Isabella Lucy Bird’ The Golden Chersonese And The Way Thither(1883) And William Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman In The Parlour(1930): A Postcolonial Comparative Study.

Résumé: This piece of research is concerned with the study of Bird’s The Golden Chersonese and The Way Thither (1983) and William Somerset Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour(1930). To achieve our aim, we have used postcolonial theory as elaborated by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978).In his theory, Said provides some key elements that can be explored through the postcolonial approach to the text. The appropriateness of this theory is explained by the fact that Bird and Maugham consider the Westerners superior to the Easterners. By analyzing the two texts in the light of other postcolonial thinkers like Reina Lewis’s Gendering Orientalism(1996) and Joseph Allen Boone’s TheHomoerotics of Orientalism(2014),it is revealed that both authors revised Orientalism to achieve personal goals. In our analysis of this topic, we have divided our discussion into three sections. The first section consists of the misrepresentation of the Malays and other Far Easterners. The second section deals with the celebration of the English power and its people, emphasizing on their abilities to rule and govern the East and its inhabitants. The third section focuses on the differences between Bird and Maugham. One is a female and the other a male, which makes a real mark of difference. As a female traveler, Birdseeks to give voice to all oppressed women and to counter patriarchal stereotypes of their inferiority. However, Maugham as a homosexual traveler aspires to break the taboo of homosexuality and finds the Orient as the appropriate place to gain his sexual liberty.

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