Swimming Against the Current: Rethinking Orientalism in Julia Pardoe's The City of the Sultan and Grace Ellison's An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem

Abstract

Throughout centuries, travel writing has been a popular genre of transferring experiences among writers and readers about unknown places. While it has been a valuable study area for not only cultural studies but also history, the subjective nature of travel texts also led to some prejudices about those places. One such prejudice is Orientalism, which is explained by Edward Said as a denigration of the East by Western writers, and this phenomenon is also observed in British travel texts about the Asia Minor. The root of the Orientalism problem stems from several facts such as the tales in One Thousand and One Nights, which depict several features of the East as one entity, and also from studies conducted on the East by scholars who studied the East as a scientific object rather than a region where actual people lived, which caused their dehumanisation by those scholars. In addition to these factors, the texts of travel and fiction, and also the visual arts that depicted the East in the same misrepresentative belittling manner have also been influential in the formation of the Oriental image of the East. While Said stated that the writers of the West contributed to the spread of Orientalism, there also have been writers who wrote against the prejudices of the West and tried to depict the East with an objective perspective. In this thesis, The City of the Sultan of Julia Pardoe and of Grace Ellison’s An Englishwoman in a Turkish Harem will be analysed through Said’s theory of Orientalism in order to highlight how these writers have been different from the previous writers who depicted the East in a negative manner and sometimes showed parallelisms to Said’s work, Orientalism.