Department of English

This thesis traces the Orientalist foundations of Western feminist discourses on women’s bodily autonomy and desire. The figure of the Oriental woman plays an integral role in Englishwomen’s discussions of Western women’s rights. Through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s epistolary travel writing in her Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) and Charlotte Dacre’s novel Zofloya (1806), I explore the manner in which Oriental women are represented through different literary forms and at different stages of English feminist development. This leads to an examination of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and its relation to Lady Mary’s travel letters and Dacre’s novel. All three texts employ Oriental women to discuss how English and Western women can or cannot gain a form of autonomy within patriarchy. I argue that this discourse begins with Lady Mary’s observations of Turkish women’s alternative lives and the bodily and sexual autonomy that grants them a kind of mobility within patriarchy. Wollstonecraft uses the East-West binary in her treatise’s argument to depart from Lady Mary’s empowered Oriental woman figure; she claims that restriction of the body and of desire will enable Western women’s authority in patriarchy. Dacre then utilizes an East-West binary in her novel’s experiment with a Western woman’s transformation into an Orientalized woman. Dacre demonstrates that her Oriental woman character consequently becomes the enemy of, and brings about the downfall of, Western identity.