Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T05:55:39.587Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“The First English Lady Seen in These Parts”: Autoexoticizing Race and Gender in Colonial Women's Writing on Cyprus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

I have before remarked upon the … excitement which our presence caused in many villages, where we were assured that, with the exception, of course, of a Turk, we were the first Europeans seen…. The extraordinary sight of the first English lady ever seen (indeed, few Europeans had got so far) brought a crowd….

—Scott-Stevenson, Our Home in Cyprus

From its earliest literary representations in english, Cyprus has been associated with intersecting anxieties toward race, religion, and sexuality. Inaugurating this theme, Shakespeare's Othello appropriates the culturally hybrid setting among Africa, Asia, and Europe as a space of uneasy female autonomy and as a locus of dangerous political and sexual activity orchestrated by men: Venus's island is, for European Venice, a “business of some heat” (211; 1.2.47), a commercial hub degrading into a deathbed of intercultural, interfaith, interracial sex. On the cultural frontiers among Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam, staged temporally between Western Europe's waning crusading past and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the island is an exoticized and effeminized space treated axiomatically as requiring the protection of Western paternalism. These themes pervade subsequent textual depictions of the space, a de facto British colony from 1878 to 1960, in works that venerate a reclaiming of the Ottoman possession by neo-Crusaders in the Orient. While academic scrutiny has addressed narratives such as Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957), there has been little focus on the patriarchal structuring of empire in this oeuvre of colonial travel writing or on the “persistent gendering of the imperial unknown” during this period (McClintock 24).

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Baker, Samuel W. Cyprus, As I Saw It in 1879. Echo Library, 2007.Google Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature, 1870–1918. Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or, The Economic World Reversed.” Translated by Richard Nice. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Johnson, Randal, Polity Press, 1993, pp. 2973.Google Scholar
Brassey, Mrs. [Annie]. Sunshine and Storm in the East; or, Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople. Longmans, Green, 1880.Google Scholar
Durrell, Lawrence. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. Faber and Faber, 1957.Google Scholar
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónké. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. U of Minnesota P, 1997.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary L. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. Penguin Books, 2003.Google Scholar
Scott-Stevenson, Mrs. [Esmé]. Our Home in Cyprus. Chapman and Hall, 1880.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello. edited by Neill, Michael, Oxford UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Agnes. Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Tree Ladies. Hurst and Blackett, 1870.Google Scholar
Smith, Agnes. Through Cyprus. Hurst and Blackett, 1887.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Broadway Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge UP, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar