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4.8. d’Alpuget’s Neo-Orientalist Looking-glass
Gaik Cheng Khoo, in response to Tiffin’s thesis, puts quite a different spin on the
reading of Turtle Beach, which is seen not so much for its various post-colonialist voices, but
for its substratum of reinvigorated Orientalist clichés which only serve to undermine the
validity of that post-colonialist expression. The novel, Khoo argues, maintains an ambivalent,
binary approach to the issues—maternal duties/career; East/West; natural/unnatural;
fatalism/free will; spirituality/materialism—and offers various liberalist views on feminism
and race to ‘challenge the traditional imperialist perspective of the Australian journalist
protagonist’ (Khoo, 31). Yet, when put into direct confrontation with the ‘Other’, those voices,
not just Judith’s, which Tiffin argues is deliberately undercut, but particularly Kanan’s and
Ambassador Hobday’s, which Tiffin sees gaining in esteem, are compromised by ‘Western
projections of desire and racial prejudice’ which brand them as Neo-Orientalist (Khoo, 33).
Judith Wilkes’ stereotypical liberal feminist view of herself is foiled by her perception of
Asia as a patriarchal society where ‘women are mere commodities, objects to be discarded,
sold, rented out cheaply’. This image of Asia serves only to support Judith’s assumed role as
the white feminist come to rescue Asia’s oppressed women (Khoo, 33).
Judith’s feminism, which has required her to abandon the traditional female role, is,
however, undermined by the same masculine mask it forces her to wear. She is pursuing a
traditionally male career in journalism, engages in extra-marital affairs while on assignment,
and stays away from her family while her husband remains at home with the children. Judith is
ultimately shown to have the same handicaps as the traditional male, namely that her social
value is tied to her functioning as a superior and dominant provider and protector. Her
suppressed feminine side can bring nothing to this masculine role, and offers her none of the
special help a Western woman could usually employ to her advantage in altering the rules of
the profoundly masculine, Orientalist realm (Khoo, 40). Minou Hobday stands in contrast as
the ‘Saigon Bar Girl’, the ‘seductive yet superstitious Asian woman’, and ‘the sacrificial
mother’ whose ‘blatant sexuality disguises her strong familial ties to her mother and children’.
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