| المستخلص: |
In light of important researches published on the woman’s figure, this doctoral dissertation focuses on the figure of the Oriental woman, especially the Muslim woman. Some writers used the figure of the woman as a literary trope in order to highlight Enlightenment values. This research is principally based on French literary genres and intersects various forms, such as novels, fables, and dramas. It also takes into account English literary works translated into French, which tell the stories of English women’s journeys in Turkey. We will study the presence, the role, and the characteristics of the Oriental woman principally in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, in addition to the works of Voltaire, Diderot, François, Baron de Tott and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. For those writers, the Oriental woman represented this ‘Other’ through whom they built social, moral, political and literary discourses. For the readers, she was this ‘Other’ who triggered in them attraction, rejection, curiosity and condemnation. The figure of the Oriental woman created a space where discourses of femininity (love, seduction, marriage) could be developed. The figure of the Oriental woman as trope was therefore reinterpreted in religious, social and political contexts and related to some universal values, such as freedom and equality between human beings. Therefore, her presence in literary works implies a gaze on the ‘Other’ as well as on the ‘Self’. Hence, the dissertation concludes that the representation of Oriental woman was a Western invention that was not intended to impose itself as a historical and cultural reality but rather, it was considered as a variant of the same stereotype to serve the aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical projects of the Enlightenment.
|
