Orientalist eyes in Gertrude Bell’s Persian pictures

Abstract EN

This research is an attempt to scrutinise how the West has othered the Persian landscape and the Persian individual by investigating Gertrude Bell’s travel book Persian Pictures (1894).

It aims to discuss Bells’ employment of a male voice, which confirms her masculine orientalist discourse in tackling foreign landscapes.

Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism is adopted to highlight the Western views of the Other and his landscape.

It investigates the contentious relationship between the Self and the Other in which all features of irrationality and abnormality are attached to those who are referred to as ‘them’.

The research affirms that the western women are active agents and an indispensable part of the Western colonial project, and Bell’s discourse is not isolated from the Orientalist masculine counterpart.