A confined amorous being : the eastern woman between travel literature and english drama

Abstract EN

From the Middle Ages to the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Eastern and Western cultures lived in a state of estrangement from one another.

This estrangement, which sometimes developed into military confrontation, was brought about by the differences in ideologies.

The limited cultural interaction between the two civilizations was, in the main, carried out by politicians and merchants.

Firsthand experience was not available to ordinary people from either side.

Consequently, throughout these long centuries, history books, travel accounts, and the translations from Arabic to some European languages remained the European reader’s main sources of knowledge about the East.

This paper explores the image of the Eastern woman in travel literature and the subsequent treatment of her in the Restoration and eighteenth century drama.

The study shows that the travelers’ stories and notions of the Eastern woman’s lifestyle were adopted by the English dramatists and sometimes incorporated in their particulars.

It argues that travel literature played a profound role in constructing the image of the Eastern woman on the English stage, in that period, as a subjugated lascivious ‘being’ and stresses that this very negative image was based on the misconceptions and often