PENETRATING AMERICAN FEMALE GAZE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: A 19TH CENTURY TRAVELOGUE
PENETRATING AMERICAN FEMALE GAZE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: A 19TH CENTURY TRAVELOGUE

Summary/Abstract: Antebellum American travel narratives of the Old World are rare compared to their European counterparts. At a time when American literary renaissance is pursuing a distinct American national character in American literature, authorship not yet a profession to live on alone, and artistic expressions by women uncommon and frowned upon, it is not surprising for Sarah Rogers Haight to be reticent in her narrative. Belonging to a nation of quite belated travelers particularly with regard to the Orient, it is common practice for male American authors to claim originality of their accounts in their prefaces to provide a reassurance for American middle class readership of their preference of their works over the English whereas Haight’s notice is apologetic and reticent about her motivations for publication. This paper seeks to scrutinize the agency of American authorship in the only travel narrative of the Ottoman Empire by an American woman published in the Antebellum period in the United States. The significance of the geographical denotation is the habitual discursive strategies applied when dealing with the Orient and to determine how Haight dealt with the conflicting notions of being and at the same time depicting the subaltern by “using the sense of sight to gain information is a classic male aristocratic technique, which avoids interaction or any kind of emotional or bodily engagement” which she could not partake in by virtue of being segmented along the gender identification lines at home and in her destination.

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