
enunciate,
and be
deeply implicated
in,
the
powerful hegemonies
it seeks to
criticize; further,
these theories
may greatly
underestimate other
points
and
positions
of
struggle
and resistance
operating
in the
discourse at all moments. T he view that a dominant discourse
produces
and
manages
Others,
univocally appropriating
and con-
taining
all
dissenting positions
within
it,
underestimates the ten-
sions and contradictions within a
discourse,
the continual
play
of
resistance, dissent,
and accommodation
by
different
positions. By
beginning
to account for
resistance,
yet continuing
to
recognize
the
functioning category
of "otherness" in
discourse,
I believe we
must consider instead the
heterogeneity
of acts of
representation.
On the one
hand,
marks of difference and otherness are multi-
valent;
the mark of
difference,
which is at one time a mode of
exclusion,
may
at another historical moment or in another set of
social relations be an
enabling
mark of inclusion. On the other
hand,
discourses are what I would call
"heterotopical";
discourses
are
heterogeneously
and
irregularly composed
of statements and
restatements,
contestations and
accommodations,
generated by
a
23. T hese moments were marked
by
the
publication
of
Juliet
Mitchell's
Psycho-
analysis
and Feminism
(New
York:
Viking,
1974), Woman, Culture,
and
Society,
ed.
Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise
Lamphere
(Stanford:
Stanford Univer-
sity
Press, 1974),
and
Nancy
Chodorow's T he
Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho-
analysis
and the
Sociology of
Gender
(Berkeley: University
of
California,
1978).
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Rereadings
in Orientalism 143
plurality
of
writing positions
at
any given
moment. T he theoreti-
cal
problem facing
us in cultural criticism at this moment is not
how to fit anomalous
positions
into a fixed dualistic
conception
of
dominant
ideology
and
counterideology,
or discourse and coun-
terdiscourse.
Rather,
it
may
be the
reverse;
heterogeneities, plu-
ralities,
and contradictions are
givens
in culture. T hese non-
equivalences
and
noncorrespondences
are not the
objects
to be
incorporated
and
explained; they
must constitute the
beginning
premise
of
any analysis.24
As
such,
the discussion of
managing
discourses is
incomplete
if not
accompanied by
a
critique
that seeks to
explain why
some
positions
are
easily coopted
and
integrated
into
apparently
domi-
nant discourses and
why
others are less
likely
to be
appropriated.
In
addition,
we would be well served
by
an examination of our
own methods of
literary
and cultural criticism that would
question
whether the continued use of the
categories
"otherness" and "dif-
ference"
may incorporate
within them the
very logics
of domina-
tion and subordination we seek to criticize.
T hus,
the ultimate
aims of
my reading
of the Lettres
persanes
are to
complicate
the
notions of "discourse" and
"otherness,"
to trouble the
continuing
efficacy
of
using
these
concepts
as critical
terms,
and to historicize
the critical
strategy
of
identifying
the
representation
of otherness
as a discursive mode of
production
in itself.
24. T his is one
implication
of the
premises
elaborated in Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe's
Hegemony
and Socialist
Strategy:
T owards a Radical Democratic
Politics,
trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack
(London: Verso, 1985).
Laclau
and Mouffe
interpret "hegemony"
as
taking place
in a "field of
articulatory
practices." T hey
make two
important
distinctions
regarding articulatory prac-
tices:
they
are not in themselves sufficient to constitute
hegemonic change-it
is
also
necessary
that the articulations should take
place through
a confrontation
with
antagonistic articulatory practices;
at the same
time,
not
every antagonism
determines that a
hegemonic
formation will
emerge.
An
antagonism emerges
when a collective
subject
or
group
finds its
subjectivity negated by
other dis-
courses and
practices;
this
negation
can
be,
but is not
necessarily,
the basis for an
antagonism. Finally, they argue persuasively
that no
hegemonic logic
can account
for the
totality
of "the
social,"
and that the
open
and
incomplete
character of the
social field is the
precondition
of
every hegemonic practice.
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