3. Orient as Woman, Orientalism as Sentimentalism: Flaubert

Abstract

Traveling through Egypt in 1853, Flaubert wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet, about the courtesan Kuchuk-Hânem, describing her thus in order to assure Colet that she had no reason for jealousy. This unsettling description of “la femme orientale” is paradigmatic of the intersections of and collusions between several nineteenth-century French discourses, not only of orientalism and romanticism but also of race and industrial capitalism. Like the passage from Flaubert that begins Chapter 1—the young adulterer’s comparison of Emma Bovary’s shoulders with those of Ingres’s odalisque—the evocation of Kuchuk-Hânem also conflates an eroticized female figure with a stylized orientalist