The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration

The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, by Piya Pal-Lapinski; pp. xx + 156. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005, $24.95.

Piya Pal-Lapinski takes readers on a whirlwind tour of nineteenth-century British (and often French and Italian) cultural productions-literature, painting, opera, archeology, even jewelry-as she investigates racial, class, and national identity; colonialism; imperialism; disease; and toxicology and its female practitioners. Pal-Lapinski ties together these disparate concerns through the figure of the odalisque, which she sees as a hybrid form that encompasses not just the Oriental/Asian norm but also the exoticized European woman. She argues that "the body of the odalisque . . . resists closure and implodes the imperatives of ethnography, threatening the coherence of 'whiteness' as a racial category" (xvi). Pal- Lapinski presents the odalisque as "deeply linked to the tensions arising from the encounter between cultures of female libertinism and emerging bourgeois ideologies of domesticity throughout the nineteenth century" (xvii). In making this argument, she challenges the work of other postcolonialist scholars, including Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, John Mackenzie, Lisa Lowe, Meyda Yegenoglu, Reina Lewis, and Hollis Clayton. Despite her declaration that she will "distance" herself from these scholars, Pal-Lapinski seems compelled to "out-Bhaba" Bhabha's frequently stultifying linguistic density.

Pal-Lapinski makes two major arguments. First, in not submitting to male or imperial dominance, the odalisque subverts the ideology of western/male hegemonic control over women and the world and disrupts the narrative of separate male and female spheres. Second, the racial and cultural hybridity of the odalisque challenges ninteenthcentury discourses of racial and gender identity and hierarchies. "The production of the hybridized courtesan," she writes, "was generated by barely articulated anxieties about the fragility of 'disciplinary mechanisms' of empire/imperialism and ethnology" (18).

Chapter 1 introduces the odalisque as a site of racial and gender indeterminacy in French and British visual presentations. Of primary importance is the gaze, both of the male observers depicted in the paintings and of the odalisque herself, whose languid, even vacant gaze suggests indifference. That indifference, Pal-Lapinski claims, implies her power and underscores her exoticism....