Department of English

In this dissertation, I review the monstrous depictions of Eastern women that appear in Oscar Wilde’s prominent Orientalist works. Across different literary genres, Wilde’s poems “Athanasia” (1879, revised 1881), The Sphinx (1894), and his drama Salome (published in French in 1893, translated into English in 1894) each contain a feminine icon of the ancient East that was sensationalized in the nineteenth-century European cultural consciousness. I use Edward W. Said’s discussion of Orientalism to examine how the feminine mummy of “Athanasia,” the eponymous creature of The Sphinx, and the princess of Salome are reduced to sexual objects of Orientalist fantasy. Across these works, these monstrous women are marginalized by patriarchal control and dictated by the disparaging desires and often grotesque curiosities of their male counterparts. However, I demonstrate how Wilde reconstructs these Eastern women as femme fatales and that exhibit extraordinary control over their male observers’ desires. Wilde’s Oriental woman is presented as a powerful force of nature as she is often immortal and has innate supernatural abilities. Therefore, I argue that Wilde confronts Western tropes of sexual conquest and imperialist control over the Orient by establishing his Eastern femme fatales as indomitable figures who usurp male authority by weaponizing the transgressive sexual fantasies that are projected onto them. I propose that Wilde’s Oriental femme fatale is constructed to critique the patriarchal structures of Western imperialism as she thwarts the submissive image associated Perez with the subaltern woman and instead uses her sexual allure to reflect her male oppressor’s depravity and powerlessness.