ASSIGNMENT

Building the Self and the Other: Women and Orient

Course Title: Literary Theory and Criticism

Course Code: LCS 6201

Submitted to- Submitted by-

Mr. Md. Tanvir Ahsan Afra Murtoza.
Associate Professor, ID: M190102825
Dept. Of English, 9th Batch.
Jagannath University.

Ms. Sharmin Afroz Shantu

Assistant Professor,
Dept. Of English,
Jagannath University.

Date of submission: 24 December 2020.

Women and the Orient both are contemplated as ‘others’ where men and the West hold on to

the position of an immutable ‘Self’. The ‘other’ is a person who is discerned by the ‘self’ as

not belonging, as being distinctive in a few essential ways. The ‘self’ sights itself as the

calibre and deduces those who do not meet that calibre (that is, who are diverse in any way)

as the ‘other’. All human confraternities, all through history, have been in touch with

distinctive ‘self’ they seen as ‘other’. That term ‘other’ can be allied with the Orient in

accordance with Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Edward W. Said. Both

the ‘other’ and the Orient are being ostracized by the hegemony for centuries.
Virginia Woolf in her “Shakespeare’s Sister” mentioned about Professor Trevelyan’s who in

History of England pictured that ‘Once more I looked up Women, found ‘position of’

(subjection) and turned to the pages indicated, ‘Wife-beating’. When the husband had been

assigned, he was lord and master, so far as law and custom could make him (A Room of

One's Own 1948). Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks

that Shakespeare’s women do not seem wanting in personality and character (1948). Indeed,

if woman had no existence save within the fiction written by men, one would imagine her as

someone of the utmost importance; terribly various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid;

infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater

(1948). In Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Edward W. Said illustrated,

Orient, that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late

Eighteenth century. The Orient isn’t as it were adjoining to Europe; it is additionally the place

of Europe’s most prominent and wealthiest and most seasoned colonies, the source of its

civilizations and dialects, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring

images of the ‘other’ (Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient XIII). In addition, the

Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality,

experience (1-2). Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, stated that,

‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ (Acknowledgement). In brief,

because of Orientalism, the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action (3).

So as we can consider women as the Orient and the ‘other’ at the same time. European

culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of

surrogate and even underground self (3). Again Orient is not an inert fact of nature (4).

Though years have been passed but still the women are the ‘other’ as well as the Orient

throughout the eyes of the ‘self’.

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Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about

them to be told, would simply blow away (Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient

6). Orientalism is the product of circumstances that are fundamentally, indeed radically,

fractious (XII). Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological

stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the

‘other’ (XII). The Orient is an integral part of European ‘material’ civilization and culture (2).

Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of

discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even

colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles (2). The most readily accepted designation for

Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic

institutions (2). Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague

and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century

and early-twentieth-century European colonialism (2). Orientalism lives on academically

through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental (2). Orient, its people,

customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so on (3). Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, and

having authority over the Orient (3). Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself; she never

represented her emotions, presence, or history (5-6). ‘He’ spoke for and represented her (6).

In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was latched up, beaten and flung concerning

the room (A Room of One's Own 1949). Practically, she is completely insignificant in fact

she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger (1949). She might

hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband (1949). According to

Professor Trevelyan, “they (women) were married whether or not they likeable it or not

before they were out of the nursery, at fifteen or sixteen terribly likely” (1950). “She cried out

that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. She stood

at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said and men laughed in her face. ... No woman

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could possibly be an actress” (1951). “Any lady born with an excellent gift within the

sixteenth-century would surely have gone insane, shot herself, or terminated her days in some

lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (1952).

“Women are detestable” (1952). “Their lives also were ‘Written’, and their letters were

printed after their deaths” (1953).

We return within range of that very fascinating and obscure masculine complicated that has

had most influence upon the woman’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not most that SHE

shall be inferior as that HE shall be superior, that plants him wherever one looks, not solely in

front of the arts, but riddance the way to politics too, even once the risk to himself seems

infinitesimal and the suppliant humble and devoted (A Room of One's Own 1955). The

history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is additional interesting maybe than the

story of that release itself. She explained that the principle which controls it, is simply that it

should give pleasures; the desire which implies pleasure (1955). It ought to lay us underneath

a spell with its first word and that we ought to solely wake refreshed with its last (1955). In

“Girton or Newnham”, Woolf deduces a theory that ‘She would need thick gloves on her

hands, and bars to protect her of solid gold’ (1955). Judith Butler in her “Subjects of Sex/

Gender/ Desire” mentioned about Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray along with other

feminist theorist. Simone de Beauvoir stated that “One is not born a woman, but rather

becomes one” (Subjects of Sex/ Gender/ Desire 334). Beauvoir is implying that gender is an

active appropriation that comes from a cultural compulsion and not from sex. The body is

only a passive receiver of the cultural expression and gender is a social construct thereby.

There are divergent opinions on the construction of the socially instituted gender asymmetry

of masculine and feminine. Beauvoir argues that only female body is marked and identified,

becoming the ‘other’ to the universal masculine. She sees the feminine as an existence in

connection to a contradicting implication- the male. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

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illustrated men as the ‘subject’ and also as the ‘absolute’ where women are the ‘other’

(Beauvoir 6). Generally, the woman discovers herself as the ‘inessential’ and never turns into

the ‘essential’, it’s because she does not bring this transformation of herself (8). In one sense,

we can illustrate the ‘other’ as the passive and the ‘subject’ as the active. On the other hand,

Irigaray suggests that female is not marked, but is the unpresentable, unspeakable, as

language itself is based on masculinity. There is a region of the ‘specifically feminine’, one

that’s both separated from the masculine as such and recognizable in its contrast by an

unmarked and, subsequently, presumed universality of ‘women’. Luce Irigaray stated

“Woman does not have a sex” (Subjects of Sex/ Gender/ Desire 334). Beauvoir argued that,

“men could not settle the question because they would be acting as both judge and party of

the case” (Subjects of Sex/ Gender/ Desire 342). “Again the Oriental woman; she (the Orient)

never spoke about her and she never represented her emotions, presence, or history”

(Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient 6). In fact the Orient is being represented by

the ‘self’. In Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient by Edward W. Said envisioned

that ‘He’ spoke for and represented her (6).

Beauvoir in her The Second Sex, compounded with Hegel that a fundamental hostility to any

other consciousness is found in consciousness itself. Therefore, the subject posits itself only

in opposition; it asserts itself as the essential and sets up the other as inessential, as the object

(Beauvoir 7). As of now within the 18th century, rationalists like Hegel (1770– 1831)

reflected almost how self-awareness is connected to the development of Otherness and since

at that point scholars have been examining how the representation of the others could be a

significant and fundamental component of the recognition and portrayal of the Self. No

subject posits itself spontaneously and at once as the inessential from the outset, it is not the

other who, defining itself as other, defines the one; the other is posited as other by the one

positing itself as one. But in order for the other not to turn into the one, the other has to

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submit to this foreign point (7). We can relate Lacan with Beauvoir in the term of ‘the

subject’ and ‘the other’. In accordance with Lacanian philosophy, ‘the signifier represents the

subject’; where subject is the person (Lacan for Beginners). Again the subject is made of

absent object (the other or woman) which is missing and lost (78). The ‘other’ is another

word for object (78). An object is any item that creates or supports subjectivity or the

‘subject’ (78). Signifier or the subject both constitute and divide us (Lacan for Beginners). In

Feminist Theory, Rosemarie Tong focused on Lacan and stated that women are virtually

excluded from the symbolic order. Women are repressed within the symbolic order, forced

into it unwillingly (143). Besides, the patriarchal ideology exaggerates biological differences

between men and women making certain that men always have the dominant role and women

have the subordinate or feminine role (Tong). Our social construction is dividing human in

between men and women. As well as hegemony is controlling and dividing us in between the

‘other’ and the ‘self’. In a broad sense from Lacanian psychology, the ‘signifier’ here

representing the ‘other’ so far the Orient. Thus the history of ‘Orientalism’ has both an

internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture

surrounding it (Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient). Thus there was (and is) a

linguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a bigot Orient-

and so on. Yet never has there been such a thing as an unadulterated, or unconditional,

Orient; similarly, never has there been a nonmaterial shape of Orientalism, much less

something so blameless as an ‘idea’ of the Orient (22-23). So far as the Orient is concerned,

standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century

academic and imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient’ (26).

Moreover, so definitive a position did Orientalism have that narrator believe no one

composing, considering, or acting on the Orient might do so without taking account of the

impediments on thought and action imposed by Orientalism (Orientalism: Western

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Conceptions of the Orient 3). Nothing of historical entities- such as locates, regions,

geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made. The relationship between

‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’ is a relationship of control, of mastery, of shifting degrees of a

complex hegemony (5). Subsequently as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that

features a history and a convention of thought, symbolism, and vocabulary that have given it

reality and presence in and for the West (5). To accept that the Orient was created- or, as

Edward W. Said call it, ‘Orientalized’- and to accept that such things happen essentially as

the necessity of the creative ability, is to be distingenuous (5). Beauvoir in her The Second

Sex mentioned that there is a good principle which created order, light and men; and an evil

principle which created chaos, darkness and women by Pythgorus (The Second Sex). She is

at once invented by men and exists without their invention. Typically women of her

generation on the left wanted to surpass feminism which was regarded as narrow and

restricted (XV).

Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe, a collective

notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all ‘those’ non-Europeans (Orientalism: Western

Conceptions of the Orient 7). There is in expansion, the hegemony of European ideas about

the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually

overriding the plausibility that a more independent, or more sceptical, thinker might have had

different views on the matter (7). Orientalism depends on flexible ‘positional’ superiority

(Said). The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought

about the Orient because he ‘could be there’, or could think about it, with very little

resistance on the Orient’s part (7). Precisely, Orientalism has always been prone to if either

too general or too specific a level of description is maintained systematically (8). Yet what

German Orientalism had in common with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was

a kind of intellectual ‘authority’ over the Orient within Western culture (19). Orient, to which

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he refers and on which he relies (20). Additionally, each work on the Orient ‘affiliates’ itself

with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself (20). The

Orientalism is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact (21). Orientalism

responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also

produced by the West (22). Orientalist discourse, it is very close ties to the enabling socio-

economic and political institutions, and its redoubtable durability (6). Culture, of course, is to

be found working inside gracious society, where the impact of thoughts, of institutions, and

of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent (7). The

form of this cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as ‘hegemony’, an

indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West (7).

Hegemony has the control over both cultural and social era for centuries. The authority ‘self’

took the power of domination and constituted the ‘other’ and the Orient too. Beauvoir used

novel by women ranging from Virginia Woolf to Colette Andry (The Second Sex). Virginia

Woolf hasn’t found some nugget of truth with which to explain women’s poverty compared

to men. She considers the Elizabethan period of literature, that is full of well known men like

Shakespeare but for which accounts of women’s lives are almost non-existent.

For feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents women

has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility of women (Subjects of Sex/ Gender/

Desire). This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in

which women’s lives were either mispresented or not represented at all (335). Focault points

out that juridical systems of power ‘produce’ the subjects they subsequently come to

represent. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms-

that is through the limitation, prohibition, regulation, control and even ‘protection’ of

individuals (335). An uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of ‘women’ will

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be clearly self-defeating (335). Women’s (the ‘other’s’) emancipation is barely can be

observed through the reign of the men- ‘the Self’.

The duality between self and other can be found in the most primitive societies (The Second

Sex). Alterity is the fundamental category of human thought, No group ever defines itself as

one without immediately setting up the other opposite itself (6). Didirot, for one, tries to

prove that, like man, woman is a human being (11-12). Another theorist in “Subjects of Sex/

Gender/ Desire”, named Julia Kristeva illustrated that ‘Strictly speaking, ‘women’ cannot be

said to exist’ (Butler). There is something existing character, understood through the category

of women, which not only initiates feminist interests and objectives inside discourse but

constitutes the subject for which political representation is pursued (334).

Yet women weren’t lacking in temperament, claims the scholarly person. In Shakespeare’s

plays, this is obvious- Cleopatra, Desdemona, Rosalind, all is full of character. But a

fascinating inconsistency appears in the female sex. Woman, she is astounding and varied; in

life and in history both, she is the property of her husband and basically is invisible. The

Elizabethan woman, there is no history written. To investigate what would have happened if a

woman had Shakespeare’s gift Virginia Woolf created a character named Judith,

Shakespeare’s sister. But Woolf believes that a woman like Judith, with all Shakespeare’s

talents would never have existed. If Judith appeared, her writing would have been ‘twisted

and deformed’ and she certainly would have disguised herself as Anon or a masculinised

name. Men’s lives are uniquely suited to writing and writing works of genius in one critical

way: society was structured in such a way that men could work undisturbed. It isn’t as

characteristic for women to look for acclaim as men do. Again she warns women that it is not

just men that they need to look for. Though in history, women have undermined their own

cause by submitting to men, by denying the value of their own opinions.

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Women are pondered as the ‘other’ from the span of Hegel to Virginia Woolf. Whereas

Edward W. Said termed Orient and alikeness between the ‘other’ and the Orient is pictured

throughout the narrative. Women are being contemplated as tool by men for last few

centenaries and so on. From the psychoanalysis of the scholars, we can assume that women

are the ‘other’ and men are the ‘self’. In short, women are not presented at all and barely

being presented by men’s tongue as for the Orients’.

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Subversion of Identity. NewYork: Roultedge, 1990. 333-337. Print.

Hill, Philip. Lacan for Beginners. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2000. Print.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Haryana, India: Penguin Random
House India Pvt. Ltd., 2016. Print.

Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction. Boulder, Colorado:

Westview Press, 2009. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. "A Room of One's Own." Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
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