Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

239project of Orientalism, which is, as Joseph Boone argues, “an occidental mode of maleperception, appropriation and control” (90). Melville’s discourse promotes ideologies ofinferiority and effeminacy of Orientals. In fact, Moby-Dick and Typee portray a typical Orientalistfantasy that depicts and deploys the American ideology of imperial expansion and eroticadventures on the Polynesian islands. However, as I mentioned before, Melville has affinitieswith various competing discourses. This sexual poetics or what Robert K. Martin calls“masturbatory poetics” which is “transformed from the personal encounter with Queequeg to theanonymous encounter with all men, cannot be realized on board the Pequod, captained as it is byAhab, the representative of Western man’s Faustian drive for power” (83). This drive for power,then, is never merely sexual; it is also political, cultural, and philosophical.As Said argues in Orientalism, the Orient provides the Western traveler with sensualityand “freedom of licentious sex” (190). In this sense, “the Orient was a place where one couldlook for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe” (190). What is unobtainable in the West is theaccessibility of homosexual eroticism. Said posits that “Orientalism itself, furthermore, was anexclusively male province; like so many professional guilds during the modern period, it vieweditself as and its subject matter with sexist blinders. This is especially in the writing of travelersand novelists: women are usually the creatures of a male power-fantasy (207). Assigningfeminine attributes, Melville, as Said argues, participates in the Orientalist project thatemphasizes the difference of the Other. This mutual exchange of erotic desire destabilizes theideology of Western male encounters because in nineteenth-century America, a heathen was to beChristianized, tamed, and excludednot fantasized about. The Ishmael-Queequeg encounter is