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chapter 9Becoming Woman and Gender Typologies in
Marmaduke Pickthall’s Oriental Fiction
Faruk KökoğluMarmaduke Pickthall published a dozen oriental novels and travelogues, and
many short stories between 1903 and 1922. The role of women and gender
issues in the Near Eastern societies especially in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and
Turkey in the early twentieth century are central and recurring themes in
most of his fiction. The Valley of the Kings (1909) opens with a typology of
Western women living in the Levant. A Christian Arab woman associates
three Englishwomen with three different types and personalities: Carulin
the Virgin, the Androgynous or Hermaphroditic Jane, and Hilda the Ripe
Fruit. Pickthall suggests a similar typology for his oriental female characters
through their submissiveness, dominance, or equality in their relationships
with the other sex. This chapter further examines these typologies by dou-
bling Deleuzo- Guattarian concepts of becoming-minoritarian with becoming-
woman in Pickthall’s oriental fiction then proceeds to analyse the types of
oriental female characters in Pickthall’s fiction. Two of his heroines are fo-
cused in detail: Barakah, an English woman who becomes a Muslim and mar-
ries the son of a Turco-Egyptian Pasha in Veiled Women (1913) undergoing
some bitter experiences and disappointments; Reshideeh, the daughter of
a late Ottoman Pasha in Istanbul, after the death of her first husband mar-
ries the Macedonian hero of the novel in The Early Hours (1921). By closely
probing the gender issues in Pickthall’s alternative oriental approach in his
fiction, this chapter aims to shed new light on the contradictory role given to
women by the Oriental Socius as the product of socio-cultural practices and
misconducts.
Becoming: Desire versus Interest
At the turn of the twentieth century in Syria, an old Circassian immigrant
from Kars shares with Pickthall his memory of the defence of the city under
the leadership of three English officers. He says: “Three Englishmen behaved
like warrior-angels, fought like devils. And while they fought for us their