| Author(s) | Haitham Abdulaziz Saab |
| Affiliation | Assistant Professor, Deartment of Foreign Languages, College of Education, King Abdulaziz University,. Madinah Al-Munawwarrah, Saudi Arabia |
| Title | The Representation of the Orient in Molière : Europe and the Turks in the Bourgeois Gentleman (1670) |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Arts. Volume 17, No 1. (2005/1425) |
| Abstract | Seventeenth-Century European representation of the Orient is deeply grounded in historical developments, particularly in the mythical encounters between East and West, the Turks and Europe. The expansion of the Ottoman Turks at the expense of European forces, especially after the middle of the fifteenth century, offered the roots of Europe’s fear of the exotic Oriental “Other,” i.e. the Turks. This paper examines Molière’s depiction of the Turkish ceremony in The Bourgeois Gentleman as a reflection of renewed tensions between Crescent and Cross. All the elements of the Turkish ceremony in the play intentionally parody the Oriental Muslim, offering evidence for a generally negative attitude of French culture towards other contemporary foreign cultures. The play, thus, demonstrates that Molière’s Orientalism conforms with European conventional representations, emphasizing Crusading tropes of difference between Europe and the Turks. |
